While the role of the horse in riding hazards is well recognised, little attention has been paid to the role of specific theoretical psychological processes of humans in contributing to and mitigating risk. The injury, mortality or compensation claim rates for participants in the horse-racing industry, veterinary medicine and equestrian disciplines provide compelling evidence for improving risk...

Emotional events are followed by recurrent thoughts (i.e., mental rumination), and talking about the event (i.e., social sharing of emotion). Factors that can account for variations in these consequences were examined (i.e., emotional intensity, the Five Factor Model, and two factors of alexithymia). In two samples, participants reported the most negative emotional event of the last months and ...

Recent theories of psychopathology have suggested that thought suppression intensifies the persistence of intrusive thoughts, and proposed that difficulty with thought suppression may differ between groups with and without psychopathology. The current meta-analytic review evaluates empirical evidence for difficulty with thought suppression as a function of the presence and specific type of psyc...

Emotional thoughts are often accompanied by a host of additional or second order thoughts relevant for perceiving and regulating emotion and emotion-management processes. These meta-cognitive thoughts can play an important role in understanding psychological processes relevant to Emotional Intelligence. In the present article, we first provide a general meta-cognitive framework useful for class...

Negatively valenced thoughts are assumed to play a central role in the development and maintenance of anxiety. However, the role of positive thoughts in anxiety is rather unclear. In the current study we examined the role of negative and positive self-statements in the anxiety level of anxious and non-anxious children. Participants were 139 anxiety disordered children and 293 non-anxious childr...

In this study we examined the prospective relationships between perseverative thoughts, internalizing negative emotions, and somatic complaints in children aged 9-13, and evaluated whether a perseverative thoughts intervention had a beneficial effect on these experiences. Children (N=227) from 7 primary schools in Leiden, the Netherlands, recorded their perseverative thoughts during one week, 1...

When mind-wandering, people may think about events that happened in the past, or events that may happen in the future. Using experience sampling, we first aimed to replicate the finding that future-oriented thoughts show a greater positivity bias than past-oriented thoughts. Furthermore, we investigated whether there is a relation between the temporal distance of past- and future-oriented thoug...

It has been said that there is no stronger urge than the urge to edit someone else's writing. Upon my retirement from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), and concurrently from my position as co-editor-in-chief of Environmental Health Perspectives, I find that perhaps the stronger urge is not to edit but rather to editorialize. Therefore, I would like to provide some...

We live in a world so uncertain, so chancy, that we seek to fill it with certainty: fundamentalist truth, hard numbers, insurance policies, political correctness, regulatory schemes, IRBs, and tenure. But the truth is, nothing can save you from the loss at the heart of it all, the probability that you will wake, blinking, from a darkness you could not imagine, to a lit world you cannot expect. ...

Abstract: Jean Mandler proposes an original and richly detailed theory of how concepts relate to sensory and motor capacities. I focus on her claims about conceptual representations and the processes that produce them. On her view, concepts are declarative representations of object kind information. First, I argue that since sensorimotor representations may be declarative, there is no bar to pe...