Emotional granularity and borderline personality disorder

This study examined the affective dysregulation component of borderline personality disorder (BPD) from an emotional granularity perspective, which refers to the specificity in which one represents emotions. Forty-six female participants meeting criteria for BPD and 51 female control participants without BPD and Axis I pathology completed tasks that assessed the degree to which participants incorporated information about valence (pleasant-unpleasant) and arousal (calm-activated) in their semantic/conceptual representations of emotions and in using labels to represent emotional reactions. As hypothesized, participants with BPD emphasized valence more and arousal less than control participants did when using emotion terms to label their emotional reactions. Implications and future research directions are discussed.     

Effects of emotion regulation strategies on smoking craving, attentional bias, and task persistence

The goal of this study was to investigate the effects of different strategies for regulating emotions associated with smoking on subjective, cognitive, and behavioral correlates of smoking. Emotion regulation was manipulated by instructing participants to reappraise (n = 32), accept (n = 31), or suppress (n = 31) their emotions associated with smoking. The dependent measures included subjective reports of craving, negative affect, and attentional biases, as measured by a modified dot-probe task, and persistence during a task to measure distress tolerance. Individuals who were encouraged to reappraise the consequences of smoking showed diminished craving, lower negative affect, had reduced attentional biases for smoking-related cues, and exhibited greater task persistence than those who were instructed to accept and suppress their urge to smoke. These findings suggest that reappraisal techniques are more effective than acceptance or suppression strategies for targeting smoking-related problems.     

Subjective well-being and adaptation to life events: a meta-analysis

Previous research has shown that major life events can have short- and long-term effects on subjective well-being (SWB). The present meta-analysis examines (a) whether life events have different effects on affective and cognitive well-being and (b) how the rate of adaptation varies across different life events. Longitudinal data from 188 publications (313 samples, N = 65,911) were integrated to describe the reaction and adaptation to 4 family events (marriage, divorce, bereavement, childbirth) and 4 work events (unemployment, reemployment, retirement, relocation/migration). The findings show that life events have very different effects on affective and cognitive well-being and that for most events the effects of life events on cognitive well-being are stronger and more consistent across samples. Different life events differ in their effects on SWB, but these effects are not a function of the alleged desirability of events. The results are discussed with respect to their theoretical implications, and recommendations for future studies on adaptation are given.     

Linguistic correlates of social anxiety disorder

The goal of this study was to examine the linguistic correlates of social anxiety disorder (SAD). Twenty-four individuals with SAD (8 of them with a generalised subtype) and 21 non-anxious controls were asked to give speeches in front of an audience. The transcribed speeches were examined for the frequency of negations, I-statements, we-statements, negative emotion words, and positive emotion words. During their speech, individuals with either SAD subtype used positive emotion words more often than controls. No significant differences were observed in the other linguistic categories. These results are discussed in the context of evolutionary and cognitive perspectives of SAD.     

Neurobiological correlates of cognitions in fear and anxiety: a cognitive-neurobiological information-processing model

We review likely neurobiological substrates of cognitions related to fear and anxiety. Cognitive processes are linked to abnormal early activity reflecting hypervigilance in subcortical networks involving the amygdala, hippocampus, and insular cortex, and later recruitment of cortical regulatory resources, including activation of the anterior cingulate cortex and prefrontal cortex to implement avoidant response strategies. Based on this evidence, we present a cognitive-neurobiological information-processing model of fear and anxiety, linking distinct brain structures to specific stages of information processing of perceived threat.     

Why Do People Use Facebook?

The social networking site, Facebook, has gained an enormous amount of popularity. In this article, we review the literature on the factors contributing to Facebook use. We propose a model suggesting that Facebook use is motivated by two primary needs: (1) the need to belong and (2) the need for self-presentation. Demographic and cultural factors contribute to the need to belong, whereas neuroticism, narcissism, shyness, self-esteem and self-worth contribute to the need for self-presentation. Areas for future research are discussed.     

Perception of racial discrimination and psychopathology across three U.S. ethnic minority groups

To examine the association between the perception of racial discrimination and the lifetime prevalence rates of psychological disorders in the three most common ethnic minorities in the United States, we analyzed data from a sample consisting of 793 Asian Americans, 951 Hispanic Americans, and 2,795 African Americans who received the Composite International Diagnostic Interview through the Collaborative Psychiatric Epidemiology Studies. The perception of racial discrimination was associated with the endorsement of major depressive disorder, panic disorder with agoraphobia, agoraphobia without history of panic disorder, posttraumatic stress disorder, and substance use disorders in varying degrees among the three minority groups, independent of the socioeconomic status, level of education, age, and gender of participants. The results suggest that the perception of racial discrimination is associated with psychopathology in the three most common U.S. minority groups.     

A General Model of Preventive and Interventive Self‐Control

The field of self‐control has witnessed an unprecedented boom, not least due to the immense implications of successful and unsuccessful self‐control for people’s lives. However, successful and unsuccessful self‐control can take many different forms, and many conceptual problems have been raised as to what self‐control is about and how to best study it. Integrating different literatures, we provide a general model of self‐control which distinguishes between preventive (i.e., anticipatory) and interventive (i.e., momentary) forms of self‐control. The proposed Preventive‐Interventive Model (PI‐Model) of Self‐Control combines seven basic components: preventive strategies, desire, conflict, control motivation, volition, opportunity constraints, and behavior enactment. The resulting taxonomy helps to distinguish self‐control from standard motivational processes, to define the concept of temptation, and to identify different types of self‐control failure including self‐monitoring failure, motivational self‐control failure, and volitional self‐control failure. Further, the model helps to outline five broad mechanisms through which people may be able to proactively boost self‐control success.     

Truthmaking, Recombination, and Facts Ontology

The idea of truthmakers is important for doing serious metaphysics, since a truthmaker principle can give us important guidance in finding out what we would like to include into our ontology. Recently, David Lewis has argued against Armstrong’s argument that a plausible truthmaker principle requires us to accept facts. I would like to take a close look at the argument. I will argue in detail that the Humean principle of recombination on which Lewis relies is not plausible (independently of the issue of facts). Then I will show that the right truthmaker principle that vindicates facts is superior to the modified truthmaker principle that Lewis has proposed. This will lead into the topic of being and existence. It turns out that truthmaking and facts are plausible, well suited for one another, and very coherent with a plausible conception of being.