The placebo effect: dissolving the expectancy versus conditioning debate

The authors review the literature on the 2 main models of the placebo effect: expectancy theory and classical conditioning. A path is suggested to dissolving the theoretical impasse that has long plagued this issue. The key is to make a clear distinction between 2 questions: What factors shape placebo effects? and What learning mediates the placebo effect? The reviewed literature suggests that classical conditioning procedures are one shaping factor but that verbal information can also shape placebo effects. The literature also suggests that conditioning procedures and other sources of information sometimes shape conscious expectancies and that these expectancies mediate some placebo effects; however, in other cases conditioning procedures appear to shape placebo effects that are not mediated by conscious cognition.     

Recalcitrant Fears of Death

According to what I will refer to as judgmentalist approaches to the fear of death (JFD), the fear of death conforms to the structure implied by judgmentalist theories of emotion. JFD holds that fears of death are constituted in part by evaluative judgments or beliefs about one’s own death. Although many philosophers endorse JFD (explicitly or implicitly), there is good reason to believe that it may be problematic. For, there is a troubling (and, for the purposes of this discussion, rather interesting) objection to judgmentalist theories of emotion; if judgmentalism is false, then so too is JFD. In brief, the worry with judgmentalist theories is this: it is sometimes the case that one has an emotion, but holds a belief (or beliefs) that is in tension with the emotion. For example, I sometimes fear flying despite the fact that I believe flying is not dangerous. Emotions of this sort are often referred to as recalcitrant emotions, and they are widely thought to pose a serious challenge to judgmentalist theories. In this paper, I consider an objection to JFD based on the existence of recalcitrant bouts of the fear of death. I include in this discussion an Epicurean-inspired solution to the problem of emotional recalcitrance. Although I argue this solution may be ultimately unsuccessful, I believe it is still worth considering. For, in most discussions of the problem of emotional recalcitrance, philosophers abandon judgmentalism in favour of some other theory of emotion. The Epicurean-inspired solution I discuss in this paper, however, may allow one to retain one’s commitment to judgmentalism.     

情绪词类型效应：区分情绪标签词和情绪负载词的行为和神经活动证据

情绪标签词直接表达情绪状态, 而情绪负载词本身不表达情绪状态, 但能引发个体的情绪反应。通过对情绪标签词和情绪负载词的相关研究综述发现, 情绪标签词与情绪负载词的加工优势存在不一致的结果; 任务需求、语言类型和词汇特征是导致情绪词类型效应不一致的主要原因; 情绪标签词与情绪负载词的加工差异可以通过语义表征的具身假说、密度假说进行解释。未来研究应深入考察情绪标签词与情绪负载词加工差异的原因; 考察两种词在句子和语篇水平的加工差异; 提供能够直接解释情绪词类型效应的理论假说; 对比中英双语者加工中文和英文情绪标签词和情绪负载词的差异; 采用神经成像技术继续探查情绪信息与语义信息加工的神经机制。     

Global and Occupation‐Specific Emotional Resources as Buffers against the Emotional Demands of Fire‐Fighting

Job resources have a protective role in minimising job strain and associated adverse outcomes. Although autonomy and support are recognised as valuable resources across nearly all occupations, relatively few occupation‐specific resources have been identified within the literature. We studied global (general) emotional resources and an occupation‐specific emotional resource (camaraderie) as potential buffers against the deleterious effects of emotional demands on emergency responders. A random sample of 547 volunteer fire‐fighters completed an anonymous survey. Through path analysis we identified significant main and interaction effects of emotional demands and resources on psychological strain and burnout. Camaraderie, the specific resource, had the most consistent protective effects against poor psychological health; the effects of global emotional resources were not as consistent. These findings have important implications for theory (e.g. the specificity of resources most appropriate for theory testing and development) and for practice (e.g. for designing primary, secondary, and tertiary stress prevention and management initiatives).     

The Neural Bases of Placebo Effects in Pain

Abstract— Placebo effects are beneficial effects of treatment caused not by the biological action of the treatment but by one's response to the treatment process itself. One possible mechanism of placebo treatments is that they create positive expectations, which change one's appraisal of the situation and may thereby shape sensory and emotional processing. Recent brain-imaging evidence suggests that placebo-induced expectations of analgesia increase activity in the prefrontal cortex in anticipation of pain and decrease the brain's response to painful stimulation. These findings suggest that placebo treatments can alter experience, not just alter what participants are willing to report about pain. To the extent that they involve neural systems mediating expectancy and appraisal, placebo effects in pain may share common circuitry with placebo effects in depression, Parkinson's disease, and other disorders.     

