Nonverbal signals speak up: Association between perceptual nonverbal dominance and emotional intelligence

Emotional communication uses verbal and nonverbal means. In case of conflicting signals, nonverbal information is assumed to have a stronger impact. It is unclear, however, whether perceptual nonverbal dominance varies between individuals and whether it is linked to emotional intelligence. Using audiovisual stimulus material comprising verbal and nonverbal emotional cues that were varied independently, perceptual nonverbal dominance profiles and their relations to emotional intelligence were examined. Nonverbal dominance was found in every participant, ranging from 55 to 100%. Moreover, emotional intelligence, particularly the ability to understand emotions, correlated positively with nonverbal dominance. Furthermore, higher overall emotional intelligence as well as a higher ability to understand emotions were linked to smaller reaction time differences between emotionally incongruent and congruent stimuli. The association between perceptual nonverbal dominance and emotional intelligence, and more specifically the ability to understand emotions, might reflect an adaptive process driven by the experience of higher authenticity in nonverbal cues.     

不只是“谈话疗法”：精神分析治疗中的非言语维度

精神分析治疗在很长一段时间里被视为“谈话疗法”,其治愈机制是将潜意识的内容意识化,语言解释在其中发挥关键作用。自20世纪末开始,越来越多分析师强调非言语交流在治疗中的作用。非言语交流不仅能够为咨访双方提供更丰富的交流形式,还能通过互动中的“相遇时刻”,实现对患者过去经验的重组,改变其有缺陷的内隐关系知晓。非言语交流和语言交流能够在治疗中发挥互补作用,未来的精神分析心理学要继续加强对非言语领域的研究。     

不只是“谈话疗法”：精神分析治疗中的非言语维度

精神分析治疗在很长一段时间里被视为“谈话疗法”,其治愈机制是将潜意识的内容意识化,语言解释在其中发挥关键作用。自20世纪末开始,越来越多分析师强调非言语交流在治疗中的作用。非言语交流不仅能够为咨访双方提供更丰富的交流形式,还能通过互动中的“相遇时刻”,实现对患者过去经验的重组,改变其有缺陷的内隐关系知晓。非言语交流和语言交流能够在治疗中发挥互补作用,未来的精神分析心理学要继续加强对非言语领域的研究。     

Therapists' emotional reactions to patients as a mediator in cognitive behavioural treatment of panic disorder with agoraphobia

The aims of this study were to examine whether therapists' emotional reactions to their patients mediate the effect of personality disorders and interpersonal problem behaviours on the outcome of treatment, focusing on an Axis I disorder; and whether therapists' reactions mediate the effect of personality disorders on the course of interpersonal problems. Therapists completed a checklist of emotional reactions to individual patients after the end of residential cognitive or guided mastery therapy for 46 inpatients with panic disorder with agoraphobia. The severity of DSM-III-R personality disorder was related to therapists' insecurity feelings, but not to interest and anger. A higher level of therapists' insecurity feelings was related to less reduction in self-reported agoraphobic avoidance during treatment, whereas therapists' emotions were unrelated to symptomatic course after treatment. Therapists' insecurity feelings appeared partly to mediate the relationship between patients' severity of personality disorder and persistence of patients' interpersonal dominance and nurturance problems.     

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。     

The Content of Emotional Thoughts

Abstract

In this paper I examine Peter Goldie's theory of emotional thoughts and feelings, offered in his recent book The Emotions and subsequent articles. Goldie argues that emotional thoughts cannot be assimilated to belief or judgment, together with some added-on phenomenological component, and on this point I agree with him. However, he also argues that emotionally-laden thoughts, thoughts had, as he puts it, ‘with feeling,’ in part differ from unemotional thoughts in their content. The thought ‘the gorilla is dangerous’ when thought with an emotional feeling of fear differs in its content from the thought ‘the gorilla is dangerous’ when thought without actually feeling fear. I argue that Goldie offers no good reason to think that the difference between emotional and unemotional thoughts is found in their contents. In fact, the analogies Goldie presents to help make his case actually suggest that the contribution feelings make to the distinctive role played by emotional thoughts consists solely in their influencing the way we think emotional thoughts. However, this position is consistent with Goldie's broader point: that theories which treat emotional feelings as phenomenological afterthoughts should be rejected.     

Therapists' Emotional Reactions to Patients as a Mediator in Cognitive Behavioural Treatment of Panic Disorder with Agoraphobia

The aims of this study were to examine whether therapists' emotional reactions to their patients mediate the effect of personality disorders and interpersonal problem behaviours on the outcome of treatment, focusing on an Axis I disorder; and whether therapists' reactions mediate the effect of personality disorders on the course of interpersonal problems. Therapists completed a checklist of emotional reactions to individual patients after the end of residential cognitive or guided mastery therapy for 46 inpatients with panic disorder with agoraphobia. The severity of DSM‐III‐R personality disorder was related to therapists' insecurity feelings, but not to interest and anger. A higher level of therapists' insecurity feelings was related to less reduction in self‐reported agoraphobic avoidance during treatment, whereas therapists' emotions were unrelated to symptomatic course after treatment. Therapists' insecurity feelings appeared partly to mediate the relationship between patients' severity of personality disorder and persistence of patients' interpersonal dominance and nurturance problems.     

