We investigated the fear of being laughed at (gelotophobia), the joy in being laughed at (gelotophilia), and the joy in laughing at others (katagelasticism) in adolescent students (N = 324, 13-15 years). Gelotophobia was associated primarily with the victim and katagelasticism with the bully-role (self-and peer reports). Gelotophobia correlated…

This study investigated the ability of adults with Asperger syndrome to recognize emotional categories of facial expressions and emotional prosodies with graded emotional intensities. The individuals with Asperger syndrome showed poorer recognition performance for angry and sad expressions from both facial and vocal information. The group…

Teenagers often harbor resentment as well as love for their parents. Theirs is an age of rebellion and separation. During the last 40 years, the author has listened as her students stormed in anger at their parents, but she has also witnessed their love and loyalty. As a daughter who has forgiven her mother, and as the mother of two daughters who…

The importance of the specific environment for understanding the microgenesis of psychological processes is well documented. It can be argued, however, that the theoretical framework of cultural psychology which is usually referred to as cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) underconceptualizes this aspect, thereby hampering its ability to…

This essay is an attempt to add to the argument that beauty matters in education through offering a reciprocal but interconnected point: if the dynamic harmony and deep connectedness of beauty need to be taken seriously, so must their aesthetic converse--the disharmony and estrangement of failure. While the discourse of philosophical aesthetics…

Previous research has identified three distinct factors that make up the Texas Revised Inventory of Grief-Present (TRIG-Present) scale, which tap into grief-related thoughts, emotional response, and nonacceptance regarding a loss. In the present study, the authors sought to identify which of these core grief experiences in the early aftermath of…

Do infants, like adults, consider both the probability of falling and the severity of a potential fall when deciding whether to cross a bridge? Crawling and walking infants were encouraged to cross bridges varying in width over a small drop-off, a large drop-off, or no drop-off. Bridge width affects the probability of falling, whereas drop-off…

This essay explores the question: Is Nel Noddings a visionary who sees past the constraints of contemporary education or is she, like Don Quixote, madly tilting at windmills in her description and defense of happiness as an educational aim? Viewing the educational aim of happiness as an ideal raises substantial challenges for the practicality of…

Objective: The current study examined whether cognitive reactivity, cognitive extremity reactivity, and mood reactivity following mood provocation predicted relapse in depression over 5.5 years. Additionally, this study was the 1st to examine whether changes in cognitive reactivity and mood reactivity following preventive cognitive therapy (PCT)…

In this response, I agree with much of what Schrag says about the principled limits of neuroscience to inform educators' decisions about approaches to learning. However, I also raise questions about the extent to which discoveries about "deficits" in brain function could possibly help teachers. I dispute Schrag's view that externalism/internalism…

With the recent upswing in research interest on the moral implications of disgust, there has been uncertainty about what kind of situations elicit moral disgust and whether disgust is a rational or irrational player in moral decision making. We first outline the benefits of distinguishing between bodily violations (e.g., sexual taboos, such as…

Cognitive disequilibrium and its affiliated affective state of confusion have been found to positively correlate with learning, presumably due to the effortful cognitive activities that accompany their experience. Although confusion naturally occurs in several learning contexts, we hypothesize that it can be induced and scaffolded to increase…

Adoption, acceptance and, more recently, continued use of information technology (IT) in workplace contexts have been researched extensively over the last three decades. As acceptance and use of IT underlie its ability to fulfill expected business benefits, it is unsurprising that researchers have sustained a great interest in the topic. While…

This paper deals with autistic syntax and its expressions both in the fully fledged autistic structure and in the autistic zones of other personality structures. The musical notion of the organ point serves as a point of departure in an attempt to describe how autistic syntax transforms what was meant to constitute the substrate for linguistic…

Happiness is often measured in surveys using responses to a single question with a limited number of response options, such as "very happy", "fairly happy" and "not too happy". There is much variety in the wording and number of response options used, which limits comparability across surveys. To solve this problem, descriptive statistics of the…