Assault victims exhibit a variety of emotional responses including fear, depression, and sexual impairment. For most assault victims, these responses decline over time. This study examined the pattern of post-assault responses during the first 12 weeks and compared the pattern of responses following rape with non-sexual criminal assault reactions.…

To examine the concept of play, a taxonomy of five categories of play was devised and four studies were conducted in an attempt to distinguish among these categories on a motivational and emotional basis. Play is defined as an autotelic, self-rewarding activity. In each of the four studies, undergraduates (total N=520) read a scenario representing…

A study was undertaken to ascertain what difference if any there is in viewer reaction to television news shows done in a traditional way as contrasted with news done in a chatty "happy talk" manner. It was hypothesized that happy talk viewers should feel significantly more entertained, happier, less depressed, less concerned, less…

Despite disagreement on other fundamental issues, most contemporary theories of emotion suggest that one consequence of emotional experience is some profound, if temporary, change in the way in which the self is experienced in the emotion-evoking situation. Both clinical and laboratory data have demonstrated the power of self-focused attention to…

Since the incidence of cancer in this country is high and the cancer survival rates are increasing, it is important to study coping strategies in cancer patients. As survival time lengthens, coping strategies that might affect the quality of a patient's life become increasingly important. A study was conducted to examine coping strategies in newly…

Metaphor-making is a universal human endeavor that manifests across cultures in various ways. Analyzing metaphors enables educators to gain a greater understanding of many social and cultural issues. Teaching children to write through metaphor based upon their emotional landscapes can reveal much of their inner worlds. Such texts can have a…

Women exhibit a wide range of responses to a sexual assault. This study focused on two factors that may either hinder or facilitate postrape recovery and which are potentially modifiable: (1) causal attributions; and (2) coping strategies. Rape survivors (n=105) seen at a sexual assault resource service in Minneapolis, Minnesota, completed…

In recent years, the relationship between moods and thoughts has been the focus of much theorizing and some empirical work. A study was undertaken to examine the intraindividual relationship between negative affect and negative thoughts using a Box-Jenkins time series analysis. College students (N=33) completed a measure of negative mood and…

Historically, most investigations of the social and psychological effects of disaster have focused on describing the impact of single traumatic events rather than on developing an understanding of how disasters or particular characteristics of disasters affect various groups of victims. This study investigated the hypothesis that stress caused by…

Recent research has refuted the behaviorist approach by establishing a relationship between emotion and behavior. The data collection procedure, however, has often involved an inferred emotional state from a hypothetical situation. As partial fulfillment of a class requirement, 60 college students were asked to perform two problem solving tasks…

Although grief reactions have been carefully examined, little information is available on the grief response following the murder of a loved one. Impressions of homicide survivors' grief reactions were obtained by the staff of a family support center who treated ten families that had experienced the loss of a family member by homicide.…

This paper attempts to tie empathy to the individual's development of a cognitive sense of the other, and thus to lay the groundwork for a stage analysis of the development of altruistic motivation. The first stage proposed in this scheme is empathic distress, the involuntary experiencing of another person's painful emotional state. Empathic…

Young people need a gymnasium for the expression of their passions: Shakespeare provides it. People who do not exercise their feelings cannot develop the strength to exercise their passions, and unexercised passions can seem to atrophy. It is even more likely that unexercised and unexpressed passions leak into pathways of the body chemistry where…

The role of autonomic arousal in feeling states has long been of interest to psychologists. To examine the necessity of arousal for an effective mood induction, 60 college students were instructed either to exercise vigorously (high arousal group), exercise lightly with a rest period (low arousal group), or complete a questionnaire (no arousal…

In the field of communication studies the preeminent forms of explanation of human behavior have been the social and psychological, but biological origins may be as important to understanding human communication as are social origins. Communication research suggests a biological basis for certain patterns of adult interaction. Although these…