Is Heightened Disgust Propensity Truly a Risk Factor for Contamination-Related Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder?

Disgust propensity (DP) has been conceptualized as a stable personality trait that confers risk for contamination-related OCD (C-OCD). However, the extent to which DP leads to the subsequent development of C-OCD is unclear. In fact, the presence of C-OCD might lead to an increase in DP rather than the inverse. The present study was aimed to test this hypothesis in a large clinical sample of OCD patients (≥ 21 years of age) with (C-OCD; n = 56) and without (NC-OCD; n = 103) contamination-related symptoms that completed measures of OCD symptoms, depression, anxiety, and DP. DP was assessed twice, in reference to the present situation (T1) and to when the participant was 18 years old (T0). The two groups did not significantly differ in DP at T0. However, C-OCD participants reported higher DP scores than NC-OCD at T1. Furthermore, the T1 vs T0 difference in DP was significant only in the C-OCD group. Subsequent analyses also showed that T1 DP levels, but not T0 levels, significantly predicted contamination-related symptoms. Despite study limitations, these findings question the role of DP as a risk factor for C-OCD.     

Is Emotion Perception Relative? Evaluating Sleep Effects on Relativity of Emotion Perception

The present study examines whether valence strength causes relativistic shifts in emotion perception form faces across sleep (filled vs deprived) nights. A group of twelve volunteers participated twice (sleep/no-sleep) with fourteen days gap between participation. Subjects evaluated low valenced facial expressions (targets) in the presence on high valence facial expressions (anchors) before sleep/no sleep nights and again the following morning. Analysis of results using 2?×?2?×?2 (groups, anchor, sessions) split plot analysis of variance suggest that larger relativistic shifts were apparent in the no-sleep group. Also post sleep relativistic shifts in emotion perception were the least (p?相似文献   

Is Disgust Prepared? A Preliminary Examination in Young Children

Children may be prepared to associate adult disgust reactions with adult disgust elicitors. To test this, three-year olds (and adults) were presented with two images and an emotive vocalization. The images and vocalizations included stimuli adults found disgusting, fear-provoking, and sad. On one set of trials, the main dependent variable (DV) was time spent looking at each image and on a second set of repeat trials the DV was knowledge of image-sound matches. Fear and disgust vocalizations were both more effective at orienting a child's attention to adult fear and disgust images, than sad vocalizations. Parental disgust sensitivity was associated with this effect, moderated by explicit matching knowledge. Matching knowledge was poor in children and good in adults. These data suggest that in children, fear and disgust vocalizations may both promote attention to stimuli that adults find disgusting and/or fear-provoking, suggesting that “preparedness” may not be wholly emotion-specific.     

Is Expressed Emotion a Specific Risk Factor for Depression or a Nonspecific Correlate of Psychopathology?

Five Minute Speech Sample Expressed Emotion (FMSS-EE) was examined in families of youth with depressive disorders, nondepressed youth with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and community controls screened for the absence of depression and ADHD. Consistent with the hypothesis that FMSS-EE shows some specificity as a risk factor for depression, rates of critical EE were significantly higher among mothers of youth with depression as compared to mothers of nondepressed youth with ADHD, or mothers of controls. When both mothers' and fathers' scores were used to generate family EE ratings, rates of overall EE and critical EE were significantly higher for the depressed group than the control group, but the nondepressed ADHD group did not differ significantly from the other groups. Results support the hypothesis that critical EE in mothers shows some specificity as a risk factor or correlate of depression in youth.     

How Transparent is Disgust?

According to the so‐called transparency thesis, what is disgusting in nature cannot but be disgusting in art. This paper critically discusses the arguments that have been put forward in favour of the transparency thesis, starting with Korsmeyer's ( 2011 ) sensory view of disgust. As an alternative, it offers an account of the relationship between disgust and representation that explains, at least in part, whatever truth there is in the transparency thesis. Such an account appeals to a distinction between object‐centric and situation‐centric emotions.     

Is Expressed Emotion an Index of a Transactional Process? II. Patient's Coping Style

This article examines the extent to which expressed emotion (EE) indexes not only relatives' behavior toward schizophrenic patients but also patients' behavior toward their relatives. The coping styles (CS) of schizophrenic patients were assessed during interactions with their parents and were compared with parental EE attitudes assessed during an acute hospitalization and during the aftercare period. It was found that parental EE attitudes measured during the inpatient period strongly predicted patients' outpatient transactional behavior: patients interacting with low-EE relatives showed significantly fewer critical and more autonomous statements than patients interacting with high-EE relatives. Further, the dominant patient coping style (autonomous, neutral, externalizing, or internalizing) was strongly related to the relatives' interactional affective style (AS) and to their pattern of EE attitudes. Patient coping style was not related to clinical attributes of these patients themselves. This article and its preceding companion (17) together suggest that EE indexes a transactional process so that the quality of both parents' and patients' transactional behaviors may predict subsequent patient functioning.     

