Explaining the protective effect of trait emotional intelligence regarding occupational stress: Exploration of emotional labour processes

This paper aims at understanding the processes explaining the protective effect of trait emotional intelligence (trait EI) regarding occupational stress. The present study focuses on a widespread occupational stressor: emotional labour (EL). EL refers to the act of managing emotions and emotional expressions in order to be consistent with organizational ‘display rules’, defined as the organizationally required emotions during interpersonal service transactions. As these display rules interact with employees spontaneous feelings, they regularly induce a clash between inner/real and required feelings. Different strategies exist to cope with this dissonance, with either beneficial or deleterious outcomes regarding psychological and physical health. The hypothesis underlying this study was that individuals varying in the level of trait EI would use different EL strategies, with different outcomes in terms of burnout and somatic complaints. Globally, the results showed that, when confronted with emotional labour, high trait EI individuals experience lower levels of burnout and somatic complaints, and this effect was found to be mediated by the choice of emotional labour strategies. Implications of these results for research, theory and practice are discussed.     

The relevance of the analyst's character and attitudes to his work.

This paper is intended to sensitize analysts to the role of their character in analytic technique. The relation of character to countertransference, its role in analytic style, in the introduction of parameters, and in transference neurosis, will be elaborated. The problem of matching and of accounting for our failures will illustrate the complex meshing of character with more traditional factors.     

Phonoemotional profiling: a description of the emotional flavour of English texts on the basis of the phonemes employed in them

Research employing three large lists of words rated along emotional dimensions (total N = 15,761 words) supported a prior claim that most phonemes have a distinct emotional character. Different phonemes tended to occur more often in different types of emotional words. When phonemes were grouped along eight radii in a two dimensional emotional space defined by Pleasantness and Activation (Pleasantness, Cheeriness, Activation, Nastiness, Unpleasantness, Sadness, Passivity, and Softness), it became possible to draw profiles of texts in terms of their preferential use of different classes of phonemes. Four experiments were performed to illustrate the manner in which phonemes in nonsense words are related to emotion, and evidence of the validity of character assignments was investigated and received support in three further analyses. The emotionality of phonemes was related to both place and manner of articulation and to properties of the auditory signal itself. Phonoemotional profiles were drawn for several types of material and provided supporting evidence for the validity of the assignment of emotional character to phonemes.     

Explaining the impact of policy information on policy-making

This article has called past studies into question as they relate to describing and explaining the impact of information on policy-making. More specifically, it attempts to empirically investigate the causality of the factors involved in the impact of information on governmental decision-making. Based on an integrated conceptual framework for when and how information helps to make policy decisions, a path model (or a covariance structure model without latent variables) is built and tested against the data in two areas of mental health policy (i.e., service provision and financing). Findings of the study demonstrate that how and when information influences governmental decision-making is directly and indirectly affected by a variety of factors and their linkages, not dominated by one set of factors (e.g., trustworthiness of information source or format of reports) defined by a single perspective (e.g., the organizational interest or the communications perspective). The most important paths in the model are those between factors related to information (e.g., the amount of information received or its use) and the impact of information on policy-making. Interestingly, these factors also play a major role in linking other variables (e.g., demographics or decision makers’ distrust of information) to the impact of information on policy-making. Furthermore, the general pattern of the findings indicates that policy areas make a difference in accounting for the impact of information on policy-making. Overall, the single most important lesson is that past perspectives are not alternative or competing tools for understanding the phenomena, and, thus, the theoretical and/or empirical task of explaining when and why information affects policy-making is equivalent to explaining why a certain set of factors is not appropriate or appropriate for a particular context and to identifying such a context.     

Piagetan inconsistencies: A note on the formal operational interpretation of adolescent psychological development

Piaget's interpretation of adolescent self-centration as egocentrism resulting from formal operations is inconsistent because it means that the end-point of human development (formal operations) is characterized by inadequate development (egocentrism). Piaget's interpretation is also inconsistent to the empirical evidence, which has failed to support a notion of a general, universal stage of formal operations. An alternative interpretation of adolescence as developing towards a cognitive stage characterized by the taking of the perspective of the other to self can be proposed.     

The personality basis of aggression: The mediating role of anger and the moderating role of emotional intelligence

High neuroticism and low agreeableness have been found to predict higher levels of aggression through an increase of negative emotions such as anger. However, previous research has only investigated these indirect associations for physical aggression, whereas evidence for such indirect effects on other types of aggression (i.e., verbal or indirect aggression) is currently lacking. Moreover, no previous work has investigated the moderating role of Ability Emotional Intelligence (AEI), which may buffer against the effects of anger on aggression. The present study (N = 665) directly addresses these gaps in the literature. The results demonstrate that high neuroticism and low agreeableness were indirectly related to higher levels of physical, verbal, and indirect aggression via increased chronic accessibility to anger. Importantly however, the associations with physical aggression were significantly weaker for those higher (vs. lower) on AEI, confirming the buffering role of AEI. We discuss the implications of our findings for theoretical frameworks aiming to understand and reduce aggression and violent behavior.     

Remarks on the Modal Logic of Henry Bradford Smith

H. B. Smith, Professor of Philosophy at the influential Pennsylvania School was (roughly) a contemporary of C. I. Lewis who was similarly interested in a proper account of implication. His research also led him into the study of modal logic but in a different direction than Lewis was led. His account of modal logic does not lend itself as readily as Lewis' to the received possible worlds semantics, so that the Smith approach was a casualty rather than a beneficiary of the renewed interest in modality. In this essay we present some of the main points of the Smith approach, in a new guise.     

