Prayer as Therapeutic Process Toward Aliveness Within a Spiritual Direction Relationship

This article underscores the potential benefit of a specific form of Christian prayer that creates space within a spiritual direction relationship for the creation of inner images that reveal a person’s unconscious relational longings and co-created representations of God. In this specific type of prayer that can be facilitated by mental health professionals and pastoral counselors, imagery of God’s presence is created in the space between a Christian spiritual director and a Christian directee while they are open to inner experiences that reveal God’s presence interacting with infantile processes toward aliveness. Aliveness is understood using Winnicottian notions in dialog with theories proposed by Allan N. Schore, affective neuropsychologist and Clinical Faculty at UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine, Ann Belford Ulanov, Jungian Analyst and Professor of Psychiatry and Religion at Union Theological Seminary and W.R.D., British psychoanalyst in the Objects Relations School. Ideas of transitional space, good enough mother, holding environment, aggression, creativity, and play are set alongside theories of affect regulation, the developing brain, co-created objective God images, the relational nature of God and being received as good while illuminating three prayer experiences during one 30-year-old Asian American woman’s 16-month therapeutic process toward aliveness.

Need for Cognition and Affective Orientation as Predictors of Sales Performance: An Investigation of Main and Interaction Effects

Two constructs—need for cognition (NFC) and affective orientation (AO)—might be helpful in explaining and ultimately predicting two measures of sales performance: a self-rated behavioral measure and an objective sales measure. Specifically, we hypothesize (1) a positive relationship between NFC and sales performance; (2) a positive relationship between AO and sales performance; and (3) a positive interaction effect between NFC and AO on sales performance. The results of this study revealed both NFC and AO correlated with self-rated behavioral performance but only NFC correlated with both performance measures; suggesting that need for cognition may be the more influential of the two for sales organizations concerned with selling behaviors as well as sales outcomes. The hypothesized interaction effect was not supported.     

Backward affective priming: Even when the prime is late, people still evaluate

It is well-established that affective stimuli can prime congruent evaluations if they precede the target within a short time interval, i.e., forward affective priming. The present research examines whether similar effects occur if affective primes succeed target presentation, i.e., backward affective priming. Experiments 1 found short-lived, yet reliable backward affective priming. Experiment 2 found parallel forward affective priming in the same paradigm. Experiment 3 found forward and backward affective priming in a within-subjects design. Comparison with neutral primes suggested that the observed effects were mainly due to interference. Backward affective priming is a robust phenomenon that may reflect a rapid and continuous evaluation of environmental stimuli.     

Parent–Infant Synchrony: Biological Foundations and Developmental Outcomes

ABSTRACT— Synchrony—a construct used across multiple fields to denote the temporal relationship between events—has been applied to the study of mother–infant interaction and is suggested here as a framework for the study of interpersonal relationships. Defined as the temporal coordination of micro-level social behavior, parent–infant synchrony is charted in its development across infancy from the initial consolidation of biological rhythms during pregnancy to the emergence of symbolic exchange between parent and child. Synchrony is shown to depend on physiological mechanisms supporting bond formation in mammals—particularly physiological oscillators and neuroendocrine systems such as those involving the hormone oxytocin. Developmental outcomes of the synchrony experience are observed in the domains of self-regulation, symbol use, and the capacity for empathy across childhood and adolescence. Specific disruptions to the parameters of synchrony that may be observed in various pathological conditions, such as prematurity or maternal affective disorder, are detailed. A time-based, micro-analytic behavioral approach to the study of human relationship may offer new insights on intersubjectivity across the lifespan.     

Psychological contracts and their implications for commitment: A feature-based approach

Two studies were conducted to examine the link between employee perceptions of the psychological contract and their affective and normative commitments to the organization. The authors adapt a new approach to the study of psychological contracts by developing a generalizable measure of contract features (e.g., scope; time frame). In Study 1 (N = 301), the authors predicted and found that employees’ perceptions of the contract’s features contributed beyond perceptions of contract type (i.e., transactional; relational) and fulfillment to the prediction of affective and normative commitment. In Study 2 (N = 147), the features measure was refined and results from the first study were largely replicated. In both studies, affective and normative commitment were greater when employees viewed the contract as broad, trust-based, equal, negotiated, tangible, and long-term, and weaker when they saw it as unequal, imposed, and short-term. We also found evidence for patterns of features that correspond to transactional and relational contracts, as well as to recently proposed balanced contracts and I-Deals. Implications for theory and the management of psychological contracts are discussed.     

