The Recognition of Emotions in Music and Landscapes: Extending Contour Theory

While inanimate objects can neither experience nor express emotions, in principle they can be expressive of emotions. In particular, music is a paradigmatic example of something expressive of emotions that surely cannot feel anything at all. The Contour theory accounts for music expressiveness in terms of those resemblances that hold between its external and perceivable properties (i.e., its contour) and the typical contour of human emotional behavior. Provided that some critical aspects are emended – notably, the stress on the perception of similarity instead of the more plausible hypothesis that the listener perceives manifestations that are similar – we are inclined to endorse contour theory. In particular, we share its basic idea that expressive properties are perceived. Although other kinds of processes – high-level conceptual inferences, imagination – sometimes characterize our encounters with music, still perception constitutes the standard process underlying the detection of expressiveness. Moreover, we propose to extend contour theory to visual arts. Taking into consideration, as a case study, depicted landscapes, we observe that they frequently cannot but express emotions such as joy, sadness, liveliness or melancholy. The fact that pictures, unlike music, lack any temporal dimension is a prima facie reason for doubting the extendibility of contour theory’s conceptual arsenal to them. Nevertheless, while being obviously unable to behave somehow, we claim that depicted landscapes can perfectly convey dynamic information. If this is the case, the extension of the notion of contour to visuals art via the stress on the notion of dynamism would represent a second interesting revision of contour theory.     

Are event-related potentials to dynamic facial expressions of emotion related to individual differences in the accuracy of processing facial expressions and identity?

Despite a wealth of knowledge about the neural mechanisms behind emotional facial expression processing, little is known about how they relate to individual differences in social cognition abilities. We studied individual differences in the event-related potentials (ERPs) elicited by dynamic facial expressions. First, we assessed the latent structure of the ERPs, reflecting structural face processing in the N170, and the allocation of processing resources and reflexive attention to emotionally salient stimuli, in the early posterior negativity (EPN) and the late positive complex (LPC). Then we estimated brain–behavior relationships between the ERP factors and behavioral indicators of facial identity and emotion-processing abilities. Structural models revealed that the participants who formed faster structural representations of neutral faces (i.e., shorter N170 latencies) performed better at face perception (r = –.51) and memory (r = –.42). The N170 amplitude was not related to individual differences in face cognition or emotion processing. The latent EPN factor correlated with emotion perception (r = .47) and memory (r = .32), and also with face perception abilities (r = .41). Interestingly, the latent factor representing the difference in EPN amplitudes between the two neutral control conditions (chewing and blinking movements) also correlated with emotion perception (r = .51), highlighting the importance of tracking facial changes in the perception of emotional facial expressions. The LPC factor for negative expressions correlated with the memory for emotional facial expressions. The links revealed between the latency and strength of activations of brain systems and individual differences in processing socio-emotional information provide new insights into the brain mechanisms involved in social communication.     

Siblings’ Perceptions of Differential Treatment,Fairness, and Jealousy and Adolescent Adjustment: A Moderated Indirect Effects Model

Youth’s perception of parents’ differential treatment (PDT) are associated with maladjustment during adolescence. Although the direct relations between PDT and youth’s maladjustment have been well established, the mechanisms underlying these associations remain unclear. We addressed this gap by examining whether sibling jealousy accounted for the links between PDT and youth’s depressive symptoms, self-worth, and risky behaviors. Additionally, we examined whether youth’s perceptions of fairness regarding their treatment as well as the gender constellation of the dyad moderated these indirect relations (i.e., moderated-indirect effects). Participants were first- and second-born adolescent siblings (M = 15.96, SD = .72 years for older siblings, M = 13.48, SD = 1.02 years for younger siblings) and their parents from 197 working and middle class European American families. Data were collected via home interviews. A series of Conditional Process Analyses revealed significant indirect effects of PDT through sibling jealousy to all three adjustment outcomes. Furthermore, perceptions of fairness moderated the relations between PDT and jealousy, such that the indirect effects were only significant at low (?1 SD) and average levels of fairness. At high levels of fairness (+1 SD) there was no association between PDT, jealousy, and youth adjustment. Taken together, results indicate that youth and parents would benefit from engaging in clear communication regarding the reasoning for the occurrence of differential treatment, likely maximizing youth and parent perceptions of that treatment as being fair and in turn mitigating sibling jealousy and maladjustment.     

