Personality Interacts With Implicit Affect to Predict Performance in Analytic Versus Holistic Processing

Both theoretical approaches and empirical evidence suggest that negative affect fosters analytic processing, whereas positive affect fosters holistic processing, but these effects are inconsistent. We aim to show that (a) differences in affect regulation abilities (“action orientation”) and (b) implicit more so than self‐reported affect assessment need to be considered to advance our understanding of these processes. Forty participants were asked to verify whether a word was correctly or incorrectly spelled to measure analytic processing, as well as to intuitively assess whether sets of three words were coherent (remote associates task) to measure holistic processing. As expected, implicit but not explicit negative affect interacted with low action orientation (“state orientation”) to predict higher d' performance in word spelling, whereas implicit but not explicit positive affect interacted with high action orientation to predict higher d' performance in coherence judgments for word triads. Results are interpreted according to personality systems interaction theory. These findings suggest that affect and affect changes should be measured explicitly and implicitly to investigate affect‐cognition interactions. Moreover, they suggest that good affect regulators benefit from positive affect for holistic processing, whereas bad affect regulators benefit from negative affect for analytical processing.     

Clinical Supervision and Logotherapy: Discovering Meaning in the Supervisory Relationship

Upon review of the clinical supervision literature, the case is made for implementation of logotherapeutic principles within the context of the supervisory relationship. Logotherapy is a meaning-centered approach that may enhance existing supervision styles and models, especially their tendency to de-emphasize the supervisor-supervisee relationship and the inner experiencing factor of what occurs during the process of supervision. The utility of incorporating elements of logotherapy in clinical supervision is presented within the context of supervisor roles (i.e., mentor, teacher, and evaluator), as well as the content and process of effective supervision (e.g., enhancing knowledge, skills, attitudes, and interpersonal ability of supervisees). The importance of supervisor and supervisee personally meaningful values to the supervision process is then discussed, followed by specific avenues for research. Recommendations for incorporating logotherapy into supervision are offered.     

Lucky joint action

In this paper, I argue that joint action permits a certain degree of luck. The cases I have in mind exhibit the following structure: each participant believes that the intended ends of each robustly support the joint action. This belief turns out to be false. Due to lucky circumstances, the discordance in intention never becomes common knowledge. However, common knowledge of the relevant intentions would have undermined the joint action altogether. The analysis of such cases shows the extent to which common knowledge of the participants’ intentions can be harmful to joint action. This extends a recent line of research that has questioned the necessity of common knowledge in joint action.