How Does the Comforting Process Work? An Empirical Test of an Appraisal‐Based Model of Comforting

Burleson and Goldsmith’s (1998) comforting model suggests an appraisal‐based mechanism through which comforting messages can bring about a positive change in emotional states. This study is a first empirical test of three causal linkages implied by the appraisal‐based comforting model. Participants (N = 258) talked about an upsetting event with a confederate trained to display low, moderate, or high levels of person centeredness and nonverbal immediacy. After the conversation, participants completed several scales. Latent composite structural equation modeling was used to examine the model, which showed that person‐centered and immediate emotional support exerted a direct effect on emotional improvement. Above and beyond this direct effect, person‐centered comfort also encouraged people to verbalize their thoughts and emotions. These verbalizations facilitated cognitive appraisals, which in turn exerted a strong direct effect on emotional improvement. Mediation analyses further suggested that verbalizations of positive emotion words in conjunction with reappraisals partially mediated the influence of person‐centered comfort on emotional improvement.     

Origins of Ruminative Thought: Trauma, Incompleteness, Nondisclosure, and Suppression

The purpose of this paper is to discuss theories of the origin of ruminative thought. We begin by providing a working definition of rumination, separating rumination from other forms of cognitive activity and distinguishing ruminations from ordinary memories. Then, we review what we believe are the major categories of theory that attempt to account for the existence and nature of rumination. These include theories of traumatization, incompleteness, nondisclosure, and thought suppression. Ruminations may originate for a number of reasons, but it seems they may continue because of our attempts to control them. Evidence from studies on thought suppression suggests that the suppression of unwanted thoughts may in fact fuel the very emotions and thoughts we are trying to avoid. Thought suppression may set up a state in which we not only increase the amount we think about an unwanted thought, but potentially also sharpen our emotional reaction to those thoughts.     

Evaluation of nonverbal emotion in face and voice: some preliminary findings on a new battery of tests

This report describes some preliminary attributes of stimuli developed for future evaluation of nonverbal emotion in neurological populations with acquired communication impairments. Facial and vocal exemplars of six target emotions were elicited from four male and four female encoders and then prejudged by 10 young decoders to establish the category membership of each item at an acceptable consensus level. Representative stimuli were then presented to 16 additional decoders to gather indices of how category membership and encoder gender influenced recognition accuracy of emotional meanings in each nonverbal channel. Initial findings pointed to greater facility in recognizing target emotions from facial than vocal stimuli overall and revealed significant accuracy differences among the six emotions in both the vocal and facial channels. The gender of the encoder portraying emotional expressions was also a significant factor in how well decoders recognized specific emotions (disgust, neutral), but only in the facial condition.     

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.     

Discrimination of facial expressions of emotion by depressed subjects

A frequent complaint of depressed people concerns their poor interpersonal relationships. Yet, although nonverbal cues are considered of primary importance in interpersonal communication, the major theories of depression focus little attention on nonverbal social perception. The present study investigated the ability of depressed, disturbed control, and normal American adults to make rapid discriminations of facial emotion. We predicted and found that depressed subjects were slower than normal subjects in facial emotion discrimination but were not slower in word category discrimination. These findings suggest that current theories of depression may need to address difficulties with nonverbal information processing. There were also no significant differences between depressed and disturbed control subjects, suggesting that the unique social-behavioral consequences of depression have yet to be identified.     

Thought suppression and self-injurious thoughts and behaviors

This study proposes and tests a theoretical model suggesting that the propensity to suppress unwanted thoughts is associated with an increased presence and frequency of self-injurious thoughts and behaviors (SITB). In the model, propensity to suppress unwanted thoughts is hypothesized to be a cognitive mediator of the relationship between emotional reactivity and SITB, and is expected to be related to the extent to which SITB is initiated to escape from aversive emotions. Results of this cross-sectional study of adolescents (N=87) revealed that the self-reported propensity to suppress unwanted thoughts is associated with the presence and frequency of non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI), suicidal ideation, and suicide attempts. Furthermore, thought suppression partially mediates the relationship between emotional reactivity and the frequency of NSSI and suicidal ideation. Finally, adolescents with a higher tendency to suppress unwanted thoughts report engaging in NSSI in order to reduce aversive emotions rather than for social communication. Results are discussed within the framework of the negative reinforcement function of SITB.     