Selective attention and emotional vulnerability: assessing the causal basis of their association through the experimental manipulation of attentional bias

Although it is well-established that vulnerability to negative emotion is associated with attentional bias toward aversive information, the causal basis of this association remains undetermined. Two studies addressed this issue by experimentally inducing differential attentional responses to emotional stimuli using a modified dot probe task, and then examining the impact of such attentional manipulation on subsequent emotional vulnerability. The results supported the hypothesis that the induction of attentional bias should serve to modify emotional vulnerability, as revealed by participants' emotional reactions to a final standardized stress task. These findings provide a sound empirical basis for the previously speculative proposal that attentional bias can causally mediate emotional vulnerability, and they suggest the possibility that cognitive-experimental procedures designed to modify selective information processing may have potential therapeutic value.     

Memory for emotional words in sentences: the importance of emotional contrast

Numerous researchers have demonstrated that emotional words are remembered better than neutral words. However, the effect has been attributed to factors other than emotion because it is somewhat fragile and influenced by variables such as the experimental designs employed. To investigate the role of emotion per se in memory for emotional words, negative-affect but low arousal emotional words were placed in sentence contexts that either activated high emotional meanings of the words (Shane died in his car last night.), or low emotional meanings of the words (Shane's old car died last night). The high-emotional contexts led to better memory than the low-emotional contexts, but only in mixed lists of emotional and neutral words. Additionally, the traditional emotional memory effect was also limited to mixed lists. The results are consistent with the idea that an emotional contrast is responsible for the emotional memory effect with low arousal emotional words.     

Nietzsche on the sociality of emotional experience

In this paper, I explore the sociality of emotional experience in the work of Friedrich Nietzsche. Specifically, I describe four key mechanisms through which an individual's sociocultural context shapes her emotional experience on Nietzsche's view—emotional contagion as habitual affective mimicry, the production of emotions' felt character through the assimilation of dominant social beliefs and norms, affective interpretation à la Christopher Fowles, and the imposition of dominant notions of emotional appropriateness—fleshing out a dimension of Nietzsche's thought which is largely taken for granted but remains undertreated. After detailing these mechanisms, I argue that attending to the sociality of emotional experience in Nietzsche's thought is crucial not only for understanding key elements of his moral psychology (including certain of his reflections on freedom and self-transformation), but also for understanding his interpretation of nihilism as a psychological-affective phenomenon produced by the society to which one belongs. On Nietzsche's view, attending to the sociality of emotion helps individuals recognize the way in which the sociocultural contexts they inhabit might undermine their flourishing—and also helps them envision the conditions (especially sociocultural conditions) requisite for healthier, more empowering emotional lives.     

Young children’s character strengths and emotional well-being: Development of the Character Strengths Inventory for Early Childhood (CSI-EC)

Abstract

The Character Strengths Inventory for Early Childhood (CSI-EC) is a parent report inventory that was developed to measure pre-school children’s character strengths consistent with the VIA Classification of Strengths and Virtues. The inventory consists of 96 items that measure 24 character strengths. The CSI-EC was administered to 2274 parents of children aged 3–6 in two large samples from Israel. Parents also completed questionnaires assessing their child’s emotional and behavioral problems and emotional well-being. Principal component analyses and confirmatory factor analyses of the CSI-EC supported 24 primary character strengths factors and four second-order factors. Children’s transcendence, intellectual and interpersonal strengths were positively associated with children’s emotional well-being, and children’s temperance and interpersonal strengths were negatively associated with socio-emotional difficulties. The findings are discussed in terms of future research and practical implication.     

An ERP investigation on the temporal dynamics of emotional prosody and emotional semantics in pseudo- and lexical-sentence context

Previous evidence supports differential event-related brain potential (ERP) responses for emotional prosodic processing and integrative emotional prosodic/semantic processing. While latter process elicits a negativity similar to the well-known N400 component, transitions in emotional prosodic processing elicit a positivity. To further substantiate this evidence, the current investigation utilized lexical-sentences and sentences without lexical content (pseudo-sentences) spoken in six basic emotions by a female and a male speaker. Results indicate that emotional prosodic expectancy violations elicit a right-lateralized positive-going ERP component independent of basic emotional prosodies and speaker voice. In addition, expectancy violations of integrative emotional prosody/semantics elicit a negativity with a whole-head distribution. The current results nicely complement previous evidence, and extend the results by showing the respective effects for a wider range of emotional prosodies independent of lexical content and speaker voice.     

Dialogue on the hypothetical character of logical analysis

Reconstructing Popper's research programme for the Human Sciences, Noretta Koertge (Inquiry, Vol. 18 [1975]) has given a deductive‐nomological account of explanations of actions by means of a Rationality Principle. It is argued here that such a Rationality Principle is fundamentally redundant. Neither is it logically necessary in order to deduce a cognitive action‐explanandum, nor can it be given a semantic non‐empty interpretation, at least not within Koertge's own syllogism. Any attempt to save the Rationality Principle as unfalsifiablc but nevertheless indispensable for action explanations is rejected in the light of possible alternative action explanations by empirical and therefore in principle falsifiable psychological laws.