A School-Based Progressive Muscle Relaxation Program for Female Adolescents: Development and the Effectiveness on Physiological and Psychological Evidence

(1) Background: A variety of stressors may be potentially harmful to adolescents’ health and well-being. Relaxation techniques have been recognized as a valid method for stress release, but the challenge is to apply them practically in schools to produce the desired effects. (2) Methods: This feasibility study used the Perceived Stress Scale (PSS) and hair cortisol concentration (HCC) to test the effects of an abbreviated progressive muscle relaxation (APMR) program on female adolescents. The participants were recruited from a high school and assigned by class cluster to either the experimental group (EG, n = 40) or the control group (CG, n = 35). Both received 4 weeks of stress-related lessons. The EG received 60 additional sessions of APMR over 12 weeks. (3) Results: The program dropout rate of the participants was 1.3%. The EG’s program adhesion rate was 99.1%, and nearly half felt satisfied with the program. After adjusting for the BMI and the pretest in the ANCOVA, it was found that the CG had a greater change in HCC between the pre- and post-tests than the EG, while the PSS did not change significantly in either group. (4) Conclusion: APMR is a valid practice for physiological homeostasis of HCC for female adolescents, but it has no significant effect on perceived stress.

Movies on Our Minds

Why do we enjoy popular movies? This book explores perceptual, cognitive, and emotional reasons for our engagement. It considers effects of camera lenses and the layout of images. It outlines the types of transitions between shots, and it traces their historical functions and changes. It classifies different kinds of shots and the changes in them across a century. It explains the arcs of scenes and how they fit into the larger structure of sequences, and then it explores scene- and sequence-like units that have become increasingly prevalent in recent years. It then breaks movies into larger, roughly half-hour parts and provides psychological evidence for them. Finally, it explores the rhythms of whole movies, first observing the flow of physical changes—shot durations, luminance, motion, and clutter—as it has developed over time, and then how cinematic polyrhythms have come to match aspects of those in the human body. Overall, this book focuses on how the narration, the manner in which the story is told, has come to reinforce the structure of the narrative, the story proper. It uses several hundred popular movies released over a century and embeds its exploration in discussions of evolution, culture, and technological change. The changes in movies have contributed to viewers’ engagement by sustaining attention, promoting understanding of the narrative, heightening emotional commitment, and fostering their felt presence in the story. Examples of cinematic effects in particular movies are given at every turn.

An Implicit Memory-Based Method for Supervised Pattern Recognition

How the human brain does recognition is still an open question. No physical or biological experiment can fully reveal this process. Psychological evidence is more about describing phenomena and laws than explaining the physiological processes behind them. The need for interpretability is well recognized. This paper proposes a new method for supervised pattern recognition based on the working pattern of implicit memory. The artificial neural network (ANN) is trained to simulate implicit memory. When an input vector is not in the training set, the ANN can treat the input as a “do not care” term. The ANN may output any value when the input is a “do not care” term since the training process needs to use as few neurons as possible. The trained ANN can be expressed as a function to design a pattern recognition algorithm. Using the Mixed National Institute of Standards and Technology database, the experiments show the efficiency of the pattern recognition method.

The physiological study of emotional piloerection: A review and guide for future research

This paper provides an accessible review of the biological and psychological evidence to guide new and experienced researchers in the study of emotional piloerection in humans. I first discuss the mechanisms and function of non-emotional and emotional piloerection. A systematic review (N = 27) reveals that indices of sympathetic activation are abundant, suggesting emotional piloerection occurs with increased skin conductivity and heart rate. Measures of emotions and parasympathetic activation are lacking and no clear conclusions can be drawn. Finally, I provide an overview of the methodological possibilities and I highlight some pressing questions researchers may wish to answer in future studies.

The Virtue of Epistemic Trustworthiness and Re-Posting on Social Media

Re-posting fake news on social media exposes others to epistemic risks that include not only false belief but also misguided trust in the source of the fake news. The risk of misguided trust comes from the fact that re-posting is a kind of credentialing; as a new kind of speech-act, re-posting does not yet have established norms and so runs an additional risk of “bent credentialing.” This chapter proposes that other-regarding epistemic virtues can help us mitigate the epistemic risks that come with re-posting—specifically the virtue of epistemic trustworthiness. It further considers how an epistemically trustworthy person should regulate her re-posting behavior in light of the psychological evidence that retracting false beliefs is far more difficult than might be supposed. Behaving in an epistemically trustworthy way requires being responsive to the real risks that our actions expose others to, as well as recognizing the real ways that others depend on us.

