R Thompson

Emotional clarity and attention to emotions represent the extent to which people understand and attend to their own emotions, respectively, and are broad facets of emotional awareness, alexithymia, and emotional intelligence. To examine the extent to which these two constructs are associated, we conducted a meta-analysis of studies including well-validated self-report measures of trait clarity and attention to emotion. Clarity and attention were moderately, positively associated. Assessment instrument, but not sample gender or age, moderated the association between clarity and attention. Analyses of between-study heterogeneity and publication bias suggested that results were valid and generalizable. We discuss potential causes of the association between clarity and attention, and elaborate on the implications of our results for emotion regulation, well-being, and psychopathology.

Carroll Izard’s theoretical and research contributions to the study of early socioemotional development are profiled. His studies of early emotional expression and the formulations of differential emotions theory have stimulated contemporary inquiry into the organization of early emotional life, the developmental processes by which distinct feelings and facial expressions become progressively concordant, and how the emotional expressions of others become imbued with emotion meaning. His work on emotion, attachment, and emotion–cognition relations has contributed to contemporary study of the emotional bases of attachment organization and the development of the internal working models associated with attachment security. Because of Izard’s contributions, developmental emotions research is theoretically richer, and emotion has a more central place in our understanding of development and motivation.

Chapter III exhibits Whitehead's intensive analysis of immediate experience, which has as its main purpose the description of how the actualities of nature are internally related. It concerns the showing of how actualities come to be constituent parts of other actualities. There is no such thing as "vacuous actualities;" all exhibit activity in a causa-sui sense. Actualities "experience" one another; and Whitehead calls this a "prehensive activity" by which actualities are constituted, or come into being. Thus all the factors of process involved in an actuality's coming into being, and contributing to the being of others, are exhibited. Also the activity of God is shown to be essential to temporal process. ;Chapter IV displays Whitehead's view that "fact" and "value" cannot be separated in the final interpretation. Value and valuation are shown as being necessary conditions of all natural occurrences, therefore of there being process. Valuation is the essential nature of prehensive activity, without which nothing would come to be. Whitehead's theory of value includes features of every other theory of value, ethics, religion, and aesthetics, but he reinterprets and combines them in a special way relevant to metaphysical interpretation. ;Chapter I considers Whitehead's defense to metaphysics as a conceptual system general enough to give a unity of understanding to the more particular bits of knowledge supplied by the special sciences. Each science abstracts from the concrete fact which we experience with our relations with the world, and thus does not give a total view. Only a metaphysician can give us a comprehensive understanding of the universe, and exhibit the various sciences as special or incomplete interpretations of what is really one and the same world for each. Thus metaphysics seeks the ultimate characterizations of reality. Accordingly, metaphysics is both critical of abstractions when taken as describing the complete character of concrete fact, and constructive as presenting a world-view on the basis of which particular abstractions can find their relevance to each other and to the total comprehensive interpretation. ;Chapter II exhibits method as of basic importance for metaphysical construction. The first business of method is to find a working-hypothesis which will tell us where to look for the evidence from which the universal principles descriptive of reality can be derived. The hypothesis must also, in its application, show us how such evidence can supply us with valid universal principles. On the basis of conceiving human experience as an occurrence in nature, and as evolving from more primitive natural occurrences, such that the same general principles will be exhibited throughout nature from the simplest to the most complex functionings, Whitehead adopts an hypothesis which identifies all natural occurrences with occasions of human experience, so far as their metaphysical nature is concerned. ;This essay is an attempt to relate Whitehead's purpose in constructing a metaphysical system, his conception of the method for its accomplishment, his notions of the content and structure of the actual world conceived as in perpetual process, and the function of value in this process. Thus it includes an explanation of why Whitehead feels that metaphysical construction is both possible and necessary, as adding to our knowledge of reality; his conception of method as including more than has usually been considered the case by previous metaphysicians; his novel interpretation of reality strictly in terms of immediate human experience; and his reasons for holding that fact and value are inseparable in the final interpretation of that which is "really real."