Emotions as social relationships

While emotions are usually treated as internal states, it is possible to view them as social relationships. From this perspective, the different emotions are not primarily understood in terms of facial expression, physiological pattern, hedonic tone, or level of arousal, but as different transformations of the relationship between person and other. To demonstrate the value of this approach, judgments of the similarity between different emotions were submitted to multidimensional scaling. It is shown that the resulting dimensions describe different aspects of the relation between self and other. These dimensions provide us with a taxonomy of emotions that makes some important distinctions between closely related emotions and leads to some interesting predictions about personality differences.The authors would like to thank David Stevens for his assistance with the statistical analysis, Eric de Rivera for drafting the three-dimensional figures, and James D. Laird and Shula Sommers for their helpful commentary.     

Evidence that fixation digits can contribute to visual field asymmetries in lateralized tachistoscopic tasks

Fixation point digits have been widely used in tachistoscopic laterality studies as a simple and convenient means of ensuring unihemispheric projection of stimulus materials to the hemispheres. Previous findings demonstrate that fixation digits do not influence asymmetries in recognition accuracy studies with adult Ss. Present results, comparing four conditions differing in their use of fixation digits, show that in the naming latency paradigm the requirement to remember and report fixation control digits significantly augments RVF superiority. Implications for other latency tasks are discussed.     

Intensive specialised multi-family therapy for multi-stressed families: Therapeutic alliance as predictor for effectiveness

The effectiveness of intense specialised multi-family therapy (ISMFT) for 111 multi-stressed families, and the therapeutic alliance as a possible predictor of outcome, were examined. A repeated measures design was used, where changes in all ISMFT phases (preparation, multi-family therapy and follow-up) were assessed and compared for both mothers and fathers. Evidence was found for improved family functioning after the therapy period, which was maintained at 3 months follow-up, although the multi-stressed families still functioned in the problematic range. The therapy did however not decrease parenting stress, or did so only temporarily. Observations of the therapeutic alliance with the System for Observing Family Therapy Alliances (SOFTA) scales indicated that high therapist engagement was related to positive therapy outcomes, both at the start of therapy and later. High family engagement also predicted therapy effectiveness, but only at the start of therapy. The present study shows that solution-focused multi-family therapy at least seems to provide the first step in alleviating problems in multi-stressed families.     

How infant-directed actions enhance infants’ attention,learning, and exploration: Evidence from EEG and computational modeling

When teaching infants new actions, parents tend to modify their movements. Infants prefer these infant-directed actions (IDAs) over adult-directed actions and learn well from them. Yet, it remains unclear how parents’ action modulations capture infants’ attention. Typically, making movements larger than usual is thought to draw attention. Recent findings, however, suggest that parents might exploit movement variability to highlight actions. We hypothesized that variability in movement amplitude rather than higher amplitude is capturing infants’ attention during IDAs. Using EEG, we measured 15-month-olds’ brain activity while they were observing action demonstrations with normal, high, or variable amplitude movements. Infants’ theta power (4–5 Hz) in fronto-central channels was compared between conditions. Frontal theta was significantly higher, indicating stronger attentional engagement, in the variable compared to the other conditions. Computational modelling showed that infants’ frontal theta power was predicted best by how surprising each movement was. Thus, surprise induced by variability in movements rather than large movements alone engages infants’ attention during IDAs. Infants with higher theta power for variable movements were more likely to perform actions successfully and to explore objects novel in the context of the given goal. This highlights the brain mechanisms by which IDAs enhance infants’ attention, learning, and exploration.     

Context-dependent alarm responses in wild vervet monkeys

Animal Cognition - The alarm calls of nonhuman primates are occasionally cited as functionally equivalent to lexical word meaning in human language. Recently, however, it has become increasingly...     

A rich palette of Bible use: A theoretical and empirical contribution from the context of Protestant Christian primary schools in the Netherlands

The aim of this study is to gain empirical knowledge about how the Bible functions in the context of Protestant Christian primary schools in the Netherlands. It presents the results of an empirical explorative and qualitative study on the perceptions of teachers and school administrators (directors and internal supervisors) on the goals of Bible use in Protestant primary education, as well as the roles of teachers and pupils, and how these can be understood in terms of religious pedagogical models and theories. Five small focus group interviews with teachers and six interviews with school administrators revealed a variety of goals teachers hold regarding Bible use in education and a variety of divisions of teacher–learner roles in this regard. The findings also show some particular characteristics when compared with secondary schools.     

Can we predict non-response in developmental tasks? Assessing the longitudinal relation between toddlers' non-response and early academic skills

To date, virtually no studies have examined toddlers' non-response in developmental tasks. This study investigates data from 3667 toddlers to address (1) whether two aspects of non-response (completion and engagement) are separable, (2) how stable these aspects are from ages two to three, (3) how non-response relates to background characteristics, and (4) whether non-response at ages two and three predicts early academic skills at age six. Structural equation modelling shows that completion and engagement are separable constructs, relatively stable across age, and related to several background characteristics. Especially engagement predicts later academic performance. Results show that non-response in behavioural tasks in toddlers is not random, increasing the likelihood of sampling bias and lack of generalizability in developmental studies.     

Stolen elections: How conspiracy beliefs during the 2020 American presidential elections changed over time

Conspiracy beliefs have been studied mostly through cross-sectional designs. We conducted a five-wave longitudinal study (N = 376; two waves before and three waves after the 2020 American presidential elections) to examine if the election results influenced specific conspiracy beliefs and conspiracy mentality, and whether effects differ between election winners (i.e., Biden voters) versus losers (i.e., Trump voters) at the individual level. Results revealed that conspiracy mentality kept unchanged over 2 months, providing first evidence that this indeed is a relatively stable trait. Specific conspiracy beliefs (outgroup and ingroup conspiracy beliefs) did change over time, however. In terms of group-level change, outgroup conspiracy beliefs decreased over time for Biden voters but increased for Trump voters. Ingroup conspiracy beliefs decreased over time across all voters, although those of Trump voters decreased faster. These findings illuminate how specific conspiracy beliefs are, and conspiracy mentality is not, influenced by an election event.