How individualism–collectivism orientations predict happiness in a collectivistic context

We discuss how individualistic/collectivistic orientations of employees predict affective well-being at work, and how this relationship is moderated by the perceptions of spirit of camaraderie in organizations. The sample comprises 161 employees of 109 organizations operating in Portugal, a collectivistic culture. The findings suggest that: (a) collectivistic individuals show higher affective well-being than individualists; (b) this relationship is moderated by the employees’ perceptions of the spirit of camaraderie in their organizations; (c) higher affective well being levels tend to be experienced by collectivists who find working in an organizational context to be rich in spirit of camaraderie, and lower levels of affective well being are expressed by individualists who perceive poor spirit of camaraderie in their working environments. The paper emphasizes that employee happiness can have different bases in different cultures and that individualism/collectivism orientations do not operate in the same way in different cultural and organizational contexts. We are very grateful to the three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions.     

Bodies out of place: Affective encounters with whiteness

This essay foregrounds the role of affect in felt experiences of whiteness by illustrating two accounts, one that took place on 25th May 2020 between Amy Cooper and Christian Cooper in Central Park, and an encounter from the authors previous study on Black educators’ experiences of working in white spaces. In doing so, this essay is an affective attunement to the ways that felt intensities inform our experience of power relations and ultimately constrain the capacities of bodies to act.     

Empathy framework for embodied conversational agents

Empathy is a complex socio-emotional behavior that results from the interaction between affective and cognitive mechanisms. Equipping embodied conversational agents (ECAs) with empathic capacity can benefit from the integration and evaluation of these low and high level capabilities in a hierarchical manner. Following the theoretical background on empathic behavior in humans, this paper presents a framework to equip ECAs with real time multi-modal empathic interaction capabilities. We present the implementation of this framework, which includes basic dialogue capabilities as well as three levels of empathic behavior in a conversational scenario. Our approach is an inclusive stand on modeling levels of empathy and provides a baseline behavior for empathic interaction.     

Attractiveness as a Function of Skin Tone and Facial Features: Evidence from Categorization Studies

Participants rated the attractiveness and racial typicality of male faces varying in their facial features from Afrocentric to Eurocentric and in skin tone from dark to light in two experiments. Experiment 1 provided evidence that facial features and skin tone have an interactive effect on perceptions of attractiveness and mixed-race faces are perceived as more attractive than single-race faces. Experiment 2 further confirmed that faces with medium levels of skin tone and facial features are perceived as more attractive than faces with extreme levels of these factors. Black phenotypes (combinations of dark skin tone and Afrocentric facial features) were rated as more attractive than White phenotypes (combinations of light skin tone and Eurocentric facial features); ambiguous faces (combinations of Afrocentric and Eurocentric physiognomy) with medium levels of skin tone were rated as the most attractive in Experiment 2. Perceptions of attractiveness were relatively independent of racial categorization in both experiments.     

Music-to-language transfer effect: may melodic ability improve learning of tonal languages by native nontonal speakers?

In tonal languages, as Mandarin Chinese and Thai, word meaning is partially determined by lexical tones. Previous studies suggest that lexical tones are processed by native listeners as linguistic information and not as pure tonal information. This study aims at verifying if, in nontonal languages speakers, the discrimination of lexical Mandarin tones varies in function of the melodic ability. Forty-six students with no previous experience of Mandarin or any other tonal language were presented with two short lists of spoken monosyllabic Mandarin words and invited to perform a same–different task trying to identify whether the variation were phonological or tonal. Main results show that subjects perform significantly better in identifying phonological variations rather than tonal ones and interestingly, the group with a high melodic ability (assessed by Wing subtest 3) shows a better performance exclusively in detecting tonal variations.