Recommending Interventions for a Borderline Personality Disorder Patient

Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is a severe personality disorder leading to unstable emotional state, impulsivity, disturbed relationships and personal distress. This paper suggests a 12-step intervention plan including Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) to Mr. X, a 21 year old male psychiatric inpatient having BPD, to promote his mental health. Therapy could not be conducted as the patient dropped out of treatment and got himself discharged from the hospital. This paper outlines implications for treatment on the basis of the clinical presentation of Mr. X. Mr. X presents himself with the BPD features showing suicidal tendencies, substance abuse and disturbed emotions. In depth interview of the patient showed extreme emotional disturbance and difficulty in controlling emotions and suicidal ideations. He was admitted at the Nur Manzil Psychiatric Centre, Lucknow, India and was kept under close observation because of being obsessed with suicidal thoughts; he also tried to kill himself. The DBT skills training and problem solving approach along with contingency management and behavioral chain analysis are suggested according to the clinical profile of Mr. X in order to reduce his self mutilating acts and substance abuse. Thus a general feeling of personal well being can be achieved thereby reducing personal distress.     

The effect of rumination on recall of emotional words: comparison of dysphoric individuals with and without a history of nonsuicidal self-injury

ABSTRACT

Prior research and theory has suggested that rumination plays a role in nonsuicidal self-injury (NSSI), and rumination increases recall of negative autobiographical information in dysphoric individuals. Across two studies, we investigated whether rumination (versus distraction) differentially influences the recall of emotional words among dysphoric persons with and without a history of NSSI. Participants encoded unpleasant, neutral, and pleasant words and then were randomly assigned to either focus on the meaning and consequences of their emotions (i.e. rumination) or unrelated thoughts (i.e. distraction) before they were asked to recall encoded words. Across the two studies, we did not find a significant effect of rumination on memory for emotional words among dysphoric people with (Studies 1 and 2) or without a history of NSSI (Study 1). We did find that people were more likely to remember neutral words as opposed to unpleasant or pleasant words across studies, regardless of rumination condition. Together, results from these two well-powered studies provide fairly compelling evidence that rumination after encoding has little to no effect on recall for emotional words in people elevated on symptoms of depression or with NSSI history. These findings can be used to refine theories of rumination and NSSI.     

Conflict over emotional expression: implications for interpersonal communication

The current study examined the role of conflict over emotional expression for subjective and interpersonal functioning. The Ambivalence Over the Expression of Emotion Questionnaire (AEQ) was administered to female students who were videotaped while engaging in a conflict-resolution and feedback task with their boyfriends. External ratings showed ambivalent women to be less positive in their verbal statements and to be more constricted in their nonverbal expressions. When mood and other personality constructs were controlled for, ambivalence entailed greater overt submissiveness. Ambivalent women also displayed lower congruence between their verbal and nonverbal communication, irrespective of depression and other personality variables. These data suggest that conflict over emotional expression entails less congruent communication, less positivity in close relationships, and a subordinate stance for the ambivalent individual.     

神经重用假说的汉语情绪词汇加工证据

神经重用假说认为对词的情绪效应可以不经语义形成而先行产生, 这更有助于人类适应环境。为了检验这一假说, 设计脑电实验和行为实验, 记录被试加工汉语厌恶情绪词和中性词的特征。结果发现, 170 ms左右厌恶词与中性词的ERPs发生分离, 且在枕部出现情绪刺激视觉注意关联的EPN; 厌恶词与中性词N400差异波溯源定位于脑岛附近, 其最大激活点时间窗口开始于380 ms。这表明在情绪词汇的语义分析之前就出现了情绪效应, 结果支持了神经重用假说。     

Facial expressions of emotions: a methodological contribution to the study of spontaneous and dynamic emotional faces

This paper addresses methodological considerations relevant to nonverbal communication of emotion research. In order to gather more information about the interpretations given to spontaneous and dynamic facial expressions, two main objectives guide the present exploratory research. The first one is to obtain naturalistic recordings of emotional expressions in realistic settings that are ‘emotional enough’. The second one is to address the issue of dynamic judgments of facial expressions of emotion, that is real-time emotional recognition. An innovative device has been created for this specific purpose. Results show that, although the social nature of the eliciting situation is minimal, the experience of some emotions is reflected on the encoders' faces while being covertly videotaped in natural conditions. Moreover, results show the utility to investigate dynamic emotional judgments of spontaneous and dynamic expressions since observers seem to be sensitive to the slightest facial expression change in making their emotional judgments. A promising paradigm is thus proposed for the study of the dynamics of real-time nonverbal emotional interaction. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

人际间情绪预测过程中的样例锚定效应

以教师预测学生的情绪为例,考察人际间情绪预测中是否存在样例锚定效应。两个实验分别采取自由回忆和样例启动范式操纵样例锚,并请教师预测典型教育情境中学生的情绪反应。结果发现,样例中学生的情绪越强烈,教师预测学生的情绪也越强烈,预测的准确性越低。可见,在教师预测学生情绪这样的人际间情绪预测过程中,存在样例锚定效应,但只有典型的样例锚才能促进情绪预测的准确性。