Unplanned pregnancies and abortion counselling: Some thoughts on unconscious motivations

Abstract

My experience of abortion counselling¹ over ten years has shown me the importance of understanding the unconscious dynamics behind an unplanned and unwanted pregnancy. Unless these dynamics are made conscious and understood, the experience of abortion may have to be repeated again and again. Both becoming pregnant and having an abortion often involve unconscious conflicts and fantasies originating in a woman's early development and reflecting her relationship with her mother. These may be acted out via an unplanned pregnancy and decision to have an abortion. The central task of abortion counselling is to address and make links with the unconscious processes, and in particular help the pregnant woman recognize and acknowledge her ambivalent feelings. In this way the counselling makes use of the opportunity to reflect provided by the crisis situation of the pregnancy.     

The Relation between Mind‐mindedness in Mothers with Borderline Personality Disorder and Mental State Understanding in their Children

This study investigated relations between mind‐mindedness in mothers with borderline personality disorder (BPD) and mental state understanding in their children. Participants were 20 mothers with BPD and 19 mothers without personality disorder and their children, aged 39–61 months. Children's mental state understanding was examined via a battery of theory of mind and emotion labelling tasks. Maternal mind‐mindedness was assessed by mothers' use of mental state references to describe their children relative to other attributes. Maternal BPD was associated with fewer references to children's mental states as well as poorer levels of mental state understanding in their children. Findings lend some empirical support to recent theoretical suggestions that BPD is associated with a reduced capacity for mentalization, as well as reduced capacity for mental state understanding in children of mothers with BPD. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Mediational Role of Effortful Control and Emotional Dysregulation in the Link Between Maternal Responsiveness and Turkish Preschoolers' Social Competency and Externalizing Symptoms

This cross‐sectional study relied on circumscribed measures of emotion regulation and dysregulation to examine their role in mediating the associations of maternal responsiveness and effortful control with social competency and externalizing symptoms. We examined those associations in an understudied cultural context, Turkey, with 118 preschoolers. Emotion regulation and dysregulation showed differential associations with broad indices of self‐regulation such that emotion dysregulation predicted both low social competency and high externalizing symptoms but emotion regulation was only associated with high social competency. Effortful control was unrelated to emotion regulation but was associated with lower levels of emotion dysregulation. Effortful control had both direct and mediated associations with externalizing and social competency (mediated by lower emotion dysregulation). Findings also showed that maternal responsiveness was associated with better social competency and lower externalizing. Those associations were both singly (through effortful control) and doubly mediated (through effortful control and lower emotion dysregulation), similar to US samples. The study contributes to a better understanding of the factors and mechanisms that speak to children's self‐regulation. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The experience of positive emotion is associated with the automatic processing of positive emotional words

The current study examines the relationship between attention bias for positive emotional words and self-reported emotional experience. Previous research suggests that the experience of positive emotion momentarily broadens cognitive processes, potentially allowing individuals to build an array of enduring personal resources. However, it is unknown whether the experience of positive emotion also broadens emotional information processing. Participants included 60 healthy undergraduate students who completed measures of psychopathology, self-reported emotional experience, and an emotional Stroop task designed to measure attentional bias to positive and negative emotional information. Results indicate significant associations between reaction times for high-intensity happiness words and self-reported high levels of positive emotion and low levels of negative emotions. These associations were not present for low intensity happiness words. Findings suggest that individuals who experience high levels of positive emotion and low levels of negative emotion demonstrate an attention bias for positive information and, from an information processing perspective, provide insight into the manner in which positive emotions broaden cognitive processes.     

青少年负性情绪信息注意偏向的情绪弹性和性别效应

探讨情绪弹性和性别变量对青少年加工负性情绪信息时注意偏向的影响,采用情绪stroop实验范式,以46名青少年为被试,以负性情绪图片为实验材料,考察不同情绪弹性和性别的青少年在负性情绪图片颜色识别时的反应时间差异。结果发现,情绪弹性对负性情绪图片颜色识别的主效应显著,统计效力非常明显;性别对负性情绪图片颜色识别的主效应显著,统计效力明显;情绪弹性与性别在颜色识别上的交互作用不显著。这说明青少年负性情绪信息加工过程中产生的注意偏向效应受情绪弹性和性别因素的影响。     

Transforming or restraining rumination: The impact of compassionate reappraisal versus emotion suppression on empathy,forgiveness, and affective psychophysiology

