Unbearable Sorrow

An unbearable task.

Man of unconscious sorrow.

Brosschot et al. in this issue [1] make a cogent and compelling argument for researchers to pay more attention to the role of unconscious processes. They argue that the prolonged physiological activity of the type that that produces wear and tear on the body and eventual stressrelated illness may be more due to unconscious worry and distress than researchers have previously recognized. This unc...

A Sorrow Shared Is a Sorrow Halved: Moral Judgments of Harm to Single versus Multiple Victims

We describe a bias in moral judgment in which the mere existence of other victims reduces assessments of the harm suffered by each harmed individual. Three experiments support the seemingly paradoxical relationship between the number of harmed individuals and the perceived severity of the harming act. In Experiment 1a, participants expressed lower punitive intentions toward a perpetrator of an ...

The Unbearable Automaticity of Being

What was noted by E. J. hanger (1978) remains true today: that much of contemporary psychological research is based on the assumption that people are consciously and systematically processing incoming information in order to construe and interpret their world and to plan and engage in courses of action. As did E. J. hanger, the authors question this assumption. First, they review evidence that ...

The unbearable lightness of breathing.

asthma but remains largely unexplained. The new concept of perturbed myosin binding within airway smooth muscle sheds light on the question of why airway narrowing is limited in the healthy lung and not in the asthmatic lung and points to unanticipated mechanisms through which lung development and allergic status may be major modulators of airway hyperresponsiveness. (J Allergy Clin Immunol 200...