Disappointment expression evokes collective guilt and collective action in intergroup conflict: the moderating role of legitimacy perceptions

Research on intergroup emotions has largely focused on the experience of emotions and surprisingly little attention has been given to the expression of emotions. Drawing on the social-functional approach to emotions, we argue that in the context of intergroup conflicts, outgroup members’ expression of disappointment with one’s ingroup induces the complementary emotion of collective guilt and correspondingly a collective action protesting ingroup actions against the outgroup. In Study 1 conducted immediately after the 2014 Gaza war, Jewish-Israeli participants received information about outgroup’s (Palestinians) expression of emotions (disappointment, fear, or none). As predicted, outgroup’s expression of disappointment increased collective guilt and willingness to participate in collective action, but only among those who saw the intergroup situation as illegitimate. Moreover, collective guilt mediated the relationship between disappointment expression and collective action, moderated, again, by legitimacy perception. In Study 2, we replicated these results in the context of racial tension between Black and White Americans in the US. We discuss the theoretical and applied implications of the findings.     

The role of learning in social development: Illustrations from neglected children

Children who experience early caregiving neglect are very likely to have problems developing and maintaining relationships and regulating their social behavior. One of the earliest manifestations of this problem is reflected in indiscriminate behavior, a phenomenon where young children do not show normative wariness of strangers or use familiar adults as sources of security. To better understand the developmental mechanisms underlying the emergence of these problems, this study examined whether institutionally reared children, who experienced early social neglect, had difficulty associating motivational significance to visual stimuli. Pairing stimuli with motivational significance is presumably one of the associative learning processes involved in establishing discriminate or selective relationships with others. We found that early experiences of neglectful caregiving were associated with difficulties in acquiring such associations, and that delays in this developmental skill were related to children's social difficulties. These data suggest a way in which early social learning experiences may impact the development of processes underlying emotional development.     

The Real Guide to Fake Barns: A Catalogue of Gifts for Your Epistemic Enemies

Perhaps the concept of knowledge, prior to its being fashioned and molded by certain philosophical traditions, never offered any stable negative verdict in the original fake barn case.     

Handwriting in patients with Parkinson disease: effect of L-dopa and stimulation of the sub-thalamic nucleus on motor anticipation

The present research focused on how patients with Parkinson’s disease (PD) produce handwriting sequences. PD patients who were on/off medication or deep brain stimulation treatments had to write lll and lln trigrams. We evaluated their ability to anticipate on-line the last letter in the trigram. The results revealed that in PD patients, contrary to healthy participants, the percentage of time taken by the down-stroke of the second l did not vary as a function of the spatial constraints of the following letter (l or n). In other words, the handwriting of the PD patients did not exhibit any sign of motor anticipation. However, under treatment, PD patients exhibited similar results to healthy participants despite no improvement in movement variability. Taken together these results do not seem consistent with the hypothesis that PD patients do not anticipate future movements because of their movement variability. They are more in agreement with theories that postulate that PD patients have a general deficit in the parallel processing of the components of a motor sequence.     

A Calculus of Regions Respecting Both Measure and Topology

Journal of Philosophical Logic - Say that space is ‘gunky’ if every part of space has a proper part. Traditional theories of gunk, dating back to the work of Whitehead in the early part...     

Screening for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder: an evaluation of two self-report scales among crime victims

The validity of the Impact of Events Scale (IES) and the Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) Symptom Scale, Self-Report version (PSS-SR) was examined among crime victims. Both instruments performed well as screeners for PTSD. For the IES, sensitivity ranged between .93 and 1.00; for the PSS-SR, sensitivity ranged between .80 and .90. Specificity for the IES ranged between .78 and .84 and for the PSS-SR ranged between .84 and .88. Some individual items from the 2 scales performed just as well as the total scales. The authors conclude that either of these short self-report instruments or their individual items are suitable as screeners for PTSD, specifically in settings where mental health professionals are unavailable. Cross-validation of these results is necessary because of the small sample size in this study.     

Two Routes to Grammatical Gender: Evidence from Hebrew

Access to grammatical gender in Hebrew was examined using gender decisions and grammaticality judgments. In gender decisions, and in rejecting agreement violations, the role of gender-marking regularity was robust; irregular feminine nouns were classified more slowly and produced more errors than did regular masculine nouns. These same exception nouns, however, produced radically different results when they appeared as part of a grammatical phrase. In this context, irregular nouns were processed as quickly and accurately as were regular nouns. These findings are interpreted within a model containing two routes to grammatical gender: one that involves an abstract gender node, and another that is form-based and is assumed to play a greater role in recovery from agreement errors. We also argue that there are cross-linguistic variations in the availability and speed of the form-based route to gender. Finally, we caution that under some circumstances grammatical gender may also be retrieved through a variety of heuristics that do not necessarily reflect the normal mechanisms of access to gender.     

Conclusive Reasons and Epistemic Luck

What is it to have conclusive reasons to believe a proposition P? According to a view famously defended by Dretske, a reason R is conclusive for P just in case [R would not be the case unless P were the case]. I argue that, while knowing that P is plausibly related to having conclusive reasons to believe that P, having such reasons cannot be understood in terms of the truth of this counterfactual condition. Simple examples show that it is possible to believe P on the basis of reasons that satisfy the counterfactual, and still get things right about P only as a matter of luck. Seeing where this account of conclusive reasons goes wrong points to an important distinction between having conclusive reasons and relying on reasons that are in point of fact conclusive. It also has wider consequences for whether modal principles like sensitivity and safety can rule out the pernicious kind of epistemic luck, or the kind of luck that interferes with knowledge.     

Functional connectivity dynamics during film viewing reveal common networks for different emotional experiences

Recent theoretical and empirical work has highlighted the role of domain-general, large-scale brain networks in generating emotional experiences. These networks are hypothesized to process aspects of emotional experiences that are not unique to a specific emotional category (e.g., “sadness,” “happiness”), but rather that generalize across categories. In this article, we examined the dynamic interactions (i.e., changing cohesiveness) between specific domain-general networks across time while participants experienced various instances of sadness, fear, and anger. We used a novel method for probing the network connectivity dynamics between two salience networks and three amygdala-based networks. We hypothesized, and found, that the functional connectivity between these networks covaried with the intensity of different emotional experiences. Stronger connectivity between the dorsal salience network and the medial amygdala network was associated with more intense ratings of emotional experience across six different instances of the three emotion categories examined. Also, stronger connectivity between the dorsal salience network and the ventrolateral amygdala network was associated with more intense ratings of emotional experience across five out of the six different instances. Our findings demonstrate that a variety of emotional experiences are associated with dynamic interactions of domain-general neural systems.     

Shared Traumatic Reality and Boundary Theory: How Mental Health Professionals Cope With the Home/Work Conflict During Continuous Security Threats

ABSTRACT

In a shared traumatic reality, mental health professionals and their clients are exposed to the same communal disaster. Both living and working in the same high-stress community can create a conflict between the professional's work and his or her private life. The author analyzed three focus groups consisting of 30 mental health professionals who worked with traumatized populations in a missile-stricken area in southern Israel. The professionals’ experience was explored through the lens of boundary theory by examining the ways in which they created and maintained boundaries between the different domains of their lives. Findings demonstrated that these professionals presented a continuum of segmentation and integration of the domains as suggested by boundary theory, when both living and working in a highly stressed environment. The discussion deals with possible costs and benefits of the boundary theory continuum.