Beyond the myth of venting: Social sharing modes determine the benefits of emotional disclosure

When individuals experience an emotion, they talk about it afterwards. A popular ‘emotional venting’ belief claims that doing so dissolves the emotional impact. This study tested a model of when and how sharing emotions is beneficial. It predicts that benefits vary according to the listener's response mode. A socio‐affective (empathic) mode was expected to buffer emotional distress temporarily. A cognitive (reframing) mode was anticipated to grant emotional recovery. Participants viewed an aversive film and then talked about it with an intimate. The latter was instructed to adopt either cognitive or socio‐affective response modes in a 2 × 2 design (cognitive/non‐cognitive; socio‐affective/neutral). Emotional, cognitive and social benefits were assessed immediately afterwards and again 2 days later following re‐exposure to the film. As predicted, emotional recovery occurred exclusively when the listener stimulated the participant's cognitive work. Cognitive variables (basic assumptions) were also positively modified by these conditions. Listeners' socio‐affective responses entailed enhanced social integration (i.e. greater proximity to the listener; less loneliness) and an impression of feeling better. These results demonstrated that sharing emotions can lead to multiple benefits depending upon the listeners' response modes: emotional recovery, consolidation of shattered assumptions, social integration and temporary distress reduction. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

"If only…": when counterfactual thoughts can reduce illusions of personal authorship

Illusions of personal authorship can arise when causation for an event is ambiguous, but people mentally represent an anticipated outcome and then observe a corresponding match in reality. When people do not maintain such high-level outcome representations and focus instead on low-level behavioral representations of concrete actions, illusions of personal authorship can be reduced. One condition that yields specific action plans and thereby moves focus from high-level outcomes to low-level actions is the generation of counterfactual thoughts. Hence, in the present research we tested whether thinking counterfactually can reduce illusory authorship. In line with predictions, generating behavior-regulating counterfactuals reduced susceptibility to the illusion (Study 1). Importantly, this only occurred when people expected to re-encounter the situation to which the counterfactuals applied (Study 2). These findings extend existing research on the boundary conditions of illusory experiences of personal authorship and might hint at a relationship between the illusion and behavior regulation.     

Procedural learning of unstructured categories

Unstructured categories are those in which the stimuli are assigned to each contrasting category randomly, and thus there is no rule- or similarity-based strategy for determining category membership. Intuition suggests that unstructured categories are likely to be learned via explicit memorization that is under the control of declarative memory. In contrast to this prediction, neuroimaging studies of unstructured-category learning have reported task-related activation in the striatum, but typically not in the hippocampus—results that seem more consistent with procedural learning than with a declarative-memory strategy. This article reports the first known behavioral test of whether unstructured-category learning is mediated by explicit strategies or by procedural learning. Our results suggest that the feedback-based learning of unstructured categories is mediated by procedural memory.     

The Future Fate of Suicide Attempters

A review is made of studies of suicide attempters in which there was a personal follow-up examination. Two studies by the author are presented: suicide attempters admitted to a psychiatric clinic and suicide attempters admitted to a traditional psychiatric hospital. The committed suicide rate among the hospital cases was three to six times higher than in the clinic cases (6.8 percent versus 1.4 to 2.8 percent). In the hospital material, 28 percent of the subjects had repeated the attempt without lethal outcome compared to 14 percent of the clinic cases. A correlation with the higher incidence of psychosis in the mental hospital cases is suggested.     

Climate Refugees,Demandingness and Kagan’s Conditional

Res Publica - In the years to come, a great number of people are going to be displaced due to climate change. Climate refugees are going to migrate to find somewhere more hospitable to live. In...     

Proof-Theoretic Semantics,a Problem with Negation and Prospects for Modality

This paper discusses proof-theoretic semantics, the project of specifying the meanings of the logical constants in terms of rules of inference governing them. I concentrate on Michael Dummett’s and Dag Prawitz’ philosophical motivations and give precise characterisations of the crucial notions of harmony and stability, placed in the context of proving normalisation results in systems of natural deduction. I point out a problem for defining the meaning of negation in this framework and prospects for an account of the meanings of modal operators in terms of rules of inference.