As an African American deeply impacted by the personal and communal trauma from the police murder of George Floyd in May 2020 and alleged “racial reckoning” that took place globally immediately thereafter, I have personally wrestled with the responses of many non-Black persons to these events. Though the responses came from well-intentioned friends and colleagues trying to be helpful and conciliatory, they resonated as an empty refrain: “I don’t know what it means to be Black, but….” Each time I heard this refrain, I found myself pondering more deeply what and how these folks, and all folks, understand and practice empathy. My experiences and research revealed a similar concern that I witness across many situations in which people think they are being helpful when in fact they are not doing what real empathy requires – being with the person rather than trying to imagine what the person is going through. This article challenges the faulty ways that people have been taught to think about and practice empathy in hopes of offering a model that might facilitate in more meaningful ways ties that bind human hearts and minds.

This article examines the extent to which or how self-identified great powers resort to military aggression following events that challenge their sense of greatness. It problematises the prevalent notion that great powers and events exist and have effects independently of the narratives that constitute them. The article does this by engaging with Ontological Security Studies, Great Power Narcissism, and the psychology of vulnerable and grandiose narcissism, as well as by analysing Japanese identity narratives in two periods seemingly marked by equally challenging events – the Meiji era (1868–1912) and the post-war period (1950–71). It finds that Japan’s military aggression against China in 1894–5 was enabled by vulnerable narratives of shame and insult, while the decision to wage war with Russia a decade later was facilitated more by grandiose narratives. Despite Japan’s overwhelming defeat in the Second World War and the persistent desire among conservative elites for great power status and identity, however, overall post-war narratives did not feature similarly negative emotions and calls for revenge. Japanese great power aspirations were arguably curtailed in this period through intense narrative contestation, notably progressive counter-narratives featuring more self-reflective expressions of guilt and remorse, and even the self-reflexive desire for a non-great power identity.

The ability to manipulate brain function through the communication between the microorganisms in the gastrointestinal tract and the brain along the gut-brain axis has emerged as a potential option to improve cognitive and emotional health. Dietary composition and patterns have demonstrated a robust capacity to modulate the microbiota-gut-brain axis. With their potential to possess pre-, pro-, post-, and synbiotic properties, dietary fibre and fermented foods stand out as potent shapers of the gut microbiota and subsequent signalling to the brain. Despite this potential, few studies have directly examined the mechanisms that might explain the beneficial action of dietary fibre and fermented foods on the microbiota-gut-brain axis, thus limiting insight and treatments for brain dysfunction. Herein, we evaluate the differential effects of dietary fibre and fermented foods from whole food sources on cognitive and emotional functioning. Potential mediating effects of dietary fibre and fermented foods on brain health via the microbiota-gut-brain axis are described. Although more multimodal research that combines psychological assessments and biological sampling to compare each food type is needed, the evidence accumulated to date suggests that dietary fibre, fermented foods, and/or their combination within a psychobiotic diet can be a cost-effective and convenient approach to improve cognitive and emotional functioning across the lifespan.

Prosody includes the pitch, timing and loudness in speech, which can convey meaning and emotion. This study examines whether prosodic categories affect novel noun learning and whether the referent characteristic influence learning. Previous research showed that emotional prosody interfered with adults’ noun learning (West et al., 2017), but it had no effect on children (West et al., 2022). However, these researchers varied their method across ages, including animacy and complexity of the referent, and it is unclear if the results extend beyond the three emotional prosodies tested. Participants in the current set of studies heard novel words presented in five prosodic categories (within-subject) in order to learn the label for either animate or inanimate objects (between-subject). Study 1 compared inanimate objects and aliens, with better noun learning performance for inanimate objects. Study 2 compared inanimate objects with the same objects with faces added, but there was no difference in noun learning by object type. Both studies showed differences in noun learning by the prosodic category, with warning less accurate than naming. These results demonstrate how extralinguistic factors like prosody, attention and referent complexity influence noun learning.

This preregistered study replicates and extends studies concerning emotional response to wartime rally speeches and applies it to U.S. President Donald Trump’s first national address regarding the COVID-19 pandemic on March 11, 2020. We experimentally test the effect of a micro-expression (ME) by Trump associated with appraised threat on change in participant self-reported distress, sadness, anger, affinity, and reassurance while controlling for followership. We find that polarization is perpetuated in emotional response to the address which focused on portraying the COVID-19 threat as being of Chinese provenance. We also find a significant, albeit slight, effect by Trump’s ME on self-reported sadness, suggesting that this facial behavior served did not diminish his speech, instead serving as a form of nonverbal punctuation. Further exploration of participant response using the Linguistic Inventory and Word Count software reinforces and extends these findings.

