To examine the relationship between grief reactions and alexithymia, 54 Japanese women (33 outpatients attending a psychosomatic clinic and 21 normal healthy participants) completed the Texas Inventory of Grief (TIG), the 20-item Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS-20), and the Profile of Mood States (POMS). Each woman had experienced the death of a…

Although much has been written recently about prison "writing" in general (Wally Lamb's Couldn't Keep It to Myself, Mark Salzman's True Notebooks), far less has been written about the efforts and challenges involved in helping prisoners. In this case, females in a maximum-security prison in Westchester County, New York, learn the kind of writing…

This study explores informants' experiences in a reading/writing program that paired eighth-grade language arts students with elderly volunteers. Twenty-three pairs were followed over an academic year as they read books in common, corresponded in response journals, and met in person at program social events. Through analysis of interviews, their…

Attachment researchers claim that individual differences in how adults talk about their early memories reflect qualitatively distinct organizations of emotion regarding childhood experiences with caregivers. Testing this assumption, the present study examined the relationship between attachment dimensions and physiological, facial expressive, as…

This article proposes that we move beyond posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in our conceptualization of traumatic stress responses of victimized women exposed to serial forms of unrelenting violence, such as intimate partner violence and stalking. It is argued that the traditional PTSD framework is ill fitting in the context of some forms of…

In this study, students' personality traits were investigated in relation to course grade in an undergraduate management course taught by the same professor and overall college grade point average (GPA). Conscientiousness positively and significantly predicted overall GPA over and beyond other personality traits of agreeableness, extroversion,…

Despite the enthusiasm for coping research, reviewers are concerned that much of the research has failed to live up to expectations as to its practical relevance. Yet the debate about the application of coping research is not short on writers pointing the way forward. By examining a number of issues at the heart of the debate on coping research…

The author argues that infants frequently give us hints that they are capable of fundamentally spiritual experiences. Three such experiences are presence, joy, and awareness of others' awareness. When babies begin to sense disapproval or anger in their caregivers, they begin a search for love that includes the development of a False Self and a…

Background: Intact emotion processing is critical for normal emotional development. Recent advances in neuroimaging have facilitated the examination of brain development, and have allowed for the exploration of the relationships between the development of emotion processing abilities, and that of associated neural systems. Methods: A literature…

A performance-based assessment of the structure and complexity of emotional awareness was developed, the Levels of Emotional Awareness Scale for Children (LEAS-C). A pilot study (N=6, ages 9-12, M [subscript age]=10.2 years) was conducted to construct, trial, and select scenarios suitable for the scale. A larger validity study (N=51, ages 10-11, M…

Flaherty's cross-cultural theory purports to account for variation in the perceived passage of time. Recent events in Argentina provide an opportunity to assess the applicability of this theory to a Latin American nation. We conducted interviews with 198 persons who participated in various kinds of political activism. The respondents who felt that…

Immigrants arriving in a new country typically have varying ideas about the relative status of their native language and the language of the receiving society, and some have strategies for dealing with maintenance and shift. In all cases there are differences between the immigrants' language experiences in the two countries. This paper reports on…

Difficulties in the cognitive processing of emotions--including difficulties identifying and describing feelings--are assumed to be an integral part of autism. We studied such difficulties via self-report in 27 high-functioning adults with autistic spectrum disorders, their biological relatives (n = 49), and normal adult controls (n = 35), using…

A previous study by Muris, Merckelbach, and Van Spauwen [1] demonstrated that children display emotional reasoning irrespective of their anxiety levels. That is, when estimating whether a situation is dangerous, children not only rely on objective danger information but also on their "own" anxiety-response. The present study further examined…

Some babies have a lot more separation anxiety than others. Between 9 and 16 months, some infants become very upset when separated from their parents. In this article, the author gives advice to caregivers on how to comfort and soothe infants who exhibit separation anxiety.