How Do Young People Deal with Border Tensions When Making Climate-Friendly Food Choices? On the Importance of Critical Emotional Awareness for Learning for Social Change

If we are going to be able to fight climate change in an effective way there is a need for a profound sustainability transformation of society. The question is how everyday pro-environmental behavior such as climate-friendly food choices should be looked upon in this context: as something that hides the need for structural change, or as a starting point for a profound transformation? The aim is to discuss how emotions related to conflicts encountered when trying to make everyday climate-friendly food choices in a society that is not always sustainable can be used to promote transformational learning. Interviews were performed with 15 adolescents. Emotions felt in relation to conflicts and how the youth cope were explored. The results show that the youth mainly felt individualized emotions of guilt, helplessness, and irritation and that they coped primarily by distancing themselves from emotions felt, but also sometimes in a problem-focused way and through positive reappraisal. Results are discussed in relation to theories about critical emotional awareness and prefigurative politics. It is argued that by taking account of emotional aspects related to everyday conflicts in a critical manner, issues such as justice could be brought to the surface and transformative learning could be enhanced.

Meta-Analysis of the Associations Among Constructs of Intrapersonal Emotion Knowledge

To better define the boundaries of conceptually overlapping constructs of intrapersonal emotion knowledge (EK), we examined meta-analytic correlations among five intrapersonal EK-related constructs (affect labelling, alexithymia, emotional awareness, emotional clarity, emotion differentiation) and attention to emotion. Affect labelling, alexithymia, and emotional clarity were strongly associated, and they were moderately associated with attention to emotion. Alexithymia and emotional awareness were weakly associated, and emotion differentiation was unrelated with emotional clarity. Sample characteristics and measures moderated some of the associations. Publication bias was not found, except for the alexithymia-emotional awareness association. This study helped to clarify the extent to which similarly defined constructs overlap or are distinct, which can inform our decision to adequately label important constructs and employ corresponding measures.

The Role of Self-Efficacy in the Thesis-Writing Experiences of Undergraduate Honors Students

Writing a thesis is often the culminating experience for undergraduate students enrolled in university honors programs in the United States. Because writing a thesis is one of the most difficult academic tasks that an undergraduate student may undertake, it requires a high level of self-efficacy, or belief in one’s capabilities to achieve certain results. However, the factors that contribute to students’ efficacy expectations when writing a thesis are not fully understood. This qualitative study followed 11 honors students over the course of several months in order to understand their experiences as they completed their theses. Data was gathered through a series of four questionnaires and two interviews. Analysis revealed six themes: previous research experiences, emotions, project timelines, structure, advisors, and support networks. These themes suggest that students’ abilities to manage their emotions and employ self-regulatory strategies play a critical role in their self-assessments of efficacy during work on challenging academic tasks, findings which have implications for a variety of academic programs and campus support services. In addition, this study reveals that faculty mentoring of undergraduate students may require greater attention to cultivating emotional awareness and regulation than does the mentoring of graduate students.

Emotional Intelligence as the Subject of Studying Metacognitive Processes in Universities

In the context of modern digital transformation of all aspects of the socioeconomic environment, training university students for analytical processing of increasing inflows of data and dealing with complex cognitive tasks driven by metacognition has become of particular importance. The research is aimed to review the structure of metacognitive processing, the development factors of metacognitive skills, the relation of metacognitive skills to emotional and cognitive skills, and to determine their role in the achievement of academic success of university students. Methodology. The research is undertaken on the basis of theoretical investigation and comprehensive analysis of theoretical conceptualization of intelligence. The authors have researched the derivation of metacognition, the structure of self-regulating metacognitive processes and their interaction with cognitive and affective processes. The research findings confirm that the metacognitive experience provides self-reflection, emotional awareness of feelings, estimating relationships between emotional states and the degree of implementation or attainability of a cognitive task. The authors conclude that emotional intelligence is manifested in metacognitive skills and predicts academic success. Also, teaching and learning strategies are required to be refined taking into account the development of emotional and metacognitive skills of university students.

