Emotion regulation through listening to music in everyday situations

Music is a stimulus capable of triggering an array of basic and complex emotions. We investigated whether and how individuals employ music to induce specific emotional states in everyday situations for the purpose of emotion regulation. Furthermore, we wanted to examine whether specific emotion-regulation styles influence music selection in specific situations. Participants indicated how likely it would be that they would want to listen to various pieces of music (which are known to elicit specific emotions) in various emotional situations. Data analyses by means of non-metric multidimensional scaling revealed a clear preference for pieces of music that were emotionally congruent with an emotional situation. In addition, we found that specific emotion-regulation styles might influence the selection of pieces of music characterised by specific emotions. Our findings demonstrate emotion-congruent music selection and highlight the important role of specific emotion-regulation styles in the selection of music in everyday situations.     

Civic Engagement, Interpersonal Trust, and Television Use: An Individual-Level Assessment of Social Capital

The mechanisms underlying the formation and sustenance of social capital on the individual level were explored with a structural model composed of the endogenous variables of civic engagement and interpersonal trust. Using the 1995 DDB Needham life style study, analysis of the model permitted an examination of the strength and direction of the causal relationships driving the "virtuous circle" of participation and trust; the demographic, situational/contextual, orientational, and attitudinal factors that are exogenous to these latent variables; and the linkage between these components of social capital and viewing preferences for specific television genres. The results indicate that (1) the direction of the linkage between civic engagement and interpersonal trust is mainly from participating to trusting; and (2) television viewing plays a conditional role in the production of social capital that is dependent on the use of particular genres.     

Generalizing everyday memory: Signs and handedness

Memory for frequently encountered road signs was investigated. In Experiment 1, the average level of recall of road sign features was found to be only 47%. In Experiment 2, more left-handed than righthanded people recalled that a walking figure faces right on one sign, whereas more right-handed than left-handed people recalled that a digging figure faces left on another sign. Performance thus reflected not a difference in level of mnemonic ability between left-handed and right-handed groups but instead the compatibility between group and task. In Experiment 3, participants were asked to draw any figure walking and any figure digging, with a pattern of results similar to that of Experiment 2. It is suggested that handedness effects in recall are mediated by motor imagery.     

Moral behavior and the development of verbal regulation

The present paper examines the relationship between the development of moral behavior and the development of verbal regulatory processes. Relational frame theory and the distinctions among pliance, tracking, and augmenting forms of rule governance are applied to the domain of moral behavior and its development, in order to identify the specific social and verbal contingencies that are responsible for an evolving moral repertoire. It is argued that moral behavior is controlled by relational and rule-following repertoires, and that these can be arranged into a rough progression: pliance, tracking, augmenting, social concern for pliance, social concern for tracking, and social concern for augmenting. Congruence with data derived from other research traditions is examined, and applied implications are explored.