The horror film industry brings in viewers from all over the world and from every caste of life. But, people differ greatly in their enjoyment of horror movies. The primary purpose of this research was to look at the individual differences in people’s horror film viewing behavior; furthermore, whether certain personality traits predicted physiological reactions to horror film viewing. This rese...

Current conceptions of anhedonia as a key symptom of depression do not consider the importance of anticipatory, consummatory, and recall deficits involved in anhedonia. Sixty-one depressed and non-depressed, college-student participants provided reports of anticipated pleasure to tasting chocolates, tasted chocolates and rated their experience of pleasure, and provided recalled reports of pleas...

Four studies investigated the utility of finding meaning in past wrongdoing to promote intergroup reconciliation. Studies 1a, 1b, and 2 demonstrated that prompting members of perpetrator groups to engage in redemption narratives increases collective guilt and willingness to make reparations—both important in obtaining victims’ forgiveness. Further, Study 2 suggests that redemption narratives (b...

We present a model linking perceptions of job insecurity to emotional reactions and negative coping behaviors. Our model is based on the idea that emotional variables explain, in part, discrepant findings reported in previous research. In particular, we propose that emotional intelligence moderates employees’ emotional reactions to job insecurity, and their ability to cope with associated stres...

This study investigated the effects of self-focused attention and evaluation on the perceived performance of individuals high in social anxiety. High and low socially anxious participants (n = 92) were asked to give four short speeches under different conditions of increased self-focused attention (in front of a mirror) or decreased self-focused attention (in front of a poster), and/or under co...

Although scholars from many disciples have contributed hypotheses to explain why humans are a musical species, relatively little empirical evidence exists in favor of any perspective. I argue that music evolved as a tool to facilitate social bonding and is, therefore, able to make people feel more connected to one another. If this is the case, then music may be able to facilitate the reduction ...

A common social comparison bias—the better-than-average-effect—is frequently described as psychologically equivalent to the individual judgment bias known as overconfidence. However, research has found “hard-easy” effects for each bias that yield a seemingly paradoxical reversal: Hard tasks tend to produce overconfidence but worse-than-average perceptions, whereas easy tasks tend to produce und...

modes of thought: abstract general-level dispositions, which indirectly guide specific behavioral intentions. Includes distinctive conceptual resources, cognitive styles, personality traits, and aspects of selfconcept. The key commonalties are that these modes of thought are reasonably consistent across the life-span and their influence reaches across multiple behavioral domains. Cultural norms...

Spirituality has mostly been studied in psychology as implied in the process of overcoming adversity, being triggered by negative experiences, and providing positive outcomes. By reversing this pathway, we investigated whether spirituality may also be triggered by selftranscendent positive emotions, which are elicited by stimuli appraised as demonstrating higher good and beauty. In two studies,...

Emotion has become one of the most popular—and popularized—areas within organizational scholarship. This chapter attempts to review and bring together within a single framework the wide and often disjointed literature on emotion in organizations. The integrated framework includes processes detailed by previous theorists who have defined emotion as a sequence that unfolds chronologically. The em...