This study examined the role of emotional awareness in couples' relationships and the effects of a tendency to respond to difficult couples' situations with "soft" emotions (including sadness and fear) versus "hard" emotions (including anger and resentment). Participants were 56 heterosexual couples who completed a measure of relationship satisfaction and two measures of emotional awareness, in...

Self-awareness is viewed here as the phenotypic expression of an interaction between genes and the environment. Brain and behavioral development of fetuses and newborn infants are a rich source of information regarding what might constitute minimal self-awareness. Research indicates that newborns have feeling (subjective) experience. Unlike automata, they do not just sense and respond to proxim...

A driver’s awareness while on the road is a critical factor in his or her ability to make decisions to avoid hazards, plan routes and maintain safe travel. Situational awareness is gleaned not only from visual observation of the environment, but also the audible cues the environment provides police sirens, honking cars, and crosswalk beeps, for instance, alert the driver to events around them. ...

Inside armored personnel carriers, APC’s, such as e.g. Hägglunds CV90 or Mowag Piranha, the possibilities for looking out are rather limited. That is especially true for the soldiers being transported inside the personnel compartment. Because of this, the soldiers are in effect expected to put themselves into harms way with very limited knowledge of what is happening outside the vehicle. One po...

An important question in the study of language is to what degree semantic and syntactic processes are automatic or controlled. This study employed an attentional blink (AB) paradigm to manipulate awareness in the processing of target words in order to assess automaticity in semantic and syntactic processing. In the semantic block, targets occurring both within and outside the AB period elicited...

Several theoretical perspectives predict that social comparisons lead to simple, default-driven effects when triggered outside of conscious awareness. These theoretical perspectives differ, however, in the default effects they predict. Some theories argue for self-evaluative contrast, whereas others argue for self-evaluative assimilation. The current studies tested the prediction that the defau...

In January 2013 in the Netherlands, a man in his 50s from Suriname underwent hemihepatectomy because of a cystic liver mass, assumed to be a cystadenoma. Pathology revealed an echinococcal infection. PCR analysis of cyst material identified Echinococcus vogeli, causing polycystic hydatid disease. This echinococcus species is rarely diagnosed outside South America. The patient received adequate ...

Studies using backward masked emotional stimuli suggest that affective processing may occur outside visual awareness and imply primacy of affective over semantic processing, yet these experiments have not strictly controlled for the participants' awareness of the stimuli. Here we directly compared the primacy of affective versus semantic categorization of biologically relevant stimuli in 5 expe...