Breakthrough victories: How can a loser ever win?

The domain of sport provides opportunity for development and growth, which is often incremental but can be marked by significant breakthroughs. Using Aristotle’s virtue ethic as a model, this paper explores the challenge of overcoming new obstacles, sometimes reversing bad habits, in the athletic domain. Breakthrough victories in sport are achievements that both reward persistent effort and open new horizons in the pursuit of excellence. They are significant because they seem to hold out a promise for future performance, now that some barrier has been passed. Breakthrough victories are often among the most important and rewarding moments in an athletic career.     

Film clips and narrative text as subjective emotion elicitation techniques

Film clips and narrative text are useful techniques in eliciting emotion in a laboratory setting but have not been examined side-by-side using the same methodology. This study examined the self-identification of emotions elicited by film clip and narrative text stimuli to confirm that selected stimuli appropriately target the intended emotions. Seventy participants viewed 30 film clips, and 40 additional participants read 30 narrative texts. Participants identified the emotion experienced (happy, sad, angry, fearful, neutral—six stimuli each). Eighty-five percent of participants self-identified the target emotion for at least two stimuli for all emotion categories of film clips, except angry (only one) and for all categories of narrative text, except fearful (only one). The most effective angry text was correctly identified 74% of the time. Film clips were more effective in eliciting all target emotions in participants for eliciting the correct emotion (angry), intensity rating (happy, sad), or both (fearful).     

The lack of dominance and choice deferral: Choosing to defer to cope with the feeling of being out of control

The present study aimed to explore whether emotional dominance can also account for choice deferral. This research manipulated emotional dominance through the difference in attractiveness among current alternatives in Experiment 1 and the readability of fonts for describing current options in Experiment 2, to investigate the role of dominance in choice deferral. The results revealed that increasingly submissive decision environments were related to more choice of deferral options. Mediation analyses indicated that dominance could mediate the effects of experimental manipulations on choice deferral, and that the actual choice of a deferral option was associated with more increase in dominance of retrospective emotion. The results indicate that dominance plays an important role in choice deferral and that choosing to defer can minimize the explicit confrontation of being out of control.     

The caregiving relationship under stress: foster carers’ experience of loss of the sense of self

This paper is an account of a piece of research which involved interviewing six foster carers who had ended a placement with a child under the age of five with an early experience of abuse and neglect. The paper describes one of the themes that emerged from the data analysis, the loss of the sense of self in the foster carers, and argues that the experience of attempting to provide care for these children led to internal shifts in the carers that reverberated throughout the network around the child. The paper suggests that knowing about the external reasons for placement breakdown is not enough without taking into account the impact on the internal world of the foster carers and the emotional impact of attempting to provide care for a child who has experienced abuse and neglect.     

Kant’s deductions of morality and freedom

It is commonly held that Kant ventured to derive morality from freedom in Groundwork III. It is also believed that he reversed this strategy in the second Critique, attempting to derive freedom from morality instead. In this paper, I set out to challenge these familiar assumptions: Kant’s argument in Groundwork III rests on a moral conception of the intelligible world, one that plays a similar role as the ‘fact of reason’ in the second Critique. Accordingly, I argue, there is no reversal in the proof-structure of Kant’s two works.     

One man’s freedom fighter is another man’s terrorist: a selected overview of the psychoanalytic and group analytic study of terrorism

This paper is an attempt to understand the significant increase in terrorism worldwide following the 9/11 Al-Quaida bombings which triggered the Bush Administration’s “war on terror”, leading to two wars and ultimately to the emergence of Daesh. I explore the motivation for social violence as terrorism, which can be carried out by the state or by its citizens, and look at how one man’s freedom fighter is another’s terrorist. The paper looks at why seemingly ordinary people are converted into ‘homegrown’ jihadists and how alienation and shame are the driving forces of violence. I give a selected overview of psychoanalytical ideas that try to make sense of the unconscious roots of aggression, hatred and violence. As terrorism is a social activity group analysis has an important contribution to make in understanding the violence of large groupings. The media has a crucial role to play as sensationalist coverage of violence provides terrorists with a free media platform. Both the media and terrorists need an audience and feed off each other. This paper will explore these themes.     