IS MY FEELING YOUR PAIN BAD FOR OTHERS? EMPATHY AS VIRTUE VERSUS EMPATHY AS FIXED TRAIT

The purpose of this article is to (1) critique the primary arguments given by Paul Bloom and Jesse Prinz against empathy, and (2) to argue instead that empathy is best understood as a virtue that plays an important but complicated role in the moral life. That it is a virtue does not mean that it always functions well, and empathy sometimes contributes to behavior that is partial and unfair. In some of their writings, both Bloom and Prinz endorse the view that empathy is a fixed trait, but there is little reason to think this, and the studies that they cite do not support this view. Further, a number of recent studies suggest the opposite: our empathic reactions are malleable and subject to environmental effects and learning. Although our capacities for cognitive and emotional empathy are clearly not sufficient for being moral, I argue that they are functionally necessary traits that, like other virtues, must be cultivated correctly.     

Motivational changes in response to blocked goals and foreshortened time: testing alternatives to socioemotional selectivity theory

Socioemotional selectivity theory contends that when people perceive time as limited, they prioritize emotionally meaningful goals. Although empirical support for the theory has been found in several studies, 2 alternative explanations for the pattern of findings remain: (a) emotional goals are pursued by default because nonemotional goals are blocked, and (b) emotional goals are pursued in search of emotional support rather than emotional meaning. This study tested these alternatives by examining social goals in response to blocked goals and foreshortened time. Findings reveal distinct motivational patterns, as reflected in social preferences and self-reported social goals, in response to the 2 types of constraints.     

Similarities and differences between traumatic and emotional memories: review and directions for future research

The authors review theory and empirical research on the characteristics of memories for traumatic versus emotional events, with the goal of bringing together the cognitive and clinical perspectives on this issue. They consider the most important approaches to the study of traumatic and emotional memory and summarize the results of recent studies that have compared autobiographical recollections of traumatic and nontraumatic emotional experiences (positive and negative), either in nonclinical or clinical samples. Overall, findings from the current empirical literature are inconsistent. Although some researchers have found that traumatic memories are retrieved differently than are emotional memories, others have demonstrated that the phenomenological characteristics of these memory types are highly similar. The authors discuss methodological issues that could help researchers to interpret the inconsistencies found in the empirical findings. Last, they suggest possible directions for future research that may advance researchers' knowledge of memory, trauma, and emotion.     

On the malleability of emotional encoding

The encoding of emotional events has sometimes been regarded as automatic, because the processing involved can occur outside awareness. However, this does not mean that emotional encoding cannot be controlled, although it may often be the case that people are unaware of how to do so, or even that such control is possible. Evidence is presented to show that the neural activation associated with fear-related stimuli can be modified by top-down control, and that related instructions can modify emotional vulnerability to stressful events. However, it is further argued that such effortful control is resource limited, and that more robust control might be achieved via repeated practice in accessing positive representations that inhibit competing negative meanings. Studies of attentional and interpretative encoding biases induced by practice show that they have causal effects on emotional vulnerability, by influencing how threatening events are encoded. Experimental investigations are beginning to reveal the critical processes underlying these changes in emotional vulnerability, and it is argued that the same approach is likely to be helpful in addressing questions relevant to therapeutic change.     