The Influence of Emotional Awareness on Time Perception: Evidence From Event-Related Potentials

Prior studies found that participants overestimated both negative and positive emotional stimuli, compared with neutral emotion. This phenomenon can be explained by the “arousal mechanism.” Participants demonstrated individual differences in emotion perception. In other words, high emotional awareness resulted in high emotional arousal, and vice versa. This study extended existing findings by exploring the influence of emotional awareness on time perception in a temporal generalization task, while recording electroencephalographic (EEG) signals. The findings revealed that in the positive emotion condition, the high emotional awareness group made more overestimations, compared with the low emotional awareness group. However, no difference was observed in the neutral or negative emotion conditions. Moreover, the event-related potential (ERP) results showed that in the positive emotion condition, the high awareness group elicited larger vertex positive potential (VPP) amplitudes, compared with that of the low awareness group. However, no such differences were observed in the neutral and negative emotion conditions. Moreover, the contingent negative variation (CNV) (200–300, 300–490 ms) component showed that in the positive emotion, the amplitudes of the high awareness group were larger than that of the low awareness group; however, they did not show differences in the neutral condition. The findings of this study suggest that high emotional awareness produces higher physiological arousal; moreover, when participants were required to estimate the time duration of emotional pictures, they tended to make higher time overestimation. Thus, our results support the relationship between emotional awareness and time perception.

An Investigation on Well-being and Emotional Intelligence among Young Adults

Subjective well-being is a psychological aspect of life satisfaction. An individual’s psychological well-being affects how a person thinks and feels. There are numerous factors which can influence the subjective well-being of an individual. One of the most important factors is emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence has been preoccupying a significant place in well-being literature. Goleman (1998) defines it as “emotional awareness and emotional management abilities give the ability to balance emotion and reason in order to maximise long-term enjoyment". It entails recognising one's own and others feelings, managing one's own emotions, and adapting to others emotions. The objective of this study was to examine the nature of the relationship between emotional intelligence and psychological well-being among young adults who are following bachelor degrees from recognized national universities. The sample consists of 200 participants both male and female of age range 19 to 23 years mean age is 21, included in this study. Well-being Inventory and Multidimensional Measures of Emotional Intelligence were administered to measure the subjective well-being and emotional intelligence. Results showed that selfawareness, managing emotions, motivating oneself, handling relations dimension of emotional intelligence evidenced strong positive associations with well-being positive affect, well-being negative affect and well-being total dimensions of well-being. Stepwise regression analysis disclosed two predictors of well-being i.e. managing emotions and motivating oneself. These results have important implications with regard to our current understanding of the relationships between well-being and emotional intelligence.

Clarifying the relationship between alexithymia and subjective interoception

The long-standing hypothesis that emotions rely on bodily states is back in the spotlight. This has led some researchers to suggest that alexithymia, a personality construct characterized by altered emotional awareness, reflects a general deficit in interoception. However, tests of this hypothesis have relied on heterogeneous assessment methods, leading to inconsistent results. To shed some light on this issue, we administered a battery of self-report questionnaires of interoception and alexithymia to three samples from Italy, the U.S., and Singapore (N = 814). Correlation and machine learning analyses showed that alexithymia was associated with deficits in both subjective interoceptive accuracy and attention. Alexithymics’ interoceptive deficits were primarily related to difficulty identifying and describing feelings. Interoception showed a weaker association with externally-oriented thinking as operationalized by the Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS-20) and no association with the affective dimension of alexithymia later introduced by the Bermond-Vorst Alexithymia Questionnaire (BVAQ). We discuss our results with reference to the theoretical and psychometric differences between these two measures of alexithymia and their shortcomings. Overall, our results support the view that interoceptive deficits are a core component of alexithymia, although the latter cannot be reduced to the former.