Awareness of own anger level and subsequent aggression

Thermal facial reactivity patterns predict social categorization bias triggered by unconscious and conscious emotional stimuli

Members of highly social species decode, interpret, and react to the emotion of a conspecific depending on whether the other belongs to the same (ingroup) or different (outgroup) social group. While studies indicate that consciously perceived emotional stimuli drive social categorization, information about how implicit emotional stimuli and specific physiological signatures affect social categorization is lacking. We addressed this issue by exploring whether subliminal and supraliminal affective priming can influence the categorization of neutral faces as ingroup versus outgroup. Functional infrared thermal imaging was used to investigate whether the effect of affective priming on the categorization decision was moderated by the activation of the sympathetic nervous system (SNS). During the subliminal condition, we found that stronger SNS activation after positive or negative affective primes induced ingroup and outgroup face categorization, respectively. The exact opposite pattern (i.e. outgroup after positive and ingroup after negative primes) was observed in the supraliminal condition. We also found that misattribution effects were stronger in people with low emotional awareness, suggesting that this trait moderates how one recognizes SNS signals and employs them for unrelated decisions. Our results allow the remarkable implication that low-level affective reactions coupled with sympathetic activation may bias social categorization.

Rational-Emotive Therapy: Research Data That Supports The Clinical and Personality Hypotheses of RET and Other Modes of Cognitive-Behavior Therapy

This article examines 32 important clinical and personality hypotheses of rational-emotive therapy (RET) and other modes of cognitive-behavior therapy and lists a large number of research studies that provide empirical confirmation of these hypotheses. It concludes that (1) a vast amount of research data exists, most of which tends to confirm the major clinical and personality hypotheses of RET; (2) this data keeps increasing by leaps and bounds; (3) RET hypotheses nicely lend themselves to experimental investigation and therefore encourage a considerable amount of research; (4) researchers have not yet tested some of the major RET formulations and could do so with profit to the field of psychotherapy and personality theory.

Anger and social appraisal: A "spicy" sex difference?

The central objective of this study was to investigate the role of social appraisal in sex differences in anger expression. Anger expression was inferred from the amount of hot sauce given to the person who induced anger. Participants were randomly assigned to a social condition, in which they expected to meet this person, or to a nonsocial condition, in which they had no such expectation. Men and women differed in their anger expressions, despite the fact that they did not differ in anger experience. Women expressed anger to a lesser extent than men, but only in the social condition. Social appraisal partly mediated the relation between sex and anger expression. The role of social appraisal in emotion and appraisal theory is discussed.

On the reality and relevance of traits

A review of published research on traits of personality is focused on the controversy over situationism vs. trait theory. Extreme emphasis on situationism is interpreted as a return to the atomistic psychologies of Wundt, Titchener, Watson, and Weiss. Available data are interpreted to indicate that "trait" can be defined operationally, that existing measures are adequately reliable, and that stability over long periods of time contradicts the situationist thesis. Trait measures predict behavior in the laboratory, in education, and industry. The trait construct should be retained in the vocabulary of scientific psychology.

Hostility as a function of the opportunity to counteraggress

Half of the subjects, college students, were insulted by the experimenter while half were not. Within each of these conditions, half of the subjects were led to believe they would have an opportunity to administer electric shock to the experimenter, while the other half were not. A measure of hostility toward the experimenter was taken before there was any actual opportunity to shock him. As predicted from reactance theory, it was found that the mere opportunity to shock the experimenter reduced hostility that was produced by his insulting behavior. Alternative interpretations and implications were discussed.

Beliefs about one's bodily state, emotionality, and aggression

70 male undergraduates were given a placebo and told either that it was a stimulant, analgesic, reflex-inhibitor, or vitamin. Ss completed a mood questionnaire, after receiving either 6 shocks (attack) or 2 shocks (no attack), ostensibly an evaluation of their solution to a problem. They then used shock to evaluate a standard solution produced by their former evaluator (a confederate). No significant differences were detected among the placebo conditions in shock number, duration, intensity, or latency. However, among Ss reporting that the “drug” seems to have some effect, those attacked and taking the reflex-inhibitor had significantly longer shock latencies. Attacked analgesic Ss did not perceive the shocks as less painful but rated themselves highest in insult.