ABSTRACTCrying is often considered to be a positive experience that benefits the crier, yet there is little empirical evidence to support this. Indeed, it seems that people hold a range of appraisals about their crying, and these are likely to influence the effects of crying on their emotional state. This paper reports on the development and psychometric validation of the Beliefs about Crying Scale, a new measure assessing beliefs about whether crying leads to positive or negative emotional outcomes in individual (...) and interpersonal contexts. Using 40 preliminary items drawn from a qualitative study, an exploratory factor analysis with 202 participants yielded three subscales: Helpful Beliefs, Unhelpful-Individual Beliefs, and Unhelpful-Social Beliefs, explaining 60% of the variance in the data. Confirmatory factor analysis on the 14-item scale with 210 participants showed a good fit to the three factors. The subscales showed differential... (shrink)

ABSTRACTAlexithymia is characterised by a lack of words for emotional experiences and it has been implicated in deficits in emotion processing. Research in this area has typically focused on judgem...

There is accumulating evidence that disgust plays an important role in prejudice toward individuals with obesity, but that research is primarily based on self-reported emotions. In four studies, we examined whether participants displayed a physiological marker of disgust in response to images of obese individuals, and whether these responses corresponded with their self-reported disgust to those images. All four studies showed the predicted self-reported disgust response toward images of obese individuals. Study 1 further showed that participants exhibited more levator activity (...) to images of obese individuals than to neutral images. However, Studies 2–4 failed to provide any evidence that the targets’ body size affected levator responses. These findings suggest that disgust may operate at multiple levels, and that the disgust response to images of obese individuals may be more of a cognitive-conceptual one than a physiological one. (shrink)