Mother-Child Interactions and Preschoolers’ Emotion Regulation Outcomes: Nurturing Autonomous Emotion Regulation

Emotion regulation is a complex process that begins in infancy and continues through childhood with parents’ support. Early parent-child interactions shape the way children learn emotion management. We took a sociocultural and social learning approach to exploring the specific components of mother-child interactions that are related to mothers’ perceptions of her child’s regulatory ability and the child’s observed emotion regulation. Thirty mothers and their preschool children were recruited from two New England urban areas: one community sample and one head start sample. Dyads engaged in a free play session, children completed an observed compliance task, and mothers completed a set of questionnaires assessing their perceptions of their child’s regulation. Regression analyses revealed that maternal behaviors during free play predicted child’s observed hostility (F _(2,29)?=?3.137, p?<?.05) and mothers’ perceptions of her child’s regulatory ability predicted observed child compliance (F _{(2, 17)}?=?4.990, p?<?.05). Child behaviors during play significantly predicted child’s compliance (F _(3,20)?=?4.722, p?<?.05) and child’s hostility (F _{(1, 26)}?=?9.220, p?<?.001). Maternal modeling and intentional scaffolding as well as perceptions of her child’s regulatory capacity have a powerful impact on her child’s observed regulation. Results indicate that it is particularly important for mothers of preschoolers to support autonomy while guiding socially appropriate behavior. Interventions that target improving mothers’ negative perceptions of their children, educating on appropriate preschool expectations, and facilitating preschoolers’ mature play may help mothers interact with their children in the ways that foster children’s autonomous emotion regulation.     

“Seeing-in” and twofold empathic intentionality: a Husserlian account

In recent years, the phenomenological approach to empathy becomes increasingly influential in explaining social perception of other people. Yet, it leaves untouched a related and pivotal question concerning the unique and irreducible intentionality of empathy that constitutes the peculiarity of social perception. In this article, I focus on this problem by drawing upon Husserl’s theory of image-consciousness, and I suggest that empathy is characterized by a “seeing-in” structure. I develop two theses so as to further explicate the seeing-in structure in question: first, empathy as a phenomenologically sui generis act is an intentional fusion of both presentation and re-presentation; and second, empathic intentionality is in essence twofold in that it is at once directed at both the other’s sensuously given body and the other’s non-sensuously given mentality. In this light, I argue that empathy is better conceived as a quasi-perceptual act that is fundamentally different from external perception simpliciter and other complex acts such as signitive, recollective and imaginative intention.     

Guiding others for their own good: Action orientation is associated with prosocial enactment of the implicit power motive

Prior research has repeatedly documented how people who are implicitly motivated by power motives may hurt other people’s interests. However, people may also enact the implicit power motive (nPower) in a prosocial manner. Using an Operant Motive Test, the authors differentiated five enactment strategies within nPower and investigated personality antecedents and personal benefits of a prosocial enactment strategy. Two studies found that demand-related action orientation (i.e., ability to self-regulate positive affect) was associated with prosocial enactment of nPower. Furthermore, prosocial enactment of nPower was associated with a higher explicit power motive among future teachers (Study 1) and future psychologists (Study 2). Finally, there was an indirect effect of action orientation through the prosocial enactment of nPower on the explicit power motive (Studies 1 and 2) and, in turn, on well-being (Study 2). Our integration of motivation and self-regulation research (the “what” and “how” of goal striving) helps to better understand the dual nature of power motives.     