We tested the effects of practicing compassionate reappraisal vs. emotional suppression as direct coping responses to victims’ ruminations about a past interpersonal offense. Participants (32 females, 32 males) were randomly assigned to learn one coping strategy which immediately followed three of six offense rumination trials (counterbalanced). For both strategy types, coping (vs. offense ruminating) reduced ratings of negative emotion, decreased the use of negative emotion language, and reduced tension at the brow muscle (corrugator EMG). Only compassionate reappraisal coping (vs. offense rumination) immediately prompted greater empathy and emotional forgiveness toward the offender. Empathy ratings for the first coping trial mediated the relationship between strategy type and empathy ratings for the final rumination trial. Compassionate reappraisal strategy participants increased their empathy toward the offender while ruminating at the end of the study. Compassionate reappraisal participants (vs. emotional suppression) described coping (vs. rumination) with more positive language, and also had calmer cardiac pre-ejection period responses.     

Hopeful + Hoping = Hope: unique experiential features in the measurement of emotion

Abstract

Distinct differences have been found between hope and optimism based on retrospective stories. This study sought to replicate those findings when anticipating outcomes in real-time and examine whether they are affected by different lexical formulations of the word hope. One-hundred and two participants read two first-person, chronological vignettes. They rated their hope, optimism, fear, and worry about the anticipated outcome following each part of the story; they also rated their appraisals of importance, likelihood, and perceived control. Half of the participants read adjective forms of the states (e.g. hopeful) and half read verb forms (e.g. hoping). Differences in ratings for the adjective and verb forms were found for hope but not the other anticipatory states, and both forms of hope were found to differ from optimism. Implications of these lexical differences for understanding and measuring the experience of hope are discussed.     

Finding a family: A categorization of enjoyable emotions

Abstract

Responding to burgeoning scholarship examining discrete positive emotions, the overarching goals of the current review are to provide a summary of 28 enjoyable emotions and to offer an initial classification of these emotions into families. The families of discrete enjoyable emotions, many proposed for the first time, are as follows: (1) Self-praising emotions (authentic pride, fiero, naches, feeling respected), (2) other-praising emotions (admiration, elevation, gratitude, inspiration), (3) past-oriented emotions (forgiveness, nostalgia, relief), (4) future-oriented emotions (anticipatory enthusiasm, courage, determination, hope), (5) hazardous emotions (lust, schadenfreude, hubristic pride), (6) affectionate emotions (love, attachment love, tenderness, positive empathy), (7) arousal-defined emotions (euphoria, serenity), (8) violation-elicited emotions (amusement, awe, curiosity, positive surprise).This review describes how the 28 enjoyable emotions were selected, outlines the classification process generating the families of enjoyable emotions, provides a brief summary of current scholarship on each emotion, and concludes with a discussion of fertile future directions.     

Speaking of pain in Greek: Implications for the cognitive permeation of emotions

ABSTRACT

Although item-memory for emotional information is enhanced, memory for associations between items is often impaired for negative, emotionally arousing compared to neutral information. We tested two possible mechanisms underlying this impairment, using picture pairs: 1) higher confidence in one’s own ability to memorise negative information may cause participants to under-study negative pairs; 2) better interactive imagery for neutral pairs could facilitate associative memory for neutral pairs more than for negative pairs. Tested with associative recognition, we replicated the impairment of associative memory for negative pairs. We also replicated the result that confidence in future memory (judgments of learning) was higher for negative than neutral pairs. Inflated confidence could not explain the impairment of associative recognition memory: Judgements of learning were positively correlated with associative memory success for both negative and neutral pairs. However, neutral pairs were rated higher in their conduciveness to interactive imagery than negative pairs, and this difference in interactive imagery showed a robust relationship to the associative memory difference. Thus, associative memory reductions for negative information are not due to differences in encoding effort. Instead, interactive imagery may be less effective for encoding of negative than neutral pairs.     

Do emotions have distinct vocal profiles? A study of idiographic patterns of expression

Research on vocal expressions of emotion indicates that persons can identify emotions from voice with relatively high accuracy rates. In addition, fairly consistent vocal profiles for specific emotions have been identified. However, important methodological issues remain to be addressed. In this paper, we address the issue of whether there are individual differences in the manner in which particular emotions may be expressed vocally and whether trained speakers’ portrayals of emotion are in some sense superior to untrained speakers’ portrayals. Consistent support was found for differences across speakers in the manner in which they expressed the same emotions. No accompanying relationship was found between differences in expression and accuracy of identification of those expressions. Little evidence for the superiority of trained speakers was found. Implications of these findings for future studies of vocal expressions of emotion, as well as our understanding of emotions in general, are discussed.