Human evaluation of animal emotional expressivity can inform animal welfare. Qualitative Behavioural Assessment (QBA) has been applied to domesticated and some non-domesticated animals, but its use in primates is limited despite their emotional expressivity. We aimed to develop and apply a QBA for bonobos (Pan paniscus) through two consecutive studies. We applied Free Choice Profiling (FCP) and the Fixed List methodology, respectively, in Study 1 and 2, and invited students and bonobo experts to rate video clips of zoo-living bonobos of different sexes and age classes, and before and after moving to a new enclosure. In Study 1, students described dimension 1 as ranging from ‘quiet/calm’ to ‘angry/active’ and dimension 2 from ‘sad/anxious’ to ‘happy/loving’. Experts described dimension 1 ranging from ‘quiet/relaxed’ to ‘nervous/alert’ and dimension 2 from ‘nervous/bored’ to ‘playful/happy’. Using a fixed list of descriptors, informed by findings from Study 1, students in Study 2 described dimension 1 as ranging from ‘quiet/calm’ to ‘agitated/frustrated’, and dimension 2 from ‘sad/stressed’ to ‘happy/positively engaged’. Experts described dimension 1 as ranging from ‘quiet/calm’ to ‘active/excited’, and dimension 2 from ‘sad/bored’ to ‘happy/positively engaged’. Students scored adults as more ‘calm/quiet’ and experts scored subadults as more ‘happy/positively engaged’. Additionally, experts in Study 2 rated bonobos as more ‘active/excited’ in their new enclosure. Reliability was moderate to good for the dimensions. Additionally, animal-directed empathy of observers influenced QBA scores. This is the first time, FCP has been successfully used as a method to study primate emotional expressivity. Our findings show the promise of employing QBA in primate studies and in industry, with validation of additional metrics to enable its use for welfare-monitoring purposes.

The commemoration of Husain’s martyrdom named “Muharram” implies for the Shi’ite community that it publicly expresses its grief. This emotion is central to its definition, as Muharram is referred to as the “month of mourning” and the Shi’ite as a “community of mourners.” However, Muharram would not be equivalent across Pakistan, as a young Shi’ite fakir, who will serve as our guide, in this comparative study, points out. According to him, the sadness would be greater in Lahore (Punjab) than in Sehwan (Sindh), and for this reason Muharram would be better celebrated there. The comparison of the ritual process in these two cities, drawn from the experiences of this fakir and the ethnographer, will show how the production and expression of sadness are subject to contrasting experiences on the one hand, and divergent aims on the other, depending on the position of the actors in the social context in which they are lived.

Distributional semantic representations were used to investigate crossmodal correspondences within language, offering a comprehensive analysis of how sensory experiences interconnect in linguistic constructs. By computing semantic proximity between words from different sensory modalities, a crossmodal semantic network was constructed, providing a general view of crossmodal correspondences in the English language. Community detection techniques were applied to unveil domains of experience where crossmodal correspondences were likely to manifest, while also considering the role of affective dimensions in shaping these domains. The study revealed the existence of an architecture of structured domains of experience in language, whereby crossmodal correspondences are deeply embedded. The present research highlights the roles of emotion and statistical associations in the organization of sensory concepts across modalities in language. The domains identified, including food, the body, the physical world and emotions/values, underscored the intricate interplay between the senses, emotion and semantic patterns. These findings align with the embodied lexicon hypothesis and the semantic coding hypothesis, emphasizing the capacity of language to capture and reflect crossmodal correspondences’ emotional and perceptual subtleties in the form of networks, while also revealing opportunities for further perceptual research on crossmodal correspondences and multisensory integration.

Reading official letters and being able to react to them appropriately is part of the daily life of every adult in many countries. Although the history of the plain language movement dates to the past century, it is only now that efforts are being made in Poland to adapt official documents to their audience. In this paper, we describe the results of a study (N = 685) in which we examined how particular linguistic forms and text structure affect the reception of an official-looking text – comprehension as well as emotions experienced, trust in the office, feelings of helplessness in the situation of reading the writing, and many other variables. Based on Imbir’s (2016, New Ideas in Psychology, 43, 39–49), two-system theory of emotions, we aim to examine how emotions – triggered by these complex stimuli – affect their processing. We hope that the results of our interdisciplinary research will answer the questions and hypotheses posed by researchers and find application in the reforms currently underway. We believe that by linking findings from cognitive psychology, the psychology of emotions and linguistics, we will also expand knowledge in the broad discussion on overcoming barriers between administrative offices and target audiences.

Prior research suggests that bilinguals show reduced sensitivity to negative content when operating in the second language (L2). The available evidence, however, is limited to language comprehension. We tested the production of emotional words in Polish (L1)–English (L2) bilinguals in two EEG studies that manipulated emotional cueing. In Experiment 1 (neutral context), white or black circles indicated whether participants should read aloud (shadow) or translate a subsequently presented word. N400 amplitudes were selectively reduced for negative L2 words regardless of the task. In Experiment 2 (emotional context), we used black or white emojis, either sad or neutral, as cues. The previous interaction between word valence and language of operation vanished, but late positive potential amplitudes elicited by negative words were larger for translation from L2 to L1 (i.e., production in Polish) than L1 to L2. These results validate and extend to production previous findings of attenuated emotional response in L2 comprehension.