Ropressive Coping Style and the Experience and Recall of Emotion: A Naturalistic Study of Daily Affect

ABSTRACT Research shows that people characterized as repressors display inhibited recall for unpleasant memories. In this study, the relationship between repressive coping style and the recall of affect near the time of the experience was compared to delayed recall. An experience sampling technique was used to collect affect data twice daily for 4 weeks. Repressive coping style was found to be related to low levels of average daily unpleasant affect and lowered delayed recall of unpleasant affect. Unlike repressors, high anxious individuals overestimated unpleasant affect during delayed recall. Repressors did not exhibit isolation of the dominant unpleasant affect from nondominant unpleasant affect in daily reporting. The overall pattern of results suggests that the effect of repressive coping style is to diminish the encoding of all unpleasant affect, whereas trait anxiety appears to promote overestimation in the recall of unpleasant affect.     

Do Promise Keepers Dream of Feminist Sheep?

This article describes a qualitative researchstudy of Promise Keeper fathers. Twenty-two middleclass, primarily White suburban fathers were interviewedin focus groups abouttheir fathering experiences. The grounded theory analysis found that the menwere experiencing gender role strain as they tried toconform to traditional masculine role norms. The PromiseKeeper movement provided them with an ideology and social supportsystem that facilitated theirbecoming more involved fathers, while simultaneouslyreassuring them that they were the leaders of theirfamilies. Using these supports, the men were able to construct a more personally gratifyingfatherhood identity. These results suggest a possibleinterpretation of why the Promise Keeper movement hasappealed to more men than has the pro-feminist men's movement.     

Illusory displacement of a moving trace with respect to the grid during oscilloscope motion

Observers report that a trace streak, which follows a sinusoidal path, moves vertically with respect to the oscilloscope’s grid when an oscilloscope is oscillated in the vertical plane. The vertical component of the trace streak motion with respect to the grid is illusory. This illusion is stable across a limited range of illumination and physical motion conditions. We hypothesize that this illusion is based on the manner in which the visual system calculates the vertical location of the grid and the trace: the trace location is determined on a moment-to-moment basis, whereas the grid tends to be seen in its average vertical position. The results of two experiments indicate that this hypothesis can account, at least partially, for the illusion. The illusion may have practical implications for pilots or navigators who track target blips on radar screens in moving aircraft.     

Eye movement in perception of another person's looking behavior.

Eye contact is a non-verbal behavior category of major concern in the study of social interaction. Within this category many behaviors are included which serve a wide range of functions. It was hypothesied that (1) one of the important stimulus properties that distinguish these behaviors is the movement pattern of the eye and (2) that people use different criteria to judge whether another person is looking at them, depending upon whether the other person is displaying a dynamic or static eye presentation. Data are presented to support these hypotheses.     

The assessment of empathy in early childhood

In much of the literature on empathy in young children, researchers have assessed empathy with the FASTE (Feshbach and Roe Affective Situations Test for Empathy). Consequently, much of the literature on early affective responsiveness and the role of empathy in prosocial development is dependent on the validity of the FASTE. However, examination of the literature on gender differences in young children's empathy has suggested a methodological flaw in picture/story techniques such as the FASTE; children's responses to these instruments appear to vary as a function of the interaction of sex of experimenter with sex of subject. In the present study, we empirically examined the effects of sex of experimenter on children's responses to the FASTE. Eighty preschool children were randomly assigned by sex to four male and four female experimenters and were administered the FASTE. Children scored higher when interviewed by a same-sex experimenter, especially if only the stories that the children comprehended (the happy/sad episodes, not the anger or fear episodes) were examined. The implications of the findings for interpreting the literature on children's empathy (especially gender differences in empathy) are discussed.     

Depression,restraint and eating behavior

Contrary to the belief that weight loss is a principal symptom of depression, several recent studies have suggested that certain people gain rather than lose weight when depressed. The present experiment concerned the effects of experimentally induced mood states on the eating behavior of high- and low-restraint persons. Sixty-eight female undergraduates were randomly assigned to one of three groups each designed to induce a different mood state (depressed, neutral or elated), and were classified as high or low restraint based on their responses to a questionnaire. During the mood induction procedure subjects were provided with the opportunity to eat. High-restraint persons induced into a depressed mood ate significantly more than high-restraint persons induced into neutral or elated moods, and more than low-restraint persons induced into a depressed mood. This effect was most prominent among subjects who scored high on the weight-fluctuation factor of the restraint scale. There was no evidence that this effect occurred among subjects who scored high on the concern for dieting factor. The role of emotional arousal on the self-control over eating behavior of high weight-fluctuation persons, and the implications of these findings for the evaluation of depression were discussed.     

Effects of instructions and biofeedback on EEG-alpha production and the effects of EEG-alpha biofeedback training for controlling arousal in a subsequent stressful situation

In Phase One, 44 subjects participated in a 2 (instructions to increase alpha, no instructions to increase alpha) × 2 (alpha biofeedback, no alpha biofeedback) factorial experiment. Results indicated that increases in alpha production were due to instructions to increase alpha and that biofeedback had no effect on alpha production. In Phase Two, the 44 subjects from Phase One were exposed to a threat of shock whereas 11 additional subjects in a control condition were not. The design employed in Phase Two was a 2 (previous instructions and stress, no previous instructions and stress) × 2 (previous biofeedback and stress, no previous biofeedback and stress) plus 1 (no previous instructions/no previous biofeedback, no stress). Results indicated that the threat of shock was effective in increasing arousal (as measured by heart rate and skin resistance) but previous EEG-alpha biofeedback training was not effective in helping subjects decrease arousal while in the stressful situation. The results indicate that it is the instructions (and related information concerning alpha) rather than the biofeedback that is critical in alpha biofeedback training and that this training does not appear to have utility for controlling arousal under stress.     

Conditions on rate normalization in speech perception

Recent work by Summerfield (1975) and others indicates that a listener’s phonemic judgments may vary with the utterance rate of prior context. In particular, if a phonemic distinction is signaled by a temporal cue such as voice onset time (VOT), faster utterance rates tend to shift the phoneme boundary toward smaller values of that cue. The listener thus appears to “normalize” temporal cues according to utterance rate. In the present experiment, subjects identified syllables varying in VOT ([ga]-[k^ha]) following either a slow or a fast version of the phrase “Teddy hears_ _ _ _ .” Typical normalization effects were observed when the precursor phrase and target syllable had formant frequencies corresponding to an adult male vocal tract. However, a reversal of the typical pattern (i.e., a shift in the perceived voicing boundary towardlarger values of VOT with an increased utterance rate) occurred when the precursor and target had formant frequencies corresponding to an adult female vocal tract. Both normalization and “reverse” normalization effects were reduced or eliminated under several conditions of source change between precursor and target. These conditions included a change in fundamental frequency, a change in implied vocal-tract size (as reflected in an upward or downward scaling of formant frequencies), or both.