A comprehensive model of women’s social cognition and responsiveness to infant crying: Integrating personality,emotion, executive function,and sleep

Disparate lines of research suggest that women’s (a) emotion regulation and personality, (b) executive function and (c) sleep may be important predictors of mothers’ cry responding in part through their effects on social cognition. However, the extent to which each contributes to cry responding independently remains unknown. We examined this question in a convenience sample of 109 nulliparous undergraduate women. Women completed online surveys to assess personality and emotion dysregulation traits, then visited the lab for a testing session during which they reported on sleep the night before and reactions to videotapes of crying infants and completed computerized working memory and inhibitory control tasks under challenging noise conditions (exposure to traffic and cry sounds). Results indicate that women’s positive personality and higher working memory were associated with higher levels of infant-oriented cry processing (i.e., accurate distress detection, empathy and situational/emotional attributions about distress), which in turn was associated with higher intended responsiveness to infant crying. Emotion dysregulation and deficits in inhibitory control were associated with higher levels of self-oriented cry processing (i.e., anger, anxiety, negative and emotion minimizing attributions in response to infant distress), which in turn was associated with lower cry responsiveness. Short-term sleep deprivation was associated with lower intended responsiveness via the above path from poorer inhibitory control to heightened self-oriented cry processing. Findings suggest that sleep, emotional and cognitive factors are associated with cry processing and subsequent responsiveness independent of one another.     

From “villages of longevity” to “villages of cancer”? The emotional geography of tourism development in Bama,China

Studies on residents' attitudes toward tourism development either assume that residents are unemotional “homo economics” or frame their emotions as forming rigid patterns. Following emotional approach, this study on Bama in China argues that residents' emotions toward tourism development and its environmental impacts are dynamic and ambivalent. Qualitative methods such as semi-structured interview and observation were used to collect data. The results show that during tourism development, interactions with outsiders encouraged the residents to realize the symbolic healing effects of their living environment and develop feelings of amazement and pride. However, continuous development had negative effects on the physical and symbolic environments, which induced complex emotional responses in the residents, including dislike, dissatisfaction, tolerance, anger, and fear. However, in this wealth-building stage, the residents’ ecological grief is compensated by economic growth and has not evolved to resisting actions against development. The emotional ambivalence between eagerness to economic prosperity and concern of ecological loss still exists in Bama and was enhanced in the shutdown of tourism caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Further research should explore whether, and how ecological concerns about a tourism location may override potential economic gains and encompass anti-development actions.     

Psychologie du frisson esthétique

This study concerns the problem of aesthetic emotions and that of aesthetic chills in particular. We asked thirty subjects to describe a narrative structure (film, play, book) eliciting chills and the phenomenology of the aesthetic experience. A number of non-random redundancies are observable. The stimuli eliciting positive aesthetic chills in our population have a sensorial dimension and their particular properties are often the selfless actions, existential considerations of a very general nature (e.g., the meaning of life), moments of inner recollection or quiet reflection, situations of solidarity and communion (family, couple, friends) or, on the contrary, situations of violent separation (family, couple, friends). In general, when real events are at stake (and not fictional scenes as in a film or a novel), subjects describe situations where they are safe, where they trust the environment.