Humour as emotion regulation: the differential consequences of negative versus positive humour

Humour is often seen as an adaptive coping strategy; however, the empirical literature is inconclusive. One possible explanation is that different types of humour have different adaptive consequences. In the present research, we predicted that positive (good-natured) humour would be more effective at regulating negative emotions than negative (mean-spirited) humour. In Study 1, participants were shown negative pictures two times. First, they simply viewed the pictures and rated their levels of positive and negative emotions. Second, they were instructed to: (a) view; (b) use positive humour; or (c) use negative humour, and then rate their reactions. Compared to negative humour, positive humour was more successful at down-regulating negative and up-regulating positive emotion. In Study 2, we replicated these findings and showed that these effects cannot be explained by differences in difficulty between the two humour conditions, participants' expectations, or social desirability. Taken together, these findings suggest that positive (but not negative) humour may be an effective form of emotion regulation.     

Plasticity of inhibition in older adults: Retest practice and transfer effects

This study assessed plasticity of inhibition in older adults through examining retest practice effects in a six-session training paradigm using the Stroop task and the training-induced transfer effects to a range of cognitive measures. Fifty-six older adults (aged 60-84 years, mean = 71.05, standard deviation = 6.17) participated in this study. They were evenly assigned to one of four groups: summary feedback, individualized and adaptive feedback, no-feedback, or a no-contact control group. The results suggest that older adults are able to improve inhibition across retest sessions but unable to transfer the retest practice effects to other tasks. In addition, the improvement is not item specific and feedback does not appear to moderate the magnitude of the training benefits; however, feedback does appear to reduce interference variance across retest practice sessions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved).     

Predicting borderline personality disorder features from personality traits, identity orientation, and attachment styles in Italian nonclinical adults: issues of consistency across age ranges

The aims of this study were to assess whether Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) features could be predicted by Big Five traits, impulsivity, identity orientation, and adult attachment patterns in a sample of 1,192 adult nonclinical participants, and to evaluate the consistency of these regression models across four age groups (<30 years, 30-39 years, 40-49 years, and >50 years, respectively). In the full sample, measures of neuroticism (N), impulsivity, and anxious insecure attachment were substantial predictors of BPD features (adjusted R(2) = .38, p < .001). Attachment scales were significant predictors of BPD features across all age groups, but different scales were relevant in different age groups. Our results suggest that in nonclinical populations, BPD may represent a complex constellation of personality traits and disturbed attachment patterns.     

Bedrohungsszenarien und Gewalt gegenüber Dritten in der Psychotherapie

Aggressive behaviour, violent fantasies and potential threats against third parties are frequent topics in psychotherapy. Clinical, social and dynamic factors have to be considered for the risk assessment of aggressive behaviour. The appearance of aggressive fantasies and threats can be perceived as an indicator for potential threats. Legal aspects such as medical confidentiality, rights and duties to warn have to be kept in mind when dealing with threats against third parties. Concerning threats against children different laws have to be considered.     

Treating Depression in Men: The Role of Emotionally Focused Couple Therapy

While initial treatment recommendations for depression in the context of relationship problems have been outlined, attention typically has been focused on females experiencing depression. Less is known about the assessment and treatment of men with depression and relationship distress. This article presents the current literature on depression and relationship problems, including what is currently known about the occurrence, expression, assessment, and treatment of depression in men. Theoretical and empirically based assessment and treatment recommendations are then provided for Emotionally Focused Couple Therapy with depressed men in distressed relationships.     

Implicit Memory in Korsakoff’s Syndrome: A Review of Procedural Learning and Priming Studies

Korsakoff's syndrome (KS) is characterized by dense anterograde amnesia resulting from damage to the diencephalon region, typically resulting from chronic alcohol abuse and thiamine deficiency. This review assesses the integrity of the implicit memory system in KS, focusing on studies of procedural learning and priming. KS patients are impaired on several measures of procedural memory, most likely due to impairment in cognitive functions associated with alcohol-related neural damage outside of the diencephalon. The pattern of performance on tasks of implicit priming suggests reliance on a residual, non-flexible memory operating more or less in an automatic fashion. Our review concludes that whether measures of implicit memory reveal intact or impaired performance in individuals with KS depends heavily on specific task parameters and demands, including timing between stimuli, the specific nature of the stimuli used in a task, and the integrity of supportive cognitive functions necessary for performance.     

Audiovisual identity perception from naturally-varying stimuli is driven by visual information

Identity perception often takes place in multimodal settings, where perceivers have access to both visual (face) and auditory (voice) information. Despite this, identity perception is usually studied in unimodal contexts, where face and voice identity perception are modelled independently from one another. In this study, we asked whether and how much auditory and visual information contribute to audiovisual identity perception from naturally-varying stimuli. In a between-subjects design, participants completed an identity sorting task with either dynamic video-only, audio-only or dynamic audiovisual stimuli. In this task, participants were asked to sort multiple, naturally-varying stimuli from three different people by perceived identity. We found that identity perception was more accurate for video-only and audiovisual stimuli compared with audio-only stimuli. Interestingly, there was no difference in accuracy between video-only and audiovisual stimuli. Auditory information nonetheless played a role alongside visual information as audiovisual identity judgements per stimulus could be predicted from both auditory and visual identity judgements, respectively. While the relationship was stronger for visual information and audiovisual information, auditory information still uniquely explained a significant portion of the variance in audiovisual identity judgements. Our findings thus align with previous theoretical and empirical work that proposes that, compared with faces, voices are an important but relatively less salient and a weaker cue to identity perception. We expand on this work to show that, at least in the context of this study, having access to voices in addition to faces does not result in better identity perception accuracy.     

Kind terms and semantic uniformity

Philosophia - Since Saul Kripke’s and Hilary Putnam’s groundbreaking work in the Seventies, the idea has emerged that natural kind terms are semantically special among common nouns....     

Maternal Emotion Dysregulation Predicts Emotion Socialization Practices and Adolescent Emotion Lability: Conditional Effects of Youth ADHD Symptoms

Research on Child and Adolescent Psychopathology - Maternal emotional functioning and emotion socialization practices can facilitate or hinder children’s emotional development, and youth with...