Dear John

Are 'Dear John' letters lethal weapons in the hands of men at war? Many US officers, servicemen, veterans, and civilians would say yes. Drawing on personal letters, oral histories, and psychiatric reports, as well as popular music and movies, Susan L. Carruthers shows how the armed forces and civilian society have attempted to weaponize romantic love in pursuit of martial ends, from World War II to today. Yet efforts to discipline feeling have frequently failed. And women have often borne the blame. This sweeping history of emotional life in wartime explores the interplay between letter-writing and storytelling, breakups and breakdowns, and between imploded intimacy and boosted camaraderie. Incorporating vivid personal experiences in lively and engaging prose – variously tragic, comic, and everything in between – this compelling study will change the way we think about wartime relationships.

Pseudomentalization as a Challenge for Therapists of Group Psychotherapy With Drug Addicted Patients

One of the main challenges in group therapy with drug-addicted patients is collective pseudomentalization, i.e., a group discourse consisting of words and clichés that are decoupled from any inner emotional life and are poorly related to external reality. In this study, we aimed to explore the phenomenology of pseudomentalization and how it was addressed by the therapist in an outpatient group for drug-addicted patients. The group was composed of seven members, and the transcripts of eight audio-recorded sessions (one per month) were rated and studied. The interventions of the therapist were measured with the mentalization-based group therapy (MBT-G) adherence and quality scale by independent raters. Two sessions, one with the highest and one with the lowest adherence, were selected, and the clinical sequences of pseudomentalization were analyzed in a comparative way. The findings revealed that pseudomentalization does occur as a collective phenomenon, akin to “basic assumptions” of Wilfred Bion, which we reconceptualized in this study. Any pseudomentalization seemed to be reinforced by the therapist when she was presenting frequent and long interventions, when abstaining from the management of group boundaries, when providing questions focused more on content than on the mental states of the group members, and when not focusing on emotions. However, the ultimate source of collective pseudomentalization seemed to be the fear of the group members of being overwhelmed by painful emotions, mental confusion, and a loss of identity. The findings also indicated that the principles of MBT-G may be a good antidote to pseudomentalization.

The Thinking Fetus: Descartes at the Brink of Psychoanalysis

Descartes’s philosophy of the passions is central for an understanding of seventeenth-century ideas of affects and emotions and for the history of emotions overall. But does it have bearing today? In this article, I argue that Descartes raises the question of how the infantile relation to the maternal body influences the emotional life of the adult, a question that is still relevant for psychoanalysis and neuropsychology. In the philosophical scholarship on Descartes, the passages which pertain to the infant, or the fetus, and its alleged ‘confused thought’, are often quoted to demonstrate the challenges to dualism that are inherent in his own writings. However, I argue that these discussions point also to the complexity of the development of affects and emotions. In my reading, I show that Descartes’s ideas of the passions can be seen as precursory to psychoanalytic theories of object relations. This opens the way for a new trajectory of research involving fantasy, instincts and repression in the Cartesian analysis of emotions and affects.

How the Emotional Environment Shapes the Emotional Life of the Child

Emotion understanding facilitates the development of healthy social interactions. To develop emotion knowledge, infants and young children must learn to make inferences about people's dynamically changing facial and vocal expressions in the context of their everyday lives. Given that emotional information varies so widely, the emotional input that children receive might particularly shape their emotion understanding over time. This review explores how variation in children's received emotional input shapes their emotion understanding and their emotional behavior over the course of development. Variation in emotional input from caregivers shapes individual differences in infants’ emotion perception and understanding, as well as older children's emotional behavior. Finally, this work can inform policy and focus interventions designed to help infants and young children with social-emotional development.

