Jealousy,Infidelity, and the Difficulty of Diagnosing Pathology: A CBT Approach to Coping with Sexual Betrayal and the Green-Eyed Monster

Humans have evolved adaptations for infidelity, as well defenses against a partner’s betrayal—centrally the emotion of jealousy. Both create problems that bring couples to therapy. Diagnosing jealousy as pathological versus normal turns out to be difficult, in part because infidelity has evolved to be concealed from the betrayed mate, which creates a signal detection problem. Because missing an infidelity committed by a mate has been more costly in evolutionary currencies than falsely suspecting a partner of cheating, selection has created an error management cognitive bias to over-infer a partner’s betrayal. Moreover, adaptations for jealousy become activated by predictors of infidelity, such as mate value discrepancies, when no actual infidelities have occurred. Cognitive-behavior therapy (CBT) offers several ways to deal with these complexities. One way is to highlight potential mismatches, distinguishing between jealous emotions that were functional in ancestral environments but are less so in modern environments. A second is to distinguish between the goal of personal well-being and reproductive outcomes. Understanding the evolutionary logic of jealousy, in short, provides patients with conceptual tools for cognitively reframing jealousy and infidelity.     

Age‐related changes in the dynamics of fear‐related regulation in early childhood

Self‐regulation is a dynamic process wherein executive processes (EP) delay, minimize or desist prepotent responses (PR) that arise in situations that threaten well‐being. It is generally assumed that, over the course of early childhood, children expand and more effectively deploy their repertoire of EP‐related strategies to regulate PR. However, longitudinal tests of these assumptions are scarce in part because self‐regulation has been mostly studied as a static construct. This study engages dynamic systems modeling to examine developmental changes in self‐regulation between ages 2 and 5 years. Second‐by‐second time‐series data derived from behavioral observations of 112 children (63 boys) faced with novel laboratory‐based situations designed to elicit wariness, hesitation, and fear were modeled using differential equation models designed to capture age‐related changes in the intrinsic dynamics and bidirectional coupling of PR (fear/wariness) and EP (strategy use). Results revealed that dynamic models allow for the conceptualization and measurement of fear regulation as intrinsic processes as well as direct and indirect coupling between PR and EP. Several patterns of age‐related changes were in line with developmental theory suggesting that PR weakened and was regulated more quickly and efficiently by EP at age 5 than at age 2. However, most findings were in the intrinsic dynamics and moderating influences between PR and EP rather than direct influences. The findings illustrate the precision with which specific aspects of self‐regulation can be articulated using dynamic systems models, and how such models can be used to describe the development of self‐regulation in nuanced and theoretically meaningful ways.     

Weakness of Will

My chief aim is to explain how someone can act freely against her own best judgment. But I also have a second aim: to defend a conception of practical rationality according to which someone cannot do something freely if she believes it would be better to do something else. These aims may appear incompatible. But I argue that practical reason has the capacity to undermine itself in such a way that it produces reasons for behaving irrationally. Weakness of will is possible because it is possible to conclude that one has sufficient reason to reject the verdicts of one's own reason.     

Forgiveness or breakup: Sex differences in responses to a partner's infidelity

Infidelities--sexual, emotional, or both--afflict many long-term romantic relationships. When a person discovers a partner's betrayal, a major decision faced is to forgive the partner and remain together or to terminate the relationship. Because men and women have confronted different adaptive problems over evolutionary history associated with different forms of infidelity, we hypothesised the existence of sex differences in which aspects of infidelity would affect the likelihood of forgiveness or breakup. We tested this hypothesis using forced-choice dilemmas in which participants (N = 256) indicated how difficult it would be to forgive the partner and how likely they would be to break up with the partner, depending on the nature of the infidelity. Results support the hypothesis that men, relative to women: (a) find it more difficult to forgive a sexual infidelity than an emotional infidelity; and (b) are more likely to terminate a current relationship following a partner's sexual infidelity than an emotional infidelity. The Discussion provides directions for future work on the determinants of breakup and the psychology of forgiveness.     

Some Musings About the Limits of an Ethics That Can Be Applied – A Response to a Question About Courage and Convictions That Confronted the Author When She Woke Up on November 9, 2016

I experienced the 2016 Presidential election as a loss of innocence. For the first time in my life, the prospect of losing my most basic rights and freedoms did not feel so remote. Confronting this possibility prompted the musings in this article. I call them ‘musings' because the article is not a systematic defense of a clearly demarcated position. It is, rather, a somewhat circuitous exploration of the many questions that pressed themselves upon me as I struggled to understand what distinguishes (a) reasonable accommodations to injustice from (b) morally unacceptable accommodations. When is a commitment not really a commitment? When does reasonable fear become shameful cowardice? When does my knowledge that I can do something to resist injustice give me good enough reason to resist? Under what conditions is my reason an enemy of my ideals? What is the proper balance between valuing myself beyond price and appreciating that many, many things matter far more than my own life and security? In grappling with these questions, I have been reminded of the extent to which moral discernment does not involve applying a ‘philosophy' and the extent to which it cannot be secured by prior training.     

MELODY: IMPORTANCE IN LEARNING ORAL AND BOOK LANGUAGE

This paper reviews the concept that the melodic features of language play a major role in the child's acquisition of both oral and book language. The first linguistic features learned by children when acquiring oral language are the melodic or rhythmic structures (stress, intonation and juncture) and these features are learned before the phonemic. Therefore, it is feasible to claim that the melodic features of book language are learned before awareness of print. Exposure to text language read aloud and instructional methods, such as, repeated readings may supply the necessary experiential background needed to learn the rhythmic rule system of the text.