Emotion Concepts and Self-Focused Attention: Exploring Parallel Effects of Emotional States and Emotional Knowledge

Many experiments have found that emotional experience affects self-focused attention. Several approaches to cognition and emotion predict that conscious emotional experience may be unnecessary for this effect. To test this hypothesis, two experiments primed emotion concepts without affecting emotional experience. In Experiment 1, subliminal exposure to sad faces (relative to happy faces and neutral faces) increased self-focused attention but not subjectively experienced affect. In Experiment 2, a scrambled-sentences task that primed happy and sad emotion concepts increased self-focused attention relative to a neutral task. Thus, simply activating knowledge about emotions was sufficient to increase self-focused attention. The discussion considers implications for research on how emotional states affect self-awareness.

Looking at You or Looking Elsewhere: The Influence of Head Orientation on the Signal Value of Emotional Facial Expressions

The role of horizontal head tilt for the perceptions of emotional facial expressions was examined. For this, a total of 387 participants rated facial expressions of anger, fear, sadness, and happiness, as well as neutral expressions shown by two men and two women in either a direct or an averted face angle. Decoding accuracy, attributions of dominance and affiliation, emotional reactions of the perceivers, and the felt desire to approach the expresser were assessed. Head position was found to strongly influence reactions to anger and fear but less so for other emotions. Direct anger expressions were more accurately decoded, perceived as less affiliative, and elicited higher levels of anxiousness and repulsion, as well as less desire to approach than did averted anger expressions. Conversely, for fear expressions averted faces elicited more negative affect in the perceiver. These findings suggest that horizontal head position is an important cue for the assessment of threat.

Towards a New Epistemology of Mathematics

In this introduction we discuss the motivation behind the workshop “Towards a New Epistemology of Mathematics” of which this special issue constitutes the proceedings. We elaborate on historical and empirical aspects of the desired new epistemology, connect it to the public image of mathematics, and give a summary and an introduction to the contributions to this issue.

---

Are There Stable Factors in Preadolescent Girls’ Externalizing Behaviors?

Relatively little is known about the factor structure of disruptive behavior among preadolescent girls. The present study reports on exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses of disruptive girl behavior over four successive data waves as rated by parents and teachers in a large, representative community sample of girls (N = 2,451). Five factors were identified from parent ratings (oppositional behavior/conduct problems, inattention, hyperactivity/impulsivity, relational aggression, and callous-unemotional behaviors), and four factors were identified derived from teacher ratings (oppositional behavior/conduct problems/callous-unemotional behaviors, inattention, hyperactivityimpulsivity, and relational aggression). There was a high degree of consistency of items loading on equivalent factors across parent and teacher ratings. Year-to-year stability of factors between ages five and 12 was high for parent ratings (ICC = 0.70 to 0.88), and slightly lower for teacher ratings (ICC = 0.56 to 0.83). These findings are discussed in terms of possible adjustment to the criteria for children's disruptive behavior disorders found in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders.

---

Smile intensity in photographs predicts divorce later in life

Based on social–functional accounts of emotion, we conducted two studies examining whether the degree to which people smiled in photographs predicts the likelihood of divorce. Along with other theorists, we posited that smiling behavior in photographs is potentially indicative of underlying emotional dispositions that have direct and indirect life consequences. In the first study, we examined participants’ positive expressive behavior in college yearbook photos and in Study 2 we examined a variety of participants’ photos from childhood through early adulthood. In both studies, divorce was predicted by the degree to which subjects smiled in their photos.

Mediating and Moderating Processes in the Relation between Maltreatment and Psychopathology: Mother-Child Relationship Quality and Emotion Regulation

The present study investigated underlying processes of the effect of maltreatment on psychopathology (i.e., internalizing and externalizing problems) in a group of 111 maltreated and 110 nonmaltreated 7–10 year-old children (60% boys). We tested the moderating and/or mediating roles of emotion regulation and the mother-child relationship quality (pattern of relatedness) using Structural Equation Modeling. Emotion regulation, but not the pattern of relatedness, mediated the relation between maltreatment and psychopathology. This mediation was moderated by the pattern of relatedness: For the group of children with an insecure pattern of relatedness, maltreatment was related to lower levels of emotion regulation, which was predictive of higher levels of internalizing and externalizing symptomatology. In contrast, for the secure relatedness group, there was no mediation by emotion regulation since the impact of maltreatment on emotion regulation was not significant. Implications of the mediating role of emotion regulation and the buffering role of the mother-child relationship quality were discussed.

Compassion and Beyond

This paper is a discussion of the emotion of compassion or pity, and the corresponding virtue. It begins by placing the emotion of compassion in the moral conceptual landscape, and then moves to reject the currently dominant view, a version of Aristotelianism developed by Martha Nussbaum, in favour of a non-cognitive conception of compassion as a feeling. An alternative neo-Aristotelian account is then outlined. The relation of the virtue of compassion to other virtues is plotted, and some doubts sown about its practical significance.

Die Geschichte der „Stellungnahme zur psychoanalytischen Therapie“

Ohne Zusammenfassung

---

The phenomenology of negation

Negation is a fundamental component of communication (no-answers), cognition (logical negation), perception (different color), attitude (dislike), emotion (hatred), and volition (disagreement). Its many uses make it difficult to provide an integrated definition of the concept. The aim of this paper is to show that an integrated definition of the concept can be arrived at by means of a phenomenological method structuring it into three general essences labelled lack, otherness and obstruction.

