The Effect of a Brief Mindfulness Training on Distress Tolerance and Stress Reactivity

Poor distress tolerance (DT) is considered an underlying facet of anxiety, depression, and a number of other psychological disorders. Mindfulness may help to increase DT by fostering an attitude of acceptance or nonjudgment toward distressing experiences. Accordingly, the present study examined the effects of a brief mindfulness training on tolerance of different types of distress, and tested whether trait mindfulness moderates the effect of such training. Undergraduates (n = 107) naïve to mindfulness completed a measure of trait mindfulness and underwent a series of stress tasks (cold pressor, hyperventilation challenge, neutralization task) before and after completing a 15-minute mindfulness training or a no-instruction control in which participants listened to relaxing music. Participants in the mindfulness condition demonstrated greater task persistence on the hyperventilation task compared to the control group, as well as a decreased urge to neutralize the effects of writing an upsetting sentence. No effect on distress ratings during the tasks were found. Overall trait mindfulness did not significantly moderate task persistence, but those with lower scores on the act with awareness facet of mindfulness demonstrated greater relative benefit of mindfulness training on the hyperventilation challenge. Mediation analyses revealed significant indirect effects of mindfulness training on cold pressor task persistence and urges to neutralize through the use of the nonjudge and nonreact facets of mindfulness. These results suggest that a brief mindfulness training can increase DT without affecting the subjective experience of distress.     

Helping to reduce fights before flights: How environmental stressors in organizations shape customer emotions and customer–employee interactions

Previous examinations of environmental stressors in organizations have mostly emphasized their dysfunctional effects on individuals’ emotions and behaviors. Extending this work by drawing from the social functional perspective on emotion, we propose that customers’ negative emotional responses to environmental stressors in organizations can exert both dysfunctional and functional effects on customer–employee interactions. Specifically, we theorize that situational and physiological forms of environmental stressors can be dysfunctional by incurring customer anger, precipitating customer aggression, and diminishing employee helpfulness. We further theorize that situational relative to physiological stressors can exert functional effects in inducing customer fear that elicits empathy and helpfulness from employees. We test our model via an archival, observational, and critical incident yoked experimental study set in the airport context. This research contributes to stress theory and its organizational application by integrating theory from the social functional approach to emotion with appraisal-based theories of stress in organizations.     

Temporary Safety Hazards

The Epistemic Objection says that certain theories of time (like the “growing block” and “moving spotlight”) imply that it is impossible to know which time is absolutely present. Standard presentations of the Epistemic Objection are elliptical—and some of the most natural premises one might fill in to complete the argument end up leading to radical skepticism. But there is a way of filling in the details which avoids this problem, using epistemic safety. The new version has two interesting upshots. First, while Ross Cameron alleges that the Epistemic Objection applies to presentism as much as to theories like the growing block, the safety version does not overgeneralize this way. Second, the Epistemic Objection does generalize in a different, overlooked way. The safety objection is a serious problem for a widely held combination of views: “propositional temporalism” (objects of belief change truth‐value) together with “metaphysical eternalism” (the world does not objectively privilege any particular time).     

Agonistic character displacement in social cognition of advertisement signals

Interspecific aggression between sibling species may enhance discrimination of competitors when recognition errors are costly, but proximate mechanisms mediating increased discriminative ability are unclear. We studied behavioral and neural mechanisms underlying responses to conspecific and heterospecific vocalizations in Alston’s singing mouse (Scotinomys teguina), a species in which males sing to repel rivals. We performed playback experiments using males in allopatry and sympatry with a dominant heterospecific (Scotinomys xerampelinus) and examined song-evoked induction of egr-1 in the auditory system to examine how neural tuning modulates species-specific responses. Heterospecific songs elicited stronger neural responses in sympatry than in allopatry, despite eliciting less singing in sympatry. Our results refute the traditional neuroethological concept of a matched filter and instead suggest expansion of sensory sensitivity to mediate competitor recognition in sympatry.     

Anti-Individualism, Content Preservation, and Discursive Justification

Most explorations of the epistemic implications of Semantic Anti‐Individualism (SAI) focus on issues of self‐knowledge (first‐person authority) and/or external‐world skepticism. Less explored has been SAI's implications for the epistemology of reasoning. In this paper I argue that SAI has some nontrivial implications on this score. I bring these out by reflecting on a problem first raised by Boghossian (1992) . Whereas Boghossian's main interest was in establishing the incompatibility of SAI and “the a priority of logical abilities” ( Boghossian 1992 : 22), I argue that Boghossian's argument is better interpreted as pointing to SAI's implications for the nature of discursive justification.     

Anti‐reductionism and Expected Trust

According to anti‐reductionism, audiences have a default (but defeasible) epistemic entitlement to accept observed testimony. This paper explores the prospects of arguing from this premise to a conclusion in ethics, to the effect that speakers enjoy a default (but defeasible) moral entitlement to expect to be trusted when they testify. After proposing what I regard as the best attempt to link the two, I conclude that any argument from the one to the other will depend on a strong epistemological assumption that has not yet been discussed in this connection.     

Evaluation of a preventive intervention for a self-selected subpopulation of children

Evaluated an experimental preventive intervention developed for children who perceived their parents as problem drinkers. The 8-session program was designed to improve children's coping, self-esteem, and social competence, and modify alcohol expectancies which were specified as mediators of the effects of parental alcohol abuse on child mental health. Participants were 271 self-selected 4th-, 5th-, and 6th-grade students in 13 schools. The children were randomly assigned to treatment or delayed treatment conditions and the program was given to three successive cohorts of students. A meta-analysis across three different cohorts indicated significant program effects to improve knowledge of the program content and the use of support- and emotion-focused coping behaviors for the full sample. A slightly stronger range of effects was found for a high-risk subsample. This research was funded by the National Institute of Mental Health Grant P50-MH39246 to support a Preventive Intervention Research Center and Prevention Training Grant T32-MH18387-02.     

Moral Development and Higher States of Consciousness

This paper discusses possible relationships between the cognitive–moral development theory of Lawrence Kohlberg and Charles Alexander's life-span model. Central to Alexander's model is the role which levels of mind and higher states of consciousness play throughout the general periods of development. Parallel to Kohlberg's cosmic perspective Stage 7—which goes beyond the representational logic and reasoning identified by Piaget's highest stage—are the postrepresentational stages of development, described by Vedic psychology and Alexander's model as "higher states of consciousness"—transcendental consciousness, cosmic consciousness, God consciousness, and unity consciousness. Research indicates that EEG brainwave coherence is associated with the development of higher states of consciousness and Kohlberg's Stage 7. Studies on the Transcendental Meditation (TM) and TM-Sidhi programs as effective technologies for promoting moral development are further discussed.