A Golden Lever for Politics: Feminist Emotion and Women's Agency

Pervasive feminism is a component located in emotionality—feminist emotion—and contains women's primary agency. Because affect and emotions are elusive, an interpretive conceptual tool is necessary and is key to making use of their potential for feminist politics aimed at women's empowerment and well‐being and to build gender equality. This essay builds on contemporary feminist theory and affect theory and draws from multidisciplinary research. It presents a new theoretical framework anchored in hermeneutics and phenomenology to pin down the affective component of women's multifaceted, intersectional emotional experiences of gender. A case study also illustrates how the theoretical premises around the concept of feminist emotion are compatible with and useful for feminist praxis.     

The Syzygy,Reformulation and New Perspectives: Dreams,Anima-Animus and Gender1

The main objective of this qualitative and quantitative research paper is to explore the occurrences and relations of the anima, animus and androgynous in dreams, with particular emphasis on the consideration of the androgynous in the human psyche. The sample consists of 9 series of dreams (141 dreams in total), from 9 dreamers, 7 women (female sex/gender) and 2 men (male sex/gender), aged 25–57, heterosexual, undergoing Jungian psychotherapy, and presenting couple-related themes. Statistical results and qualitative analysis offer new input for the re-vision of the classical anima-animus model, and the addition of in-depth explorations into the androgynous, paving the way for a new model of psychopathology and psychotherapeutic clinical work, in transition.     

A Follow-Up Study of a Reminiscence Intervention and Its Effects on Depressed Mood,Life Satisfaction,and Well-Being in the Elderly

The purpose of this study was to investigate the extent to which a reminiscence intervention reduces depressed mood and improves life satisfaction and psychological well-being. 160 healthy elderly people participated in a 10-session intervention. An experimental design with pretest and posttest evaluations was applied, comparing a control group to an intervention group to evaluate the effects of the program. Follow-up measures were also taken to find out whether the intervention's positive effects lasted over time. Mixed Model ANOVAs showed significant increases in the time-group interaction, life satisfaction, and psychological well-being measures, and decreases in depressed mood, after treatment. The effects remained after three months in the case of life satisfaction and some dimensions of psychological well-being, but they were lower on depressed mood. This study provides additional support for the effectiveness of a reminiscence program as a useful intervention to improve the quality of life of older adults.     

“I was and still am”: Narratives of Bisexual Marking in the #StillBisexual Campaign

This research investigated narratives of bi-erasure and bisexual marking by considering 53 video confessionals associated with the #StillBisexual campaign. #StillBisexual is a web-based campaign that targets myths about bisexuality and promotes bisexual identity visibility. Thematic analysis was conducted to identify emergent themes regarding the ways that individuals mark and make known their bisexuality. Three major themes of bisexual demarcation emerged including the enduring nature of bisexuality, defining bisexuality, and defining the self as a bisexual being. Discussion focuses on describing bisexual marking approaches by #StillBisexual participants and by analyzing the way bisexual demarcation challenges assumptions of monosexism and cisgenderism inherent to cultural conceptualizations of sexuality.     

Clustering and switching in unconstrained,phonemic and semantic verbal fluency: the role of age and school type

We investigated the role of age and school type on clustering and switching in verbal fluency tasks (VFTs) with Brazilian children. The children were administered unconstrained, phonemic and semantic VFTs with a duration of 150 or 120 s, respectively. Both age and school type influenced all variables and in terms of performance over time. Older children and private school students outperformed the remainder of the sample, with the first 30 s of each VFT usually being the most productive. Although the size of the clusters produced did not differ between groups, the types of clusters did show some variations, with semantic clusters being the most frequent. Our results revealed strong correlations between switching ability and word production in all three VFTs. In conclusion, the executive functions known as planning and cognitive flexibility play a crucial role in word production by organising and facilitating the recall of lexical information from memory.     

Forgiveness: a China-Western Europe comparison

The authors assessed forgiveness among Chinese (n=738) and Western European (n=810) participants using the Forgivingness Questionnaire (E. Mullet et al., 2003). They found that between the 2 samples, (a) the overall level of dispositional forgiveness was similar, (b) lasting resentment was higher among the Chinese than among the Western Europeans, and (c) sensitivity to the circumstances of the offense was higher among the Chinese than among the Western Europeans. These results contrast with what researchers have observed in previous studies in which forgiveness has been shown to be systematically higher in collectivistic cultures than in individualistic cultures. The authors suggest that there are possibly many other differences across cultures, namely in religion, that may impact views of forgiveness.     

On the Measurement of Implicative Dilemmas

The implicative dilemma (ID) is gradually receiving attention of clinical psychologists and researchers. Although research on its clinical relevance is promising, there are still some issues regarding its measurement that need further consideration. This article explores the adequacy of the different thresholds used to determine construct association, the efficacy of the different indices commonly used to measure IDs, and a verification of the ID not being a mere subproduct of the self-ideal distance. It also introduces a new index. Finally, guidelines are provided for practitioners on how to interpret the indices' numerical results in relation to major depression.     

Undifferentiation of somatic responses to emotions in a case of functional amnesia

The term functional amnesia (FA) has been proposed for cases of memory impairment presenting with severe retrograde amnesia in the absence of cerebral injury or history of psychiatric disturbance. Emotional flattening has often been reported alongside FA, however the mechanism of such a modification is unknown. This study aimed to explore the emotional processing in a rare case of a patient with FA complaining of severe emotional flattening. We presented ecological dynamic video stimuli conveying strong peaceful and fearful emotions to the patient and 13 controls. We then explored their emotional responses considering both conscious emotional judgements and automatic psychophysiological responses (skin conductance) and facial muscular activity (corrugator supercilii). Both patient P.P. and controls perfectly recognized the emotions conveyed by the films. However, P.P. failed to show an increased skin conductance and corrugator activity as found in controls during fearful film extracts compared with peaceful extracts. Taken together, these finding demonstrate the presence of an emotional deficit, characterized by a failure to generate appropriate somatic responses to positive and negative stimuli. Although this altered somatic processing did not interfere with PP's explicit recognition of emotion, it modified his emotional experience, thereby constituting a possible explanation for his emotional flattening. This study therefore suggests that FA is not limited to a mnemonic impairment, but is a more complex disorder, involving also the processing of emotionally loaded experiences.