Archive

Bad day? How it can seem even worse for some

Many people do not realize how often our emotions affect us. Our emotions dictate what things we focus on or attend to, how we interpret things, and what things we think of or memories we recall. This article aims to describe how emotion processing biases occur in our lives.

The positive and negative events we experience during the day set the tone for the...

Hot or cold morality? (Part 1)

How do we make moral judgments? Are people cold, calculating Vulcans? Or are they affectively hot hedonists? Researchers often present morality as a war between vying ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ processes, but in this two-part blog post I argue that the distinction is a false choice. Morality is both hot and cold, but not in the way previous research leads people to believe. / more

How stress influences our morality

All of us are stressed every now and then. There are phenomena we usually associate with stress, like health risks and feelings like fear, panic, or insecurity. But stress might also have effects we normally don’t think of; recent studies suggest it can dramatically influence our decision-making in a number of—perhaps unexpected—ways. This becomes particularly relevant in the moral context: people who are put under stress behave more compassionately in some situations, yet the opposite can be...

Revisiting the past can make the present a better place: The psychological and social benefits of nostalgia

For centuries nostalgia was viewed as an illness of the brain or mind. The consensus was that nostalgia caused physical and mental distress and by orienting people’s attention to the past, it prevented them from living fully and healthily in the present. However, this view lacked scientific support. In recent years, social psychologists have employed scientific methods to more systematically consider the psychological effects of ... / more

Smile! And I tell you where you’re from

Although popular belief (and a heartwarming children’s song) holds that we all laugh in the same language, recent research has found that people are remarkably adapt at detecting local accents in the way that emotions are expressed. In this blog, I will review the research that suggests that the long-assumed universality of emotions is limited. / more

Why do we sometimes enjoy the misfortune of others?

Have you ever been in a situation where you couldn’t resist a little smile when someone else had a setback? Have you ever experienced joy when another person suffered a mishap? We’ve all probably been in that situation and we’ve all felt that joy. The German language coined the word Schadenfreude—a compound word of the German words 'Schaden' meaning 'harm' and 'Freude' meaning 'joy'—for the pleasure at the misfortunes of others and nowadays it is used as a... / more

Honor and Emotion

This paper discusses honor and its effects on emotion. The paper is divided into two parts. In the first part, the definition of honor is discussed. This section answers the questions ‘what is honor,’ and ‘are there different types of honor?’ Later, there is an overview on the ways in which honor influences emotional experiences and expressions. Throughout the paper, conclusions are reached based on honor and emotion research in Mediterranean, Northern European, North American and Middle-Eastern cultures. Imagine as... / more