Outside the Classroom Walls: Perceptions of Professor Inappropriate Out-of-Class Conduct and Student Classroom Incivility among American Business Students

Under higher education’s contemporary consumer model, students are treated as customers and professors are encouraged to increase student engagement through more personal out-of-class interactions, often in social settings. In the course of this more personal student-faculty involvement, students inevitably encounter or learn of their professors’ occasional inappropriate or unethical behavior. In the present study, we investigated the impact of 145 American undergraduate Business students’ perceptions of their professors’ inappropriate out-of-class behavior on student beliefs and in-class behavior. Results indicate that student perceptions of professors engaging in inappropriate out-of-class behavior were associated with students viewing these professors as lower in ethical character and reporting a stronger likelihood of attending these professors’ classes under the influence of alcohol and illicit drugs, swearing and using vulgarity in these professors’ class discussions, and showing disregard for these professors’ rules, time, and effort. These relationships held even when student grade satisfaction and professor in-class behavior were accounted for. Our results suggest professors’ behavior outside the classroom may impact students’ behavior inside the classroom, re-igniting dialogue regarding the professorial role and the boundaries on oversight of that role. We offer suggestions as to how higher education may address these concerns without infringing upon professors’ personal freedoms.     

Stigma Consciousness and Subjective Well-Being in Lesbians and Gays

The stigma associated with sexual identity can affect an individual’s well-being. The main goal of this study was to analyse the role of a psychosocial variable, stigma consciousness, on the well-being of lesbian and gay (LG) individuals. For this purpose, a sample of 481 participants completed various questionnaires (M _age = 32.36, SD _age = 9.60). Analysis of these results using structural equations showed two different pathways to cope with the stigma. The first pathway consists of collective action, and the second consists of stigma concealment. Specifically, stigma consciousness positively predicts well-being through group identification and collective action. Stigma concealment, however, negatively predicts well-being through the perception of prejudice. In addition, this work has confirmed that concealment has a direct negative relationship with subjective well-being. These results are interpreted from a psychosocial perspective. Finally, based on our data, we propose future interventions that provide LG individuals with strategies to cope with their perceptions of stigma.     

The relation between students’ justice experiences and their school refusal behavior

In a cross-sectional questionnaire study with N = 1658 German students, aged between 12 and 17 years (M = 14.1, SD = 0.5), we investigated the relation of students’ personal belief in a just world (BJW) to their school absenteeism and functions of school refusal behavior. In accordance with recent studies which identified negative relations between students’ BJW and different forms of rule-breaking behavior (e.g., bullying, cheating), we expected that students with a strong BJW would be less likely to refuse school than those with a weak BJW. Furthermore, we considered students’ personal experience of teacher justice and their feelings of exclusion from school as possible mediators in this relation. We also controlled for confounding effects of gender, age, social desirability, school reluctance, and test anxiety. To test our hypotheses, we used bootstrap mediation analyses. As expected, these analyses showed that the more students endorsed personal BJW, the less likely they were to report that they refused school. The students’ personal experience of teachers justice and especially their feelings of exclusion from school at least partly mediated personal BJW’s relation to school refusal behavior and its functions. The observed relations mainly persisted when we controlled for gender, age, social desirability, school reluctance, and test anxiety. We discussed the adaptive functions of BJW and implications for future school research and practice.     

Quieting the Ego Through Group Activities: A Thematic Analysis of Romanian and Japanese Students’ Positive Group Experiences

Research suggests that quieting the ego (reducing excessive self-focus) can foster well-being. Two exploratory qualitative studies were carried out to investigate the features of ego-quieting group activities. Romanian (N = 140) and Japanese participants (N = 99) read a definition of “self-detachment” and answered several open-ended questions asking them to describe a group situation in which they had experienced a similar state. Thematic analysis showed numerous similarities between the responses of the two samples, as well as cultural-specific features. Participants recalled moments of enjoyment in the company of friends, or challenging group work. For the Romanian sample, the experience was characterized by present-oriented attention, valuing others, positivity, disinhibition and altered perceptions, while for the Japanese sample, valuing others, stress relief, matching challenge and skill and merging self with exterior world were its prevalent features. Both samples identified similar eliciting factors (individual receptiveness, acceptant group, captivating activity, appropriate environment) and similar consequences of the experience (increased closeness, relaxation and self-development). While supporting the existing literature on the importance of communal activities in reducing self-focus and promoting individual well-being, the paper provides new in-depth insights into participants’ subjective experiences and the cultural specifics of positive group activities.     

