When love is not blind: rumination impairs implicit affect regulation in response to romantic relationship threat

The present research examined how rumination influences implicit affect regulation in response to romantic relationship threat. In three studies, the disposition to ruminate impaired the ability to maintain positive feelings about the romantic partner in the face of explicit or implicit reminders of relationship threatening events. In Study 1, a high disposition to ruminate was correlated with impaired down-regulation of negative feelings toward the partner in response to a hurtful relationship incident. Two follow-up studies manipulated relationship threat explicitly through an experiential recall procedure (Study 2) or implicitly through a subliminal evaluative-conditioning procedure (Study 3). In both studies only individuals with low disposition to ruminate were able to ward off negative feelings and maintain positive feelings toward the partner. These findings illuminate the role of implicit affect regulation in the context of relationship threat-and how it is inextricably connected with the processes underlying rumination.     

Money Pumps,Incompleteness, and Indeterminacy

In an alleged counter‐example to the completeness of rational preferences, a career as a clarinettist is compared with a career in law. It seems reasonable to neither want to judge that the law career is at least as preferred as the clarinet career nor want to judge that the clarinet career is at least as preferred as the law career. The two standard interpretations of examples of this kind are, first, that the examples show that preferences are rationally permitted to be incomplete and, second, that the examples show that preferences are rationally permitted to be indeterminate. In this paper, I shall argue that the difference between these interpretations is crucial for the money‐pump argument for transitivity, which is the standard argument that rational preferences are transitive. I shall argue that the money‐pump argument for transitivity fails if preferences are rationally permitted to be incomplete but that it works if preferences are rationally permitted to be indeterminate and rationally required to be complete.     

MORALITY AND NATURE: EVOLUTIONARY CHALLENGES TO CHRISTIAN ETHICS

Christian ethics accentuates in manifold ways the unique character of human nature. Personalists believe that the mind is never reducible to material and physical substance. The human person is presented as the supreme principle, based on arguments referring to free‐willed actions, the immateriality of both the divine spirit and the reflexive capacity, intersubjectivity and self‐consciousness. But since Darwin, evolutionary biology slowly instructs us that morality roots in dispositions that are programmed by evolution into our nature. Historically, Thomas Huxley, “Darwin's bulldog,” agreed with Darwin on almost everything, except for his gradualist position on moral behavior. Huxley's “saltationism” has recently been characterized by Frans de Waal as “a veneer theory of morality.” Does this mark the end of a period of presenting morality as only the fruit of socialization processes (nurture) and as having nothing in common with nature? Does it necessarily imply a corrosion of personalist views on the human being or do Christian ethics have to become familiar again with their ancient roots?     

Death by 1000 ‘true fans’: Do marketing laws apply to music listening?

The advice to musicians and marketers is to focus on what they love: a truism for practitioners is to find 1000 ‘true fans’ and make $100 from each of them (Kelly, 2008. 1000 True fans. The Technium). If this advice is correct, we should see musicians with loyal user bases engaging more with their favourite artists and less with other music, suggesting a narrow targeting strategy would suffice. On the other hand, the established marketing laws indicate that the listeners of very different genres should overlap more than conventional wisdom would suggest, supporting the need for a much broader approach to targeting potential audiences. Given these conflicting views, musicians need to know if they should market to their existing listeners, the listeners of music similar to theirs (i.e., the same genre), or if they should try to reach a much wider audience. We turn to established choice patterns from the marketing literature to address these questions in the music context. This study examines 84,000,000 observations of music listening from 27,000 unique global users between 2013 and 2014 and survey data from 2019 containing music listening from over 1000 representative respondents in the United States. The results show that listening follows the Duplication of Purchase law for genres, artists, albums, and songs, at an annual, 6-months, 3-months, 1-month, and 1-week period, with no indication of partitioned music listening. The implication is that musicians should try to reach all potential listeners, regardless of what they already listen to. These findings contribute to the theoretical knowledge about duplication analyses of various durations, extend the contexts of choice behaviour that exhibit this pattern, and managerially, to knowledge about the extent of potential audiences and ‘share of ear’ competition.     

Appraisal of behavioral measurement techniques for assessing dental anxiety and fear in children: A review

The aim of this article is to review and evaluate behavioral and physiological measurement techniques frequently used to assess dental anxiety and fear in children. Attention is given to the data collected, the empirical findings obtained, and the availability of normative data. The main focus, however, is on the reliability and validity. Results show that all questionnaires are open to criticism. Of the behavioral measures, Melamed's Behavior Profile Rating Scale is to be preferred to Frankl's Rating Scale, Venham Rating Scales, and Visual Analogue Scales. The main reasons are that Melamed's BPRS measures the behavior of the child more precisely and that it has superior psychometric properties. Furthermore, because of their practical, conceptual, and psychometric problems, physiological measures at this stage are found to be less appropriate for assessing dental fear in children. It is concluded that a behavioral measure is not always the ideal, but often the only available technique for assessing dental fear in children.