PSYCHOLOGICAL FACTORS OF EMOTIONAL INSTABILITY IN ADOLESCENTS

The article presents an overview of the problem of the affective sphere of adolescents on both theoretical and empirical levels. Its relevance and, at the same time, the prospect for further research is justified. It was revealed that the emotional life of persons of pubertal period is differently disclosed in the scientific heritage of foreign scientists, but insufficiently covered in the domestic. Correlations between the emotional experiences of adolescents and their relationships with parents, peers; gender identity; eating disorders, etc., were established. Against the background of emphasizing the influence of various external psychological factors in the life of an adolescent, the topic of the intrapersonal, psychological potential of persons of this age remains open. Taking into account the topicality of the problem of emotional instability of teenagers, we aimed to find out in detail, from an empirical point of view, the internal psychological reasons of this phenomenon. For this purpose, the ascertaining experiment was carried out which involved 300 pupils of 6-7 and 8-9 forms of the general secondary educational institutions of the Ternopil region (Berezhanska Secondary School № 1 and Berezhanska Secondary School № 2). Respondents were offered specific, according to the formulated scientific problem, a package of psychodiagnostic techniques, directed to the research of features of the level of manifestation as well as categories of hypothetical factors of emotional stability of adolescents. The next stage of the study involved processing the data by factor analysis using the capabilities of Microsoft Excel and SPSS 21 software. As a result, 10 psychological factors that cause emotional instability in adolescents were identified. Among them: imbalance of self-esteem and personal abilities, personal insecurity compensated by self-control, low resistance to stress, impulsiveness against insecurity, dissonance in the assessment of one's own self, motivational polarity, emotional uncertainty, public insecurity, uncertainty in own abilities, confident behavior. The prospect of our study is the development and practical implementation of social psychological training as a means of correcting dysregulation of the affective sphere of personality and the development of their emotional stability.

Cultural values of Hung Kings worship in Vietnam

The worship of Hung Kings is a unique type of beliefs that takes an important role in the spiritual and emotional life of many Vietnamese generations. This type of beliefs has existed since ancient times and has become one of the factors that create an exceptional and influential culture of the Vietnamese people. This article studies the history of formation and development of Hung Kings worship and cultural values of Hung Kings worship to understand the spiritual meaning, sense of origin, moral traditions of this beliefs in the spiritual life of Vietnam.

Fraseologismi con la componente somatica cuore nella lingua croata e italiana. Approccio contrastivo

The article provides a cognitive analysis of phraseological units with the heart component in comparative terms. The purpose of the analysis is to show the similarities and differences in expressing emotions (positive, neutral and negative) between two languages originating from different linguistic groups: the Croatian language (South Slavic group) and the Italian language (from the group of the Romance languages). Phraseological units are analysed on the basis of three criteria: identical in both languages; partially adequate in both languages; idiomatic for one language. The research presents the motivation of phraseologisms and aims to prove that the heart is related to human emotional life and is a container for feelings.

Simondon, emotion, and individuation: The tensions of psychological life in digital worlds

This article develops new theoretical connections that offer insight regarding the status and operation of emotion in digitally mediated environments. I draw on Gilbert Simondon’s concepts of emotion and affectivity—as key dimensions of his philosophy of individuation—to articulate an account that situates emotion at the heart of psychological life, while accounting for its role in the continuous practices of (re)solving psychic and collective tensions. Simondon offers a model of the psychological subject as operating simultaneously in and through relations with itself as subject and with itself as part of the collective. This informs the analysis in this article seeking to demonstrate that the reductionism and individualising operation of emerging digitised models of emotion render them of limited value to understanding emotional life in digital worlds.

Origins of translation and simulation in terms of theory and practice: Translation of Muhammad Iqbal's Urdu and Persian poetry in Arabic as a model

Translation has a great importance in the development of human sciences in every age. First, we examine the theories of writers and critics mentioned in the translation and simulation. Translator must know the function of the symbolic language that differs from the metaphors and similes. Translation is the best way to enrich the languages in which the literatures are formulated, which must be in constant contact with what human thought offers, and the writer or translator must take a position of criticism and scrutiny. The translator must not forget that he does not convey the meanings of words only, but also conveys the cultural spirit and emotional life of the era in which these texts were composed. Finally, this article studies the subject of translating the poetry by the poetry and makes the translation of Muhammad Iqbal's poetry from Urdu and Persian into Arabic as a model for studying the translated works of various Arab poet translators as the theory and application, in order to know the extent of the success of the translators in their works. This is a critical study in which the descriptive analytical method is used, which is useful in studying such expressive arts. In this research, the researchers reached this conclusion that the translation of the poetry by the poetry should not be to show the linguistic and artistic prowess, but rather the language used in translation should be a realistic language studies that there are some souls behind the word that must be realized.

False Sincerity: College Students' Ritualistic Praise from the Perspective of Interactive Ritual Chains

In the modern society where the pressure of interpersonal communication is increasing, the ritualistic interactions represented by mutual praise reinterprets the interpersonal communication behavior of youth groups to some extent. In traditional interpersonal interaction, the connotation of sincerity, affirmation and identification represented by "praise" has been deprived and replaced. According to the needs of social interaction and individual emotional needs, college students have given new connotation to "praise", showing a changing trend from sincere praise to deliberate flattering. Based on this, this paper puts forward the concept of "ritualistic praise", and analyzes the causes and influences of this phenomenon from the perspective of interactive ritual chains, to get a glimpse of the emotional life patterns of young people in the context of modern interpersonal communication.