Emotional Competence and Anxiety in Childhood and Adolescence: A Meta-Analytic Review

Anxiety is conceptualized as a state of negative emotional arousal that is accompanied by concern about future threat. The purpose of this meta-analytic review was to evaluate the evidence of associations between emotional competence and anxiety by examining how specific emotional competence domains (emotion recognition, emotion expression, emotion awareness, emotion understanding, acceptance of emotion, emotional self-efficacy, sympathetic/empathic responses to others’ emotions, recognition of how emotion communication and self-presentation affect relationships, and emotion regulatory processes) relate to anxiety in childhood and adolescence. A total of 185 studies were included in a series of meta-analyses (N’s ranged from 573 to 25,711). Results showed that anxious youth are less effective at expressing (r = ?0.15) and understanding emotions (r = ?0.20), less aware of (r = ?0.28) and less accepting of their own emotions (r = ?0.49), and report less emotional self-efficacy (r = ?0.36). More anxious children use more support-seeking coping strategies (r = 0.07) and are more likely to use less adaptive coping strategies including avoidant coping (r = 0.18), externalizing (r = 0.18), and maladaptive cognitive coping (r = 0.34). Emotion acceptance and awareness, emotional self-efficacy, and maladaptive cognitive coping yielded the largest effect sizes. Some effects varied with children’s age. The findings inform intervention and treatment programs of anxiety in youth and identify several areas for future research.     

Factors Influencing Adolescents’ Self-control According to Family Structure

We compared factors influencing adolescents’ self-control according to their family structure. Participants were 944 adolescents in five cities in South Korea (115 from single-parent families, 65 from grandparent-led families, and 764 from two-parent families). Data were collected using self-report questionnaires containing items on self-control, stress, parenting attitude, parent–adolescent communication, and family cohesion. Data were analyzed using stepwise multiple regressions with SPSS program. The factors influencing adolescents’ self-control differed across the three family structure groups. For single-parent families, stress and parental attitudes were significantly related to adolescents’ self-control (adjusted R²?=?0.37, p?<?0.001). In contrast, for grandparent-led families, family cohesion and parental attitude were significantly related to adolescents’ self-control (adjusted R²?=?0.31, p?<?0.01), while for two-parent families, stress, parental attitude, and parent–adolescent communication were related to the outcome (adjusted R²?=?0.24, p?<?0.001). Parental attitude was thus a common factor relating to self-control, regardless of family structure. On the other hand, the main factors influencing adolescents with low self-control were gender and stress. Our results confirm that adolescents’ self-control is not only affected by personal factors but also by parental and family factors. It is important to improve individual program to improve adolescents’ self-control according to family structure. The results of study may act as a base for improving individual intervention programs aimed at promoting adolescents’ self-control by factoring in family structure.     

Reflexology,schizokinesis and autokinesis

A resume of the history and concepts culminating in the work of Pavlov shows that there has been a gradual and slow elaboration toward a science of behavior. The past work has been oriented since the time of Locke increasingly toward the external environment. Pavlov’s theories, however, were directed toward forceswithin the nervous system. Further work from the Pavlovian Laboratories at Johns Hopkins and the V.A. (and elsewhere) indicate that the various physiological systems do not always work harmoniously, but that there is often a split in function (Schizokinesis)—changes occurring over a period of time—which do not seem to be referable to the external environment but to elaborations occurringwithin the organism (Autokinesis). These may tend toward improvement of function or, on the other hand, toward deterioration. The time has come when the progressive changes and the interrelationships of active fociwithin the organism should be considered as well as the reactivity of the individual toward the external environment.     

The Fallaciousness of Threats: Character and <Emphasis Type="Italic">Ad Baculum</Emphasis>

Robert Kimball, in “What’s Wrong with Argumentum Ad Baculum?” (Argumentation, 2006) argues that dialogue-based models of rational argumentation do not satisfactorily account for what is objectionable about more malicious uses of threats encountered in some ad baculum arguments. We review the dialogue-based approach to argumentum ad baculum, and show how it can offer more than Kimball thinks for analyzing such threat arguments and ad baculum fallacies.     

