The Relation Between Appraised Mismatch and the Duration of Negative Emotions: Evidence for Universality

Emotions are processes that unfold over time. As a consequence, a better understanding of emotions can be reached only when their time‐related characteristics can be assessed and interpreted adequately. A central aspect in this regard is the duration of emotional experience. Previous studies have shown that an emotional experience can last anywhere from a couple of seconds up to several hours or longer. In this article, we examine to what extent specific appraisals of the eliciting event may account for variability in emotion duration and to what degree appraisal–duration relations are universal or culture specific. Participants in 37 countries were asked to recollect emotional episodes of fear, anger, sadness, disgust, shame and guilt. Subsequently, they were asked to report the duration of these episodes and to answer a number of questions regarding their appraisal of the emotion‐eliciting event. Multi‐level analyses revealed that negative emotions last especially long when the eliciting event and its consequences are perceived to be incongruent with the individual's goals, values and self‐ideal, creating a mismatch. These relations are largely universal, although evidence for some limited variability across countries is found as well. Copyright © 2013 European Association of Personality Psychology     

Emotion Dysregulation in Comorbid Posttraumatic Stress Disorder and Substance Use Disorders: A Narrative Review

Co-occurrence of substance use disorders (SUDs) and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is extremely common and is associated with elevated dropout and relapse rates. Given that PTSD/SUD co-occurrence rates among veterans have been found to be as high as 55?75%, it is important to identify mechanisms that may affect the interplay of both disorders. Emotion dysregulation (ED) presents a candidate mechanism that may underlie poor treatment response in co-occurring PTSD/SUD. This article proposes a transdiagnostic emotion regulation framework that considers ED conceptualized as a combination of low ability to tolerate emotional distress (low distress tolerance) and difficulties in the goal-directed use of emotion regulation strategies as a key risk factor in co-occurring PTSD/SUD. The authors review empirical findings from self-report and laboratory-based studies of ED in PTSD. They describe psychological explanations of the emotion-substance relationship and review studies documenting ED in SUDs and in co-occurring PTSD/SUD. The literature on ED in PTSD/SUD suggests that (a) patients with PTSD may resort to substances to cope with trauma-related symptoms due to ED, and (b) ED may maintain SUD symptoms and interfere with psychological treatment. Longitudinal studies on bidirectional relationships between ED and substance use in PTSD are needed, particularly research examining the course of ED in PTSD patients who use substances versus those who do not.     

On Philosophy

In this article the author holds that progress in philosophy is a vague concept. Its criteria are not universally acknowledged. All that is clear is that philosophy does not develop in a linear way. Philosophy is polydiscoursive. As for the past fifty years, the author believes three important things happened in philosophy. (1) It has been shown that consciousness exists not within one individual but spreads within a community of people; (2) philosophy has discovered autism, a result that helps us to understand a human being as neither a biological nor a social individual but a third thing—a dreaming being who is not only asocial but also tongueless, where speech and consciousness are separated; and (3) contemporary philosophy has learned to distinguish between sign and symbol. And it has been realized that the human mind is neither an instinct nor a computer but an objectified suffering, a transformed emotion.     

Prospective and concurrent correlates of emotion perception in psychotic disorders: A naturalistic,longitudinal study of neurocognition,affective blunting and avolition

This naturalistic study investigated longitudinal and cross‐sectional symptomatic and neurocognitive correlates of social cognition indexed by emotion perception. Participants were 31 persons admitted to a psychiatric emergency ward due to acute psychosis. Positive and negative (i.e., affective blunting and avolition) symptoms were assessed at baseline and 12‐month follow‐up using the Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale. Participants completed neuropsychological assessments with alternative versions of the Repeatable Battery for the Assessment of Neuropsychological Status at baseline and at 12‐month follow‐up. Emotion perception was measured using the Face/Voice Emotion Test at 12‐month follow‐up. Correlational analyses (Spearman's rho) revealed strong and statistically significant associations between neurocognition and emotion perception (baseline r = 0.58, follow‐up r = 0.43). Associations between positive symptoms and emotion perception were weak or non‐existent (baseline r = 0.13, follow‐up r  =  –0.01). Emotion perception was moderately, but not significantly, associated with affective blunting at follow‐up (r = 0.33), but not at baseline (r = 0.21). The association with avolition was non‐existent (baseline r  =  –0.05, follow‐up r = 0.01). This study supports the notion that emotion perception has neurocognitive correlates. The cross‐sectional trend level association with affective blunting suggests that the ability to perceive emotions might be related to, but dissociable from the ability to express emotions.     

Cognitive deficits of executive functions and decision‐making in obsessive‐compulsive disorder

The nature of cognitive deficits in obsessive‐compulsive disorder (OCD) is characterized by contradictory findings in terms of specific neuropsychological deficits. Selective impairments have been suggested to involve visuospatial memory, set shifting, decision‐making and response inhibition. The aim of this study was to investigate cognitive deficits in decision‐making and executive functioning in OCD. It was hypothesized that the OCD patients would be less accurate in their responses compared to the healthy controls in rational decision‐making on a version of the Cambridge gambling task (CGT) and on the color‐word interference test and on a version of the Tower of Hanoi test (tower test) of executive functioning. Thirteen participants with OCD were compared to a group of healthy controls (n = 13) matched for age, gender, education and verbal IQ. Results revealed significant differences between the OCD group and the healthy control group on quality of decision‐making on the CGT and for achievement score on the tower test. On these two tasks the OCD group performed worse than the healthy control group. The symptom‐dimension analysis revealed performance differences where safety checking patients were impaired on the tower test compared to contamination patients. Results are discussed in the framework of cognition and emotion processing and findings implicate that OCD models should address, specifically, the interaction between cognition and emotion. Here the emotional disruption hypothesis is forwarded to account for the dysfunctional behaviors in OCD. Further implications regarding methodological and inhibitory factors affecting cognitive information processing are highlighted.     

