Anxious Reading: Interrogating Selective Empathy in Trauma Memoirs

The Neuroeconomics of Mind Reading and Empathy.

The most fundamental solution concepts in Game Theory – Nash equilibrium, backward induction, and iterated elimination of dominated strategies – are based on the assumption that people are capable of predicting others' actions. These concepts require people to be able to view the game from the other players’ perspectives, i.e. to understand others’ motives and beliefs. Economists still know lit...

Emotions in reading: disgust, empathy and the contextual learning hypothesis.

Emotion effects in reading have typically been investigated by manipulating words' emotional valence and arousal in lexical decision. The standard finding is that valence and arousal can have both facilitatory and inhibitory effects, which is hard to reconcile with current theories of emotion processing in reading. Here, we contrasted these theories with the contextual-learning hypothesis, acco...

Exposure to human tragedy, empathy, and trauma in ambulance paramedics.

Paramedics are exposed to events involving human pain and suffering on a daily basis, many of which are the result of violence perpetrated by 1 individual on another. For the most part, these emergency workers have learned to deal with such events and take them in stride. At times, however, certain circumstances lead workers to develop an emotional connection with the victim or his or her famil...

Anxious mothers... anxious babies?

Many mothers of infants experience days of worry and weeks of work—an experience made so much harder by the presence of a crying infant. Up to 20% of mothers in developed countries report excessive crying in their infants. Although often thought of as a benign, self-limiting condition, infant crying—in particular, crying that lasts more than 3 h per day, for more than 3 days per week and for mo...

EMDR Therapy: Trauma Research & Further Reading