The Role of Ideal Affect in the Experience and Memory of Emotions

According to Affect Valuation Theory (Tsai et al. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 54, 1031–1039), culture influences how people want to feel (ideal affect). Integrating Affect Valuation Theory with the Time-sequential Framework of Subjective Well-being (Kim-Prieto et al. Journal of Happiness Studies, 6, 261–300), we proposed that cultural norms influence the memory, but not the experience, of emotion. The present study examined the role of ideal affect in relation to experience sampling and retrospective reports of emotion. Ideal affect correlated with retrospective reports but not experience sampling reports. Extraversion and neuroticism were more strongly related to experience sampling reports than to ideal levels of emotion. Results suggest that retrospective reports of emotion involve a dynamic process that incorporates cultural information into the reconstruction whereas on-line emotions are more constrained by temperament.

Aiming at Happiness: How Motivation Affects Attention to and Memory for Emotional Images

Socioemotional Selectivity Theory (Carstensen, L. L., Isaacowitz, D. M., & Charles, S. T. (1999). American Psychologist, 54, 155–181) posits that older adults, and anyone else who perceives their time as limited, show a motivational shift toward emotion regulation which causes them to exhibit a positivity bias and negativity avoidance in attention and memory. We tested whether such a motivational shift can indeed cause changes in emotional processing by manipulating motivation in a sample of young adults. After the manipulation, participants looked at real-world images while their eye movements were tracked. It was found that participants motivated to regulate emotion attended less to negative than positive images and showed less looking time to all stimulus types compared to the other two conditions. No evidence was found linking the motivational manipulation to emotional memory.

Aktuelle Probleme der Krankenhausplanung in der Psychosomatischen Medizin und Psychotherapie

Ohne Zusammenfassung

---

Foundationalism, Probability, and Mutual Support

The phenomenon of mutual support presents a specific challenge to the foundationalist epistemologist: Is it possible to model mutual support accurately without using circles of evidential support? We argue that the appearance of loops of support arises from a failure to distinguish different synchronic lines of evidential force. The ban on loops should be clarified to exclude loops within any such line, and basing should be understood as taking place within lines of evidence. Uncertain propositions involved in mutual support relations are conduits to each other of independent evidence originating ultimately in the foundations. We examine several putative examples of benign loops of support and show that, given the distinctions noted, they can be accurately modeled in a foundationalist fashion. We define an evidential “tangle,” a relation among three propositions that appears to require a loop for modeling, and prove that all such tangles are trivial in a sense that precludes modeling them with an evidential circle.

---

Bootstrapping and knowledge of reliability

This is a critical discussion of a paper on the problem of bootstrapping by Jose Zalabardo.

Shanahan on Symbolization

In his article ‘A New View of Language, Emotion and the Brain,’ Dan Shanahan claims that the post-war Cognitive Turn focused mainly on information processing and that little attention was paid to the dramatic role played by emotion in human cognition. One key argument in his defence of a more comprehensive view of human cognition rests upon the idea that the process of symbolization—a unique capacity only developed by humans—combines, right from the start, information processing and feelings. The author argues that any theory ignoring this fact would miss the whole point, just as mainstream cognitive science has done since Noam Chomsky published Syntactic Structures, exactly 50 years ago.

Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker

Ohne Zusammenfassung

---

Visualizations in Mathematics

In this paper we discuss visualizations in mathematics from a historical and didactical perspective. We consider historical debates from the 17th and 19th centuries regarding the role of intuition and visualizations in mathematics. We also consider the problem of what a visualization in mathematical learning can achieve. In an empirical study we investigate what mathematical conclusions university students made on the basis of a visualization. We emphasize that a visualization in mathematics should always be considered in its proper context.

---

Emotion Regulation: Antecedents and Well-Being Outcomes of Cognitive Reappraisal and Expressive Suppression in Cross-Cultural Samples

Habitual emotional state is a predictor of long-term health and life expectancy and successful emotion regulation is necessary for adaptive functioning. However, people are often unsuccessful in regulating their emotions. We investigated the use of cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression in 489 university students in Norway, Australia, and the United States and how these strategies related to measures of well-being (affect, life satisfaction, and depressed mood). Data was collected by means of selfadministered questionnaires. The major aims of the study were to begin to explore the prevalence of use of cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression across gender, age and culture, possible antecedents of emotion regulation strategies, and the influence of emotion regulation upon well-being. Results showed that the use of emotion regulation strategies varied across age, gender and culture. Private self-consciousness (self-reflection and insight) was found to be a central antecedent for the use of cognitive reappraisal. Use of emotion regulation strategies predicted well-being outcomes, also after the effect of extraversion and neuroticism had been controlled for. Generally, increased use of cognitive reappraisal predicted increased levels of positive well-being outcomes, while increased use of expressive suppression predicted increased levels of negative well-being outcomes.

Direct democracy and life satisfaction revisited: new evidence for Switzerland

We re-evaluate the relation between cantonal direct democracy and perceived subjective well-being in Switzerland using new data from the Swiss Household Panel. In addition, this study goes beyond previous work by carefully controlling for cultural determinants of happiness such as languages and religion. We find that once language is controlled for, no robust significant relationship between the extent of direct democracy and life satisfaction can be observed. The results also show that direct democracy does not affect well-being within language groups in Switzerland.

Compatibilism and Doxastic Control

Sharon Ryan has recently argued that if one has compatibilist intuitions about free action, then one should reject the claim that agents cannot exercise direct voluntary control over coming to believe. In this paper I argue that the differences between beliefs and actions make the expectation of direct voluntary control over coming to believe unreasonable. So Ryan's theory of doxastic agency is untenable.