死亡意识的恐惧管理和悲伤管理

基于悲伤情绪的功能及效应,提出死亡意识的“悲伤管理假设”。实验1采用电生理、微表情、主观报告等方法探索死亡意识伴随的情绪变化;实验2和实验3对比死亡意识的“悲伤管理”和“恐惧管理”,并探索情绪的中介作用。结果发现：死亡意识诱发悲伤和恐惧(尤其是悲伤),且死亡反思诱发更多的悲伤;恐惧在死亡意识与外在人生目标间起中介作用;悲伤(而非恐惧)背景音乐下,死亡意识使个体更重视内在人生目标。上述结果为死亡意识的“悲伤管理”提供了实证依据,表明在悲伤的情绪中加工死亡意识可能促进个体的内在成长,这对疫情等社会灾难时期的心理救援具有启示意义。     

The psalms of lament and the transformation of sorrow

This article explores how the psalms of lament can be used as a resource for pastoral care, and how ultimately they point toward the transformation of sorrow. Relying on Walter Brueggemann's scheme of orientation--disorientation--new orientation as a way to recognize the depth of human experience, the article sees the laments as honest engagement and dialogue with God within a covenantal relationship where hurt and pain are acknowledged rather than denied and avoided. The implications of using the psalms of lament in pastoral care and in Clinical Pastoral Education are discussed.     

Chronic sorrow: A content analysis of parental differences

Sixty-eight mothers and 64 fathers of children with a neural tube defect responded to a questionnaire about chronic sorrow. Mothers reported a mood state change in very intense category from more pessimistic at time of diagnosis to more optimistic at current time. Fathers, although indicating a mood change in the very intense category to more optimistic, also had more pessimistic responses. Parental similarities and differences were also reported in both times and events that triggered the sorrow response. Categories across times and events were primarily related to health care, school/development concerns and social significance. Clinical and research implications of these findings are discussed.     

Deep dysphasia: An analog of deep dyslexia in the auditory modality

A right-handed patient, with two left hemisphere lesions, a small one in the prefrontal lobe and a larger one in the temporal, presents an unusual syndrome: a massive deficit for oral language (expression and comprehension) contrasting with a fairly good preservation of written language (expression and comprehension). The processing of isolated words and sentences has been extensively tested with repetition and dictation tasks. The patient performs rather well with nouns, verbs, and adjectives, poorly with adverbs and function words, and completely fails with nonsense words. A remarkable feature of his repetition is the frequency of semantic paraphasias. Thus, this patient exhibits a behavior rather similar to deep dyslexia, hence the possible label "deep dysphasia." The paper presents a "preunderstanding" hypothesis to account for such behaviors.     

On the relative preponderance of empathic sorrow and its relation to commonsense morality

Empathy is a nominally neutral term: in principle, the affective tone of empathic concern may be either negative (insofar as the relevant experience is that of apprehending and sharing in another's aversive state) or positive (i.e., apprehending and sharing in another's joy). Yet, we propose (Section 1) that, contrary to this standard conception of empathy as a potentially bivalent, generalized disposition towards emotional perspective-taking, in actuality, negative empathic responses, as a rule, (a) are more common, (b) are more differentiated, and (c) span a broader range of human relationships than their positive counterparts. Furthermore, we suggest that, barring certain types of privileged relationships, a failure to be empathetically aroused by another's good fortune is subject to far less severe (if any) social disapproval than the failure to share in another's aversive state. In Section 2, we posit that the negativity bias evident in the nature of our empathic concern may well be at the base of the negative–positive asymmetry found in the structure of commonsense morality, particularly as it expresses itself in the view that the furtherance of another's good has a greater moral claim on us in its negative form (e.g., the relief of suffering) than in its positive form (the promotion of “enjoyment”). We conclude by asking whether this moral (and the underlying empathic) asymmetry warrants our normative concern and we suggest that there are at least two reasons to think otherwise.