Co-responsibility and Causal Involvement

In discussions of moral responsibility for collectively produced effects, it is not uncommon to assume that we have to abandon the view that causal involvement is a necessary condition for individual co-responsibility. In general, considerations of cases where there is “a mismatch between the wrong a group commits and the apparent causal contributions for which we can hold individuals responsible” motivate this move. According to Brian Lawson, “solving this problem requires an approach that deemphasizes the importance of causal contributions”. Christopher Kutz’s theory of complicitious accountability in Complicity from 2000 is probably the most well-known approach of that kind. Standard examples are supposed to illustrate mismatches of three different kinds: an agent may be morally co-responsible for an event to a high degree even if her causal contribution to that event is a) very small, b) imperceptible, or c) non-existent (in overdetermination cases). From such examples, Kutz and others conclude that principles of complicitious accountability cannot include a condition of causal involvement. In the present paper, I defend the causal involvement condition for co-responsibility. These are my lines of argument: First, overdetermination cases can be accommodated within a theory of coresponsibility without giving up the causality condition. Kutz and others oversimplify the relation between counterfactual dependence and causation, and they overlook the possibility that causal relations other than marginal contribution could be morally relevant. Second, harmful effects are sometimes overdetermined by non-collective sets of acts. Over-farming, or the greenhouse effect, might be cases of that kind. In such cases, there need not be any formal organization, any unifying intentions, or any other noncausal criterion of membership available. If we give up the causal condition for coresponsibility it will be impossible to delimit the morally relevant set of acts related to those harms. Since we sometimes find it fair to blame people for such harms, we must question the argument from overdetermination. Third, although problems about imperceptible effects or aggregation of very small effects are morally important, e.g. when we consider degrees of blameworthiness or epistemic limitations in reasoning about how to assign responsibility for specific harms, they are irrelevant to the issue of whether causal involvement is necessary for complicity. Fourth, the costs of rejecting the causality condition for complicity are high. Causation is an explicit and essential element in most doctrines of legal liability and it is central in common sense views of moral responsibility. Giving up this condition could have radical and unwanted consequences for legal security and predictability. However, it is not only for pragmatic reasons and because it is a default position that we should require stronger arguments (than conflicting intuitions about “mismatches”) before giving up the causality condition. An essential element in holding someone to account for an event is the assumption that her actions and intentions are part of the explanation of why that event occurred. If we give up that element, it is difficult to see which important function responsibility assignments could have.     

Dual process theory and the context of choice: Comments on Dhar and Gorlin

Dhar and Gorlin show that default-interventionist dual-process theory differentially classifies several effects in the consumer choice literature and makes differential predictions across a variety of manipulations. One of the most startling differential classifications in their model is that it drives a wedge between the attraction and enhancement effects, because they arise from System 1 and System 2, respectively. System-2 bias effects explain why sometimes less complex organisms (nonhumans, human children) can display more normative behavior than human adults. Such a finding does not at all undermine the heuristics and biases research tradition, as is sometimes argued.     

Spaces for feeling differently: Emotional experiments in the alternative left in West Germany during the 1970s

The article explores emotional practices amongst West German alternative leftists during the 1970s. It argues that leftists engaged in various forms of emotional practices that would allow them to produce feelings they missed in capitalist society. The article interprets these feelings as emotional experiments to feel differently that sometimes succeeded in the sense that they produced the desired feelings, but could also fail. These attempts to produce different feelings were based on a specific emotional knowledge about capitalism, that is an understanding of how capitalism, and specifically capitalist spatial arrangements, produced, regulated and restricted feelings. The emotional knowledge facilitated a variety of experiments that would yield the feelings that leftists missed so dearly under capitalism. The article focuses, first, on a variety of consciousness-raising and therapy groups where people tried to build new intimate relationships, and, second, on demonstrations and festivities that constituted temporal zones of exuberance. In both cases, changing spatial settings was a crucial element for producing different feelings.     

The role of death romanticization in the dynamics of suicide

Suicide is an emotional, complex event, the causes of which are not well understood. Hence, the subject of suicide cannot be adequately treated in an objective, simplified, scientific discussion without ignoring its essentially personal nature. In an attempt to add some insights into the personal dimension of suicide to analytical theory considered in the following pages, subjective, spontaneous thoughts, both philosophical and indulgingly emotional, have been included. The subjective thoughts have been separated from the theoretical discussions and will be found in the sections labeled with a letter a (e.g., iii a and v a) following the theory sections to which they most closely relate. A reading of these extra sections is extraneous to the understanding of the suicidal theory presented here, and they have been included only for the reader's interest.     

The Case for integrated intelligence

In this article I develop a case for a theory of intelligence incorporating transpersonal dimensions, namely integrated intelligence. Some recent expanded theories of intelligence move into concepts like creativity, wisdom, and emotional intelligence. Yet they remain embedded within mainstream intelligence theory and its reductionist and materialist presuppositions. Although various theorists in consciousness theory have developed transpersonal models that are beginning to be discussed in some mainstream circles, mainstream intelligence theory is yet to address the broader implications of this. Recent changes in the global economy and the needs of populations have created a need for an expanded theory of intelligence, and more intuitive thinking.     

