The periscope box: A nonobtrusive method of providing an eye-to-eye video perspective

An apparatus is described that allows for the nonobtrusive recording, from a direct camera perspective, of a subject watching a video or computer display. The device follows the basic principles of a periscope and is useful in a variety of experimental paradigms, particularly those involving the assessment of nonverbal aspects of behavior.     

Lateralization of defence mechanisms: Differing influences on perception with left and right visual field presentation of anxiety-arousing stimulation

Forty-five undergraduate students were randomly divided into two groups and tested with the Meta-Contrast Technique (MCT), in the left or right visual field (VF). In the MCT, the presentation of a subliminal threatening picture is intended to evoke anxiety and ego mechanisms of defence against it. More signs of repressive plus isolating defences were found in the left hemisphere (LH) group. Signs of projection plus regression tended to be more common in the right hemisphere (RH) group. The total number of anxiety signs in the MCT protocols did not differ between the groups. A clear sex difference was noticed, namely that the female LH and RH groups showed significant lateralization, while the male groups did not differ significantly on a combined defensive score. The data suggest that the left and right hemispheres may show differing perceptual styles, which are described as ego mechanisms of defence in the psychoanalytic literature.     

Epilogue: Overarching themes and enduring contributions of the Lanzetta research program

In this Epilogue we step back from the four research lines that have been the focus of this two-part Special Issue and discuss four important themes that run through the Lanzetta research program: (1) the importance of the face as a fundamental channel of social communication, (2) the physiological nature of the information conveyed by facial expression, (3) the realization that response to facial expressions involve multiple levels of cognitive processing, and (4) the value in using multiple convergent measures and creative experimental paradigms to study complicated phenomena like emotional facial expressions. The ways in which these themes carry through the individual research lines are described, and important implications of the themes are highlighted.     

Inhibiting Facial Expressions: Limitations to the Voluntary Control of Facial Expressions of Emotion

Recently, A. J. Fridlund (e.g., 1994) and others suggested that facial expressions of emotion are not linked to emotion and can be completely accounted for by social motivation. To clarify the influence of social motivation on the production of facial displays, we created an explicit motivation by using facial inhibition instructions. While facial electromyographic activity was recorded at three sites, participants saw humorous video stimuli in two conditions (inhibition, spontaneous) and neutral stimuli in a spontaneous condition. Participants showed significantly more EMG activity in the cheek region and less EMG activity in the brow region when they tried to completely inhibit amused expressions as compared with the neutral control task. Our results suggest that explicit motivation in the sense of voluntary control is not sufficient to mask the effects of spontaneous facial activation linked to humorous stimuli.     

A healing relationship: Clients’ experiences of the long-term relational significance of the horse in horse assisted psychotherapy

Horse assisted psychotherapy is a type of treatment for mental ill-health in which the client forms a relationship with a horse. Research suggests that the relationship to a horse is very helpful to clients, but how the horse is experienced many years after the end of treatment has not been investigated. The aim of the present study was thus to investigate how former clients from horse assisted psychotherapy experienced the horse several years after treatment was completed. Former clients (n = 5; all females) from one and the same treatment center were interviewed and the data was analyzed with an inductive thematic approach. The analysis showed that many years after completion of treatment, the horses were still remembered as the most important individuals in the informants’ lives during the time of treatment. This was captured by the core category ‘A healing relationship’. These findings are in line with previous research that found that patients in horse assisted psychotherapy and their family members attributed improvements from treatment to the patients’ relationship to the horses, but adds that the clients also keep these views at follow-up several years after termination of treatment.     

Semantic dispositionalism without exceptions

Philosophical Studies - Semantic Dispositionalism is roughly the view that meaning a certain thing by a word, or possessing a certain concept, consists in being disposed to do something, e.g.,...     

Beyond ‘Liberals’ and ‘Conservatives’: Complexity in Ideology,Moral Intuitions,and Worldview Among Swedish Voters

This research investigated the congruence between the ideologies of political parties and the ideological preferences (N = 1515), moral intuitions (N = 1048), and political values and worldviews (N = 1345) of diverse samples of Swedish adults who voted or intended to vote for the parties. Logistic regression analyses yielded support for a series of hypotheses about variations in ideology beyond the left–right division. With respect to social ideology, resistance to change and binding moral intuitions predicted stronger preference for a social democratic (vs. progressive) party on the left and weaker preference for a social liberal (vs. social conservative or liberal-conservative) party on the right. With respect to political values and broader worldviews, normativism and low acceptance of immigrants predicted the strongest preference for a nationalist party, while environmentalism predicted the strongest preference for a green party. The effects were generally strong and robust when we controlled for left–right self-placements, economic ideology, and demographic characteristics. These results show that personality variation in the ideological domain is not reducible to the simplistic contrast between ‘liberals’ and ‘conservatives’, which ignores differences between progressive and non-progressive leftists, economic and green progressives, social liberal and conservative rightists, and nationalist and non-nationalist conservatives.     

Moral Foundations Theory and the Psychology of Charitable Giving

Moral foundations theory proposes that intuitions about what is morally right or wrong rest upon a set of universal foundations. Although this theory has generated a recent surge of research, few studies have investigated the real-world moral consequences of the postulated moral intuitions. We show that they are predictably associated with an important type of moral behaviour. Stronger individualizing intuitions (fairness and harm prevention) and weaker binding intuitions (loyalty, authority, and sanctity) were associated with the willingness to comply with a request to volunteer for charity and with the amount of self-reported donations to charity organizations. Among participants who complied with the request, individualizing intuitions predicted the allocation of donations to causes that benefit out-groups, whereas binding intuitions predicted the allocation of donations to causes that benefit the in-group. The associations between moral foundations and self-report measures of allocations in a hypothetical dilemma and concern with helping in-group and out-group victims were similar. Moral foundations predicted charitable giving over and above effects of political ideology, religiosity, and demographics, although variables within these categories also exhibited unique effects on charitable giving and accounted for a portion of the relationship between moral foundations and charitable giving. © 2020 The Authors. European Journal of Personality published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of European Association of Personality Psychology