Is Expressed Emotion an Index of a Transactional Process? I. Parents' Affective Style

The degree to which expressed emotion (EE) attitudes in key relatives reflect ongoing transactional processes in families is a topic of controversy. The associations between EE attitudes, as measured during an acute hospitalization (using the Camberwell Family Interview) and during the aftercare period (using 5-minute speech samples), and interactional behavior in parents of recent-onset schizophrenics (this article) and in patients themselves (second article), were investigated. In the first study, EE attitudes manifested by parents during the aftercare period were stronger correlates of their interactional behaviors during the aftercare period than were EE attitudes measured during the inpatient period, despite the frequent correspondence between the two EE measures. The pattern of attitudes shown between the inpatient and outpatient periods also predicted transactional styles in parents during the outpatient period, findings not accounted for by clinical attributes of patients. When high-EE attitudes persist during the aftercare period and are reflected in transactional behaviors, the risk for subsequent patient relapse may be enhanced.     

Is alcoholism a disease?

Commentators have repeatedly attacked the traditional view that alcoholism is a disease. Their arguments that alcoholism is a central aspect of life, a deviant life style, or a form of learned behavior are examined in the light of the history and philosophy of medicine as well as current bio-behavioral research. Our conclusion is that alcoholism, as a lawful pattern of observable signs and symptoms that deviate significantly from a norm of health, is a bio-psychosocial disease.     

What Is a Parergon?

Despite important recent work, the rehabilitation of parergon as a critical concept in the history of art has yet to be fully broached. From the time Jacques Derrida introduced the term into contemporary critical theory in The Truth in Painting, its character and function have been largely understood as referencing a threshold or boundary—in particular, that of the border of the artwork. Yet a review of the term's long history suggests a meaning that differs in significant ways from its current near‐univocal characterization as a synonym for a frame. In particular, premodern art theory and criticism identifies a parergon with matters such as the background action in a history painting, the inclusion in a landscape of picturesque embellishments, or, following Kant, the addition of ornament to a painting, a statue, or a building. This article therefore proposes we ask again: What is a parergon?     

Is psychoanalysis a science?

Freud Among the Philosophers: the Psychoanalytic Unconscious and its Philosophical Critics, by Donald Levy, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996, 189 pages.     

Whose Disgust Is It Anyway?: Projection and Projective Identification in the Couple Relationship

In this commentary on Josephs’s paper on Oedipal disgust, I emphasize that disgust is best viewed as a symptom of an interpersonal dynamic that may reflect a range of underlying unconscious issues beyond threats to attachment. Disgust, like all affective experience, doesn’t only arise in response to interpersonal experience; it is also created interpersonally through projection and projective identification. In my view, disgust signals a breakdown, a failure in the couple’s capacity to engage in the communicative processes essential to all intimate relationships for negotiating the fragile balances between separation and merger, love and hate, creativity and destruction.     

What Is Music? Is There a Definitive Answer?

Philosophers frequently defend definitions by appealing to intuitions and contemporary folk classificatory norms. I raise methodological concerns that undermine some of these defenses. Focusing on Andrew Kania's recent definition of music, I argue that the way in which it has been developed leads to problems, and I show that a number of other definitions of interest to philosophers of art (and others) run into similar problems.     

The Treatment of Oedipal Disgust: When One Person’s Sexual Delight Is Another’s Disgust

Sexual disgust has been conceptualized in terms of drive theory and preoedipal dynamics. Sexual disgust can also be conceptualized from a relational perspective that draws on oedipal psychodynamics as well as recent research on disgust as a form of embodied moral cognition. From a subjective viewpoint, sexual disgust is self-affirming, as it preserves the purity, sanctity, and desirability of the self in the face of polluting sexual contact. Yet from an other-centered viewpoint, sexual disgust precludes empathic recognition when it shames the object of sexual disgust and rationalizes its mistreatment. This dialectic of assertion (i.e., refusal to submit to something sexually disgusting) and recognition (i.e., affirmation as an object of sexual desire) plays out in adult romantic relationships when one partner’s sexual delight is the other partner’s sexual disgust.     

Is Xunzi a utilitarian? Revisiting a disagreement

ABSTRACT

In Chinese scholarship, Xunzi is often regarded as an eclectic Confucian master who accepted some form of utilitarian thoughts (e.g. Fung Yu-lan, Mou Zongsan and Xu Fuguan). This characteristic was also observed by some western scholars such as Benjamin I. Schwartz. In a recent study, I argued that the basic character of Xunzi’s philosophy is utilitarianism in a broad sense based on an examination on his intellectual criticism and political criticism. Xunzi asserts that humans are innately driven by self-interested desires, and he evaluates all intellectual works and political behaviours by their utility. However, he does not limit utility to only basic animal desires such as food and sex. In Xunzi’s view, humans also have innate emotions; hence, these emotions should also be accounted for in their utility. This is similar to John Stuart Mill’s redefinition of Bentham’s concept of utility. Are Xunzi’s and Mill’s concepts of utility exactly the same? This question has yet to be examined. This article is a comparative study between utilitarianism and Xunzi’s philosophy which especially explores the compatibility of these two philosophies.