Alternatives to the fixed-set model: A review of appraisal models of emotion

Over several decades, appraisal theory has emerged as a prominent theoretical framework explaining the elicitation and differentiation of emotions, and has stimulated a great deal of theorising and empirical research. Despite the large amount of research in this area, there are many aspects of appraisal theory and research that remain unclear or problematic. In this review, we identify a common assumption of many appraisal theories—the fixed appraisal set—and argue that this assumption, combined with a lack of explicit theorising about the predicted relationship between appraisals and emotions, leads to a lack of clarity in both appraisal models and the empirical testing of those models. We recommend that appraisal theorists move in a direction already taken by a small number of theorists, and adopt the starting assumption of a variable appraisal set. We further suggest that theories of concepts and categorisation may inform theorising about appraisal–emotion relationships.     

Revisiting the revisit: added evidence for a social chemosignal in human emotional tears

In a study by Gelstein et al., we found that human emotional tears act as a social chemosignal. In the first of three different experiments in that study we observed that sniffing women’s emotional tears reduced the sexual attractiveness attributed by men to pictures of women’s faces. In a study partly titled “Chemosignaling effects of human tears revisited”, Gra?anin et al. claim failed replication of this effect in a series of experiments, one they described as “exactly the same procedure” as Gelstein. Given that Gra?anin et al. refused our extended offer to jointly replicate the experiment at our expense, we can merely comment on their effort. We find that Gra?anin, who are not a chemosignaling laboratory, used methodology that falls short of standards typically applied in chemosignaling research. Thus, their experiments were profoundly different from Gelstein. Finally, we found that in reanalysing their raw data we could in fact replicate the effect from Gelstein. Thus, we conclude that the failed replication in Gra?anin is neither a replication nor failed.     

“Local determination”, even if we could find it,does not challenge free will: Commentary on Marcelo Fischborn

Marcelo Fischborn discusses the significance of neuroscience for debates about free will. Although he concedes that, to date, Libet-style experiments have failed to threaten “libertarian free will” (free will that requires indeterminism), he argues that, in principle, neuroscience and psychology could do so by supporting local determinism. We argue that, in principle, Libet-style experiments cannot succeed in disproving or even establishing serious doubt about libertarian free will. First, we contend that “local determination”, as Fischborn outlines it, is not a coherent concept. Moreover, determinism is unlikely to be established by neuroscience in any form that should trouble compatibilists or libertarians—that is, anyone who thinks we might have free will. We conclude that, in principle, neuroscience will not be able undermine libertarian free will and explain why these conclusions support a coherent compatibilist notion of causal sourcehood.     

Scrutinizing the Emotional Nature of Intuitive Coherence Judgments

Dual‐system models propose that cognitive processing can occur either intuitively or deliberately. Unlike deliberate decision strategies, intuitive ones are assumed to have an emotional component attached to the decision process. We tested if intuitive decisions are indeed accompanied by an emotional response while deliberate decisions are not. Specifically, we conducted a psychophysiological study in which participants were instructed to decide either intuitively or deliberately if three simultaneously presented words were semantically coherent or incoherent (triad task). The degree of emotionality of these two decision strategies (intuitive vs. deliberate) was compared using changes in electrodermal activity (EDA) and the reaction time (RT) effect of an affective priming paradigm as primary measurements. Based on a valence‐arousal model, our results revealed that intuitive and deliberate judgments do not differ as to their emotional valence but that they do differ in emotional arousal. Most notably, sympathetic activation during intuitive judgments was significantly lower compared to sympathetic activation during deliberate judgments. Our results reflect that a relaxed state of mind—manifested in low sympathetic activity—could underlie the holistic processing that is assumed to facilitate the proliferation of semantic associations during coherence judgments. This suggests that coherence judgments made under an (instructed) intuitive decision mode have a specific psychophysiological signature and that arousal is the differentiating component between intuitive and deliberate decision strategies. © 2016 The Authors Journal of Behavioral Decision Making Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.