Are there really so many moral emotions? Carving morality at its functional joints

In recent decades, a large body of work has highlighted the importance of emotional processes in moral cognition. Since then, a heterogeneous bundle of emotions as varied as anger, guilt, shame, contempt, empathy, gratitude, and disgust have been proposed to play an essential role in moral psychology. However, the inclusion of these emotions in the moral domain often lacks a clear functional rationale, generating conflations between merely social and properly moral emotions. Here, we build on (i) evolutionary theories of morality as an adaptation for attracting others’ cooperative investments, and on (ii) specifications of the distinctive form and content of moral cognitive representations. On this basis, we argue that only indignation (“moral anger”) and guilt can be rigorously characterized as moral emotions, operating on distinctively moral representations. Indignation functions to reclaim benefits to which one is morally entitled, without exceeding the limits of justice. Guilt functions to motivate individuals to compensate their violations of moral contracts. By contrast, other proposed moral emotions (e.g. empathy, shame, disgust) appear only superficially associated with moral cognitive contents and adaptive challenges. Shame doesn’t track, by design, the respect of moral obligations, but rather social valuation, the two being not necessarily aligned. Empathy functions to motivate prosocial behavior between interdependent individuals, independently of, and sometimes even in contradiction with the prescriptions of moral intuitions. While disgust is often hypothesized to have acquired a moral role beyond its pathogen-avoidance function, we argue that both evolutionary rationales and psychological evidence for this claim remain inconclusive for now.

Folk conceptions of free will: A systematic review and narrative synthesis of psychological research

The existence of free will has been a subject of fierce academic debate for millennia, still the meaning of the term “free will” remains nebulous. In the past two decades, psychologists have made considerable progress in defining lay concepts of free will. We present the first systematic review of primary psychological evidence on how ordinary folk conceptualise free will, encompassing folk concepts, beliefs, intuitions, and attitudes about free will. A total of 1,384 records were identified following a pre-registered protocol. After abstract and full-text screening, 18 articles were eligible for inclusion, comprised of 36 studies and 10,176 participants from regions including the United States, Singapore, Hong Kong, India, Turkey, and Germany. A narrative synthesis of results showed that for ordinary folk, especially the more educated population from the United States, free will is a dynamic construct centred on the ability to choose following one’s goals and desires, whilst being uncoerced and reasonably free from constraints. Results suggesting metaphysical considerations regarding consciousness, dualism, and determinism were inconclusive. Our findings provided preliminary support for a psychological model of folk conception of free will, and elucidated potential pathways mediating the effects of consciousness and dualism on free will attributions. Further research is needed to explicate the distinction between having free will and having the ability to exercise free will, as well as the cross-cultural validity of findings on folk conceptions of free will.

Folk conceptions of free will: A systematic review and narrative synthesis of psychological research

The existence of free will has been a subject of fierce academic debate for millennia, still the meaning of the term “free will” remains nebulous. In the past two decades, psychologists have made considerable progress in defining folk concepts of free will. However, this growing body of literature has yet to be reviewed systematically. This systematic review aimed to narratively synthesise primary psychological evidence on folk conceptions of free will, encompassing folk concepts, beliefs, intuitions, and attitudes about free will, to provide a definition grounded in laypeople’s perspective to guide future research. Database searches were conducted following a pre-registered search strategy. A total of 1,368 records were identified through database searching, and 16 additional records were identified through reference mining, author tracing, and contacting authors for unpublished manuscripts. After duplicate removal, ASReview, an open-source machine learning programme, was used to facilitate and optimise abstract screening. Finally, 57 full-text articles were assessed for eligibility, and 18 articles were eligible for inclusion, comprised of 36 studies and 10,176 participants from regions including the United States, Singapore, Hong Kong, India, Turkey, and Germany. The results showed that for ordinary folk, especially the more educated population from the United States, free will is a dynamic construct centred on the ability to choose following one’s goals and desires, whilst being uncoerced and reasonably free from constraints. Results suggesting metaphysical considerations regarding consciousness, dualism, and determinism were inconclusive. The findings provided preliminary support for a psychological model of folk conception of free will. All data and coding are openly shared.

Effects of playing Go for education and psychological treatment

The ancient board game Go is traditionally used as educational tool in East Asian countries. Recently, neurobiological and psychological evidence has been found on the effects of Go playing regarding various intellectual and emotional factors. In this survey, we summarize these results and develop a coherent picture of the value that Go can add to education, as well as to psychological treatment. We will also briefly highlight what makes Go special as compared to other commonly played board games.