Emotion Regulation and the Quality of Social Interaction: Does the Ability to Evaluate Emotional Situations and Identify Effective Responses Matter?

We examined self and friends' ratings of social relationship quality and everyday social interactions in 3 studies involving 544 college students in Germany, Spain, and the United States. Scores on a situational judgment test measuring strategic emotion regulation ability (SERA) were negatively related to conflict with others. SERA was more consistently and strongly related to conflict with others than to the positive dimension of relationship quality (support, companionship, and nurturance). The relationship between SERA and conflict was generally not mediated by trait positive or negative affect, and it remained significant or marginally significant controlling for the Big Five personality traits. These findings highlight the importance of the ability to evaluate emotional situations and identify effective responses to these in interpersonal emotion regulation. Furthermore, they suggest that situational judgment and flexible response selection may help people to manage conflicts more than to bond with others.     

(How) does positive and negative extended cross‐group contact predict direct cross‐group contact and intergroup attitudes?

Knowing that fellow ingroup members have cross‐group contact can affect how people think, feel, and behave towards an out‐group. Previous research on extended contact focused almost exclusively on positive cross‐group interactions, neglecting the fact that extended contact can also be negative. In this contribution, we introduce negative extended contact and investigate how both forms of extended contact predict direct cross‐group contact and intergroup attitudes. In two cross‐sectional studies (N₁ = 286, N₂ = 237), we found evidence that positive and negative extended contact uniquely predict intergroup attitudes, and that direct cross‐group contact mediates this effect. In Study 2 , we also provide initial evidence that extended contact might either prepare for or impair direct contact by changing ingroup norms and intergroup self‐efficacy, which in turn influence feelings of intergroup anxiety.     

Truthmaker Theory without Truthmakers

Truthmaking without truthmakers (TWT, for short) is the thesis that although every true proposition is made true by reality, there need not be particular entities (like facts, states of affairs, or tropes) that make these propositions true. The first substantial part of this paper (section 2) is devoted to developing a particular version of TWT and at the same time defending TWT in general from arguments against it that have been advanced by orthodox truthmaker theorists. In the second part of the paper (section 3) I argue that talk about truthmakers within the theory can be understood as metaphoric and as conveying valuable information about something other than the supposed truthmakers: about truthmaking. The aim of this paper is therefore twofold. On the one hand, I intend to present the view on truthmaking, a version of TWT, that I find most plausible in the light of the arguments for and against truthmaker theory. On the other hand, I argue that friends of TWT have good reason to adopt a figuralist approach to truthmaker theory, rather than rejecting it outright.     

It's not that bad: Social challenges to emotional disclosure enhance adjustment to stress

Studies conducted in the United States (n=115) and Spain (n=146) examined how talking about an acute stressor in different social contexts influences cognitive, emotional, and physiological adjustment. In both studies, female college students viewed a video dramatizing a real-life, gang rape scene on two separate days. After the first viewing, participants were randomly assigned to one of four social conditions: no talk, talk alone about their reactions, talk to a validating confederate about their reactions, or talk to a challenging confederate about their reactions. Participants in the challenge condition showed the greatest emotional, cognitive, and physiological benefits across cultures, whereas participants in the validate and talk conditions evidenced only modest benefits. These findings suggest that the social context of disclosure has a strong influence on adjustment processes and that providing an alternative and more sanguine perspective can help individuals recover from acute stressors.     

How Coincidence Bears on Persistence

The ‘paradoxes of coincidence’ are generally taken as an important factor for deciding between rival views on persistence through time. In particular, the ability to deal with apparent cases of temporary coincidence is usually regarded as a good reason for favouring perdurantism (or ‘four-dimensionalism’) over endurantism (or ‘three-dimensionalism’). However, the recent work of Gilmore (2007) and McGrath (2007) challenges this standard view. For different reasons, both Gilmore and McGrath conclude that perdurantism does not really obtain support from the puzzles of temporary coincidence. In this paper, I will evaluate their arguments and defend the opposite view: that the paradoxes of coincidence do give some support to perdurantism. However, the way in which they do so is rather unexpected. As we will see, there are different ways in which coincidence scenarios may be thought to support perdurantism, some of which have not yet been sufficiently explored. Thus, my immediate goal is to explore one of those directions, bringing into focus a new argument from coincidence to perdurantism. And although I motivate my discussion by examining the arguments in the work of Gilmore and McGrath, the merits of this argument can be independently assessed. More generally, my overall purpose is to contribute to our general understanding of how the topics of coincidence and persistence bear on each other.     

