Knowledge that Transforms

For the past decade, an increasing number of studies have demonstrated that when individuals write about emotional experiences, significant physical and mental health improvements follow The basic paradigm and findings are summarized along with some boundary conditions Although a reduction in inhibition may contribute to the disclosure phenomenon changes in basic cognitive and linguistic processes during writing predict better health Implications for theory and treatment are discussed

Resting anterior brain electrical activity, self-report measures of Behavioral Approach and Inhibition System (BAS and BIS) strength, and general levels of positive and negative affect (PA and NA) were collected from 46 unselected undergraduates on two separate occasions Electroencephalogram (EEG) measures of prefrontal asymmetry and the self-report measures showed excellent internal consistency reliability and adequate test-retest stability Aggregate measures across the two assessments were computed for all indices Subjects with greater relative left prefrontal activation reported higher levels of BAS strength, whereas those with greater relative right prefrontal activation reported higher levels of BIS strength Prefrontal EEG asymmetry accounted for more than 25% of the variance in the self-report measure of relative BAS-BIS strength Prefrontal EEG, however, was not significantly correlated with PA or NA, or the relative strength of PA versus NA Posterior asymmetry was unrelated to the self-report measures

We report an experiment testing the hypothesis that impulsive behavior reflects a deficit in the ability to inhibit prepotent responses Specifically, we examined whether impulsive people respond more slowly to signals to inhibit (stop signals) than non-impulsive people In this experiment, 136 undergraduate students completed an impulsivity questionnaire and then participated in a stop-signal experiment, in which they performed a choice reaction time (go) task and were asked to inhibit their responses to the go task when they heard a stop signal The delay between the go signal and the stop signal was determined by a tracking procedure designed to allow subjects to inhibit on 50% of the stop-signal trials Reaction time to the go signal did not vary with impulsivity, but estimated stop-signal reaction time was longer in more impulsive subjects, consistent with the hypothesis and consistent with results from populations with pathological problems with impulse control

We describe a rather common process that we call moralization, in which objects or activities that were previously morally neutral acquire a moral component. Moralization converts preferences into values, and in doing so influences cross-generational transmission (because values are passed more effectively in families than are preferences), increases the likelihood of internalization, invokes greater emotional response, and mobilizes the support of governmental and other cultural institutions. In recent decades, we claim, cigarette smoking in America has become moralized. We support our claims about some of the consequences of moralization with an analysis of differences between health and moral vegetarians. Compared with health vegetarians, moral vegetarians find meat more disgusting, offer more reasons in support of their meat avoidance, and avoid a wider range of animal foods. However, contrary to our prediction, liking for meat is about the same in moral and health vegetarians.

Given that attention precedes an eye movement to a target it becomes possible to use fixation sequences to probe the spatiotemporal dynamics of search Applying this method to a realistic search task, we found eye movements directed to the geometric centers of progressively smaller groups of objects rather than accurate fixations to individual objects in a display Such a binary search strategy is consistent with zoom-lens models positing an initially broad distribution of search, followed by a narrowing of this search region until only the target is selected We also interpret this oculomotor averaging behavior as evidence for an initially parallel search analysis that becomes increasingly serial as the search process converges on the target

How do people feel about the outcomes of risky options? Results from two experiments demonstrate that the emotional reaction to a monetary outcome is not a simple function of the utility of that outcome Emotional responses also depend on probabilities and unobtained outcomes Unexpected outcomes have greater emotional impact than expected outcomes Furthermore any given outcome is less pleasant if an unobtained outcome is better We propose an account of emotional experiences associated with outcomes of decisions called decision affect theory It incorporates utilities expectations and counterfactual comparisons into hedonic responses Finally we show that choices between risky options can be described as the maximization of expected emotional experiences as predicted by decision affect theory That is people choose the risky option for which they expect to feel better on average