Tasting the divine: the aesthetics of religious emotion in Indian Christianity

The category of rasa (emotional ‘tastes’) in Indian Christian theology and art offers a useful theoretical lens for the academic study of religious emotion. In this article, two Bharata Nā?yam dance ministries provide a case study in the practical applicability of a rasa theology that is emerging within contemporary Indian Christianity. The Christian choreographers have significantly altered the emotions of love and peace in comparison with classical rasa theory and its traditional use in Hindu devotion. Indian Christian artists and theologians have also begun to explore and invent additional aesthetic emotions, giving unique shape to their ‘emotional community.’ Important challenges attend the dance ministries as they are currently configured, yet rasa is a capacious analytical category that can shed new light on Indian Christianity and the study of emotion in religion.     

外化行为问题与集体道德情绪、集体责任行为之关系：班级氛围的调节效应*

采用调查法,随机选取上海市3所普通中小学四、六、八、十年级的755名学生为被试,探讨班级氛围在外化行为问题与集体道德情绪、集体责任行为关系间的调节作用。结果表明：(1)男生的外化行为问题显著高于女生,其感知的班级氛围显著低于女生。而男、女生集体道德情绪与集体责任行为的性别差异不显著;(2)学生感知的班级氛围随年龄的增长先下降再上升,八年级时最低;集体道德情绪和集体责任行为随着年级的增高而呈下降趋势,小学生(四、六年级)的集体道德情绪和集体责任行为得分均比中学生(八、十年级)高,高一(十年级)学生的得分处于最低水平;(3)外化行为问题与集体道德情绪、集体责任行为的关系受班级氛围的调节。与消极的班级氛围相比,积极的班级氛围能够弱化外化行为问题与集体道德情绪、集体责任行为的负向关联。结果揭示了积极的班级氛围对外化行为问题学生具有一定的保护作用,有助于改善这些学生的社会适应能力。     

Interference suppression vs. response inhibition: An explanation for the absence of a bilingual advantage in preschoolers’ Stroop task performance

The well-documented advantage that bilingual speakers demonstrate across the lifespan on measures of controlled attention is not observed in preschoolers’ performance on Stroop task variations. We examined the role of task demands in explaining this discrepancy. Whereas the Color/Word Stroop used with adult participants requires interference suppression, the Stroop task typically used with preschoolers requires only response inhibition. We developed an age-appropriate conflict task that measures interference suppression. Fifty-one preschool children (26 bilinguals) completed this new Bivalent Shape Task and the Day/Night task used in previous research. Bilingual in comparison to monolingual children performed better on incongruent trials of the Bivalent Shape Task, but did not differ on other measures. The results indicate that the discrepancy between preschoolers and older individuals in performance on Stroop task adaptations results from characteristics of the task rather than developmental differences. Further, the findings provide additional support for the importance of interference suppression as a mechanism underlying the bilingual advantage.     

The relationship between mental vitality and cardiovascular health

Past measurement of vitality has included both emotional and physical components. Since aspects of physical vitality such as fatigue can be indicative of physical illness, the usefulness of existing measures of vitality to predict health is limited. This research was designed to examine the psychometric properties of a new Mental Vitality Scale and to test its associations with measures of cardiovascular health over the course of 2 years. The measure of mental vitality was administered in a two-part study using three different samples. In part 1, the reliability and validity of the scale was assessed with a student and a clinic sample. In part 2, medical data on mental and physical health were abstracted over a two-year period from 1041 patient records from a multi-specialty medical practice, and mental vitality assessed through a mailed questionnaire. The findings indicate that the Mental Vitality Scale is a valid and reliable questionnaire for measuring this construct. Mental vitality was also associated with reduced odds of several cardiovascular outcomes and prospective analyses suggest that mental vitality may serve a protective function in the development of cardiovascular disease. The results lend support for the importance of mental vitality as a construct that may be relevant for considering resilience in relation to cardiovascular disease.     

Maintaining a healthy diet: Effects of personality and self-reward versus self-punishment on commitment to and enactment of self-chosen and assigned goals

Abstract

A theory decomposing volition into four modes of central organization of executive control functions is outlined. These modes include (1) an autonomy-oriented mode (“self-regulation”) which is facilitated by challenging conditions and positive mood, (2) a self-suppressive mode oriented toward external-control (“self-control”) facilitated by negative mood and two modes associated with volitional inhibition (“state orientation”). Two experiments are reported that test predicted interactions between dispositional and situational factors in determining commitment to and actual enactment of self-chosen versus assigned activities directed at changing nutritional behavior. The results confirm the predicted disordinal interactions: The degree of commitment to and enactment of intended behavioral changes depends upon an interaction between personality (volitional styles), type of self-regulatory task (eat more healthy versus avoid unhealthy food), and instructional focus on easy versus difficult steps (Study 1) or self-reward versus self-punishment strategies (Study 2). Practical implications for designing intervention procedures according to individual personality characteristics and situational constraints are discussed.