Group identity as a source of threat and means of compensation: Establishing personal control through group identification and ideology

Compensatory control theory proposes that individuals can assuage threatened personal control by endorsing external systems or agents that provide a sense that the world is meaningfully ordered. Recent research drawing on this perspective finds that one means by which individuals can compensate for a loss of control is adherence to ideological beliefs about the social world. This prior work, however, has largely neglected the role of social groups in defining either the nature of control threat or the means by which individuals compensate for these threats. In four experiments (N = 466), we test the possibility that group‐based threats to personal control can be effectively managed by defensively identifying with the threatened group and its values. We provide evidence for the specificity of these effects by demonstrating that defensive identification and ideology endorsement are specific to the content of the group‐based threat.     

Predicting pleasure at others’ misfortune: Morality trumps sociability and competence in driving deservingness and schadenfreude

Schadenfreude occurs when people feel pleasure at others’ misfortunes. Previous research suggested that individuals feel such a malicious pleasure when the misfortune befalls social targets perceived as highly competent but lacking human warmth. Two experiments explored whether the two components of warmth (i.e., sociability and morality) have distinct roles in driving schadenfreude. Study 1 (N = 128) compared a competent but immoral individual to a competent but unsociable person and found that people felt more schadenfreude when a misfortune befell an individual lacking morality. Study 2 (N = 199) confirmed the primary role of morality in driving schadenfreude by manipulating not only morality and sociability, but also competence. Moreover, both experiments showed that social targets lacking moral qualities elicited higher levels of schadenfreude because their misfortunes were perceived as deserved. Overall, our findings suggest that morality has a primary role over other basic dimensions of person perception (i.e., sociability and competence) in driving schadenfreude.     

Effect of Body Image on Tunisian Women’s Sexual Functioning

The objective of this study was to identify the perception of body image by Tunisian women and their spouses and to examine its impact on female sexuality. Our study involved 300 Tunisian women who had been married for at least 1 year and consulted in primary care medicine during the months of June and July 2016. Each participant completed a questionnaire covering four areas: women’s perception of their body, the perception of the spouses of the latter as it was reported by the participants, sexual activity, and the impact of body perception on sexual activity. The participants were satisfied with their bodies in 51% of cases. This satisfaction was associated with perceiving the body as physically attractive (p?=?0.007), young (p?=?0.047) and as a source of confidence (p?<?0.001). Compared to women dissatisfied with their bodies, those satisfied declared satisfaction of sexual desire (p?=?0.005), reaching orgasm (p?=?0.001), taking the initiative in sexual activity (p?=?0.003) and preparation for sex (p?=?0.006). Perceived satisfaction of the partner with the female body was related to a more positive sexuality in women, specifically to women’s sexual satisfaction (p?=?0.018), women taking sexual initiative (p?=?0.014) and preparation for sex (p?=?0.001). Our study indicates the important impact of a positive perception of the body image of Tunisian women by themselves and by their spouses on their sexuality. It would be interesting to consider these aspects in the management of female sexual disorders.     

Uncertainty is associated with increased selective attention and sustained stimulus processing

Uncertainty about future threat has been found to be associated with an overestimation of threat probability and is hypothesized to elicit additional allocation of attention. We used event-related potentials to examine uncertainty-related dynamics in attentional allocation, exploiting brain potentials’ high temporal resolution and sensitivity to attention. Thirty participants performed a picture-viewing task in which cues indicated the subsequent picture valence. A certain-neutral and a certain-aversive cue accurately predicted subsequent picture valence, whereas an uncertain cue did not. Participants overestimated the effective frequency of aversive pictures following the uncertain cue, both during and after the task, signifying expectancy and covariation biases, and they tended to express lower subjective valences for aversive pictures presented after the uncertain cue. Pictures elicited increased P2 and LPP amplitudes when their valence could not be predicted from the cue. For the LPP, this effect was more pronounced in response to neutral pictures. Uncertainty appears to enhance the engagement of early phasic and sustained attention for uncertainly cued targets. Thus, defensive motivation related to uncertainty about future threat elicits specific attentional dynamics implicating prioritization at various processing stages, especially for nonthreatening stimuli that tend to violate expectations.