Psychometric properties of the Interpersonal Reactivity Index in Spanish child and adolescent population

This article analyses the dimensions of the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI; Davis, 1980). The sample comprised 721 Spanish participants between 9 and 16 years old. Diverse exploratory factor analyses were conducted as the basis for the final confirmatory factor analysis, through self-report. The results supported a structure with 5 first-order main factors (Intellectual empathy, Positive emotional empathy, Disorganized emotional empathy, Virtual empathy, and Impassiveness), where the two first factors are nested in a second-order dimension: "Considerate Social Style". The psychometric characteristics of the instrument were adequate. The proposed model is a new alternative to conceptualize the factor structure of empathy.     

Emotional valence modulates the preference for curved objects

Previous studies have shown that people prefer objects with curved contours over objects with sharp contours. However, those studies used stimuli that were mainly neutral in emotional valence. We tested here the interplay between visual features and general valence as positive or negative. After replicating curvature preferences for neutral objects, we used positive (cake, chocolate) and negative (snake, bomb) stimuli to examine if emotional valence-through response prioritisation-modulates the preference for curved objects. We found that people indeed preferred the curved versions of objects to the sharp versions of the same objects, but only if the objects were neutral or positive in emotional valence. There were no difference in liking for objects with negative emotional valence. This is evidence that the aesthetic response is adaptive, in this case prioritising valence over contour as demanded by the general semantic classification.     

Factor structure and longitudinal invariance of the Medical Adherence Report Scale-Asthma

Adequate assessment of adherence to medical treatment is critical for both research purposes and clinical practice. This study examined the factor structure and longitudinal invariance of the Medication Adherence Report Scale (MARS-A10) in a sample of asthmatic patients. We examined longitudinal data from 294 inner-city, adult participants with moderate to severe asthma. Because of ambiguous evidence regarding the dimensionality of the MARS-A10, the data was analysed with exploratory structural equation modelling. We first proceeded by determining the dimensionality of the scale at baseline and examined whether the structure, loadings, intercepts and errors were invariant over the four assessments points. Results indicated that a two-factor structure (factor 1: non-adherence based on experiential changes; factor 2: non-adherence based on intentional medication avoidance) had the best fit to the data (χ(2)(25)=37.69, p=0.05). Longitudinal analyses revealed that the nine items assessing intentional non-adherence were invariant over time. The evidence from the factor analysis suggests that intentional non-adherence is a multidimensional construct. Additionally, longitudinal data provided strong evidence that the items examining intentional non-adherence are invariant over time, indicating that changes in non-adherence scores can be validly attributed to changes in behaviour.     

Decision making cognition in primary progressive aphasia

We sought to investigate the decision making profile of Primary Progressive Aphasia (PPA) by assessing patients diagnosed with this disease (n = 10), patients diagnosed with behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD, n = 35), and matched controls (n = 14) using the Iowa Gambling Task, a widely used test that mimics real-life decision making. Participants were also evaluated with a complete neuropsychological battery. Patients with PPA were unable to adopt an advantageous strategy on the IGT, which resulted in a flat performance, different to that exhibited by both controls (who showed advantageous decision making) and bvFTD patients (who showed risk-appetitive behavior). The decision making profile of PPA patients was not associated with performance on language tasks and did not differ between sub-variants of the disease (namely, semantic dementia and progressive nonfluent aphasia). Investigating decision making in PPA is crucial both from a theoretical perspective, as it can shed light about the way in which language interacts with other cognitive functions, as well as a clinical standpoint, as it could lead to a more objective detection of impairments of decision making deficits in this condition.