j. Kellenberger,Kierkegaard and Nietzsche: Faith and Eternal Acceptance

International Journal for Philosophy of Religion -     

Better together: a unified perspective on appraisal and emotion regulation

ABSTRACT

Advances in our understanding of appraisal processes and emotion regulation have been two of the most important contributions of research on cognition and emotion in recent decades. Interestingly, however, progress in these two areas has been less mutually informative than one might expect or desire. To help remedy this situation, we provide an integration of appraisal theory and the process model of emotion regulation by describing parallel, interacting and iterative systems for emotion generation and emotion regulation. Outputs of the emotion generation system are perceived by the emotion regulation system, and emotion regulation strategies then modulate emotion by intervening at specific stages of the emotion generation system, ultimately changing appraisal dimensions. We hope that our unified perspective will encourage and guide future research at the interface of cognition and emotion.     

Individual differences in executive function partially explain the socioeconomic gradient in middle‐school academic achievement

Children from families with low socioeconomic status (SES) earn lower grades, perform worse on achievement tests, and attain less education on average than their peers from higher‐SES families. We evaluated neurocognitive mediators of SES disparities in achievement in a diverse sample of youth whose data were linked to administrative records of performance on school‐administered tests of 7th grade reading and math proficiency (N = 203). We used structural equation modeling to evaluate whether associations between SES (measured at ages 8–9) and achievement (measured at age 13) are mediated by verbal ability and executive function (measured at age 10), a suite of top‐down mental processes that facilitate control of thinking and behavior. Children from relatively higher‐SES families performed better than their lower‐SES peers on all neurocognitive and achievement measures, and SES disparities in both reading and math achievement were partially mediated by variation in executive function, but not verbal ability. SES disparities in executive function explained approximately 37% of the SES gap in math achievement and 17% of the SES gap in reading achievement. Exploratory modeling suggests that SES‐related variation in working memory may play a particularly prominent role in mediation. We discuss potential implications of these findings for research, intervention programming, and classroom practice.     

"Feminine Protection": The Effects of Menstruation on Attitudes Towards Women

An experiment tested the hypothesis that reminders of a woman's menstrual status lead to more negative reactions to her and increased objectification of women in general. Participants interacted with a female confederate who ostensibly accidentally dropped either a tampon or hair clip out of her handbag. Dropping the tampon led to lower evaluations of the confederate's competence, decreased liking for her, and a marginal tendency to avoid sitting close to her. Furthermore, gender schematic participants responded to the reminder of menstruation with increased objectification of women in general, an effect we view as an effort to "protect" culturally sanitized views of the feminine. These findings are discussed from the perspective of feminist theory and a terror management perspective on the role of ambivalence about the human body in the objectification of women.