Explaining Emotions

Emotions and cognition are inextricably intertwined. Feelings influence thoughts and actions, which in turn can give rise to new emotional reactions. We claim that people infer emotional states in others using commonsense psychological theories of the interactions among emotions, cognition, and action. We present a situation calculus theory of emotion elicitation representing knowledge underlying commonsense causal reasoning involving emotions, and show how the theory can be used to construct explanations for emotional states. The method for constructing explanations is based on the notion of abduction. This method has been implemented in a computer program called AbMaL. The results of computational experiments using AbMaL to construct explanations of examples based on cases taken from a diary study of emotions indicate that the abductive approach to explanatory reasoning about emotions offers significant advantages. We found that the majority of the diary study examples cannot be explained using deduction alone, but they can be explained by making abjuctive inferences. These inferences provide useful information relevant to emotional states.     

The treatment of borderline personalities with rational emotive behavior therapy

The rational emotive behavior therapy (REBT) theory holds that individuals with severe personality disorders in general, and borderline personalities in particular usually are biologically different from “normal” neurotics and are born with a predisposition to be highly vulnerable to stressful environmental conditions. They tend to have cognitive, emotional, and behavioral deficits or disabilities that handicap them socially, vocationally, and in other important aspects of their lives. But they also have distinct, and sometimes exceptionally strong, neurotic tendencies to demand that they absolutely must perform well, that other people have to treat them kindly and fairly, and that frustrating conditions ought not exist. Their neurosis exacerbates their cognitive-emotive-behavioral handicaps, produces even greater life difficulties, and often interferes with their working hard at therapy. A summary is presented of how borderline personalities can be treated with rational emotive behavior therapy (REBT).     

Finding unconscious phantasy in the session: Recognizing form

The concept of unconscious phantasy has played – and still does play – a central role in psychoanalytic thinking. The author discusses the various forms by which unconscious phantasies manifest themselves in the analytic session as they are lived out and enacted in the transference relationship. This paper also aims at expanding the kleinian theory of symbol formation by exploring the impact that emotional aspects connected to early “raw’, “pre‐symbolic’ phantasies have in the analysis and how their corporeal elements interlock with the signifying process. The author follows the expressive forms of primitive unconscious phantasies as they appear in a psychoanalytic session and proposes that the emotional effect that can be experienced in the communication between patient and analyst depends in great measure on “semiotic’ aspects linked to primitive phantasies that are felt and lived out in embodied ways. Rather than a move from unconscious phantasies that typify symbolic equations to those showing proper symbolization, these can coexist and simultaneously find their way to what is communicated to the analyst. As early phantasies bear an intimate connection to the body and to unprocessed emotions when they are projected into the analyst they can produce a powerful resonance, sometimes also experienced in a physical way and forming an integral part of the analyst's counter‐transference.     

The Consequences of Emotional Labor: Effects on Work Stress,Job Satisfaction,and Well-Being

Although early research suggested that the performance of emotional labor had deleterious effects on workers, recent empirical investigations have been equivocal. The performance of emotional labor appears to have diverse consequences for workers—both negative and positive. Variation in the consequences of emotional labor may be due to the different forms of emotion management involved. There is also evidence that the effects of emotional labor are specified by other work conditions. The effects of two forms of emotional labor on work stress, job satisfaction, and psychological distress—self-focused and other-focused emotion management—are explored using data from a survey of workers in a large organization. Results indicate that both forms of emotional labor have uniformly negative effects on workers, net of work complexity, control, and demands. Emotional labor increases perceptions of job stress, decreases satisfaction, and increases distress. Self-focused emotion management has the most pervasive and detrimental impacts. There is little evidence of interaction effects of work conditions and emotional labor.     

Writing about psychoanalysis: II. Analysts who write, patients who read

When we make a decision to lecture, or to write for publication, we have begun an activity that will affect every one of our patients. If they attend our lectures, or read our published works, they cannot help being influenced. Even if they do not, they will have some reaction to the focusing of our interest on particular phases of the analysis. This will be true whether or not we intend to present clinical material. These considerations inevitably affect the analyst himself, sometimes inhibiting his writing altogether, sometimes constricting its scope, or worst of all, degrading its quality. The analyst's writing is also almost certain to influence whether and with what success his patient may choose to write. Lest these considerations suggest that we avoid writing altogether, I emphasize that such a sacrifice is by no means desirable or necessary. Problems of discretion will arise, and may in some cases be virtually insoluble; but there are ways of writing that can overcome most such objections. The analyst's interest in writing should be recognized and its effects, if any, brought into the analysis; so long as the writing itself is done with due regard to the conduct of the analysis and the welfare of the patient, it need have no adverse effects on either.