Facial expressions depicting compassionate and critical emotions: the development and validation of a new emotional face stimulus set

Attachment with altruistic others requires the ability to appropriately process affiliative and kind facial cues. Yet there is no stimulus set available to investigate such processes. Here, we developed a stimulus set depicting compassionate and critical facial expressions, and validated its effectiveness using well-established visual-probe methodology. In Study 1, 62 participants rated photographs of actors displaying compassionate/kind and critical faces on strength of emotion type. This produced a new stimulus set based on N = 31 actors, whose facial expressions were reliably distinguished as compassionate, critical and neutral. In Study 2, 70 participants completed a visual-probe task measuring attentional orientation to critical and compassionate/kind faces. This revealed that participants lower in self-criticism demonstrated enhanced attention to compassionate/kind faces whereas those higher in self-criticism showed no bias. To sum, the new stimulus set produced interpretable findings using visual-probe methodology and is the first to include higher order, complex positive affect displays

Short-Term Compassion Training Increases Prosocial Behavior in a Newly Developed Prosocial Game

Compassion has been suggested to be a strong motivator for prosocial behavior. While research has demonstrated that compassion training has positive effects on mood and health, we do not know whether it also leads to increases in prosocial behavior. We addressed this question in two experiments. In Experiment 1, we introduce a new prosocial game, the Zurich Prosocial Game (ZPG), which allows for repeated, ecologically valid assessment of prosocial behavior and is sensitive to the influence of reciprocity, helping cost, and distress cues on helping behavior. Experiment 2 shows that helping behavior in the ZPG increased in participants who had received short-term compassion training, but not in participants who had received short-term memory training. Interindividual differences in practice duration were specifically related to changes in the amount of helping under no-reciprocity conditions. Our results provide first evidence for the positive impact of short-term compassion training on prosocial behavior towards strangers in a training-unrelated task

Mindfulness-Based Childbirth and Parenting Education: Promoting Family Mindfulness During the Perinatal Period

We present the conceptual and empirical foundation and curriculum content of the Mindfulness-Based Childbirth and Parenting (MBCP) program and the results of a pilot study of n = 27 pregnant women participating in MBCP during their third trimester of pregnancy. MBCP is a formal adaptation of the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction program and was developed and refined over the course of 11 years of clinical practice with 59 groups of expectant couples. MBCP is designed to promote family health and well-being through the practice of mindfulness during pregnancy, childbirth, and early parenting. Quantitative results from the current study include statistically significant increases in mindfulness and positive affect, and decreases in pregnancy anxiety, depression, and negative affect from pre- to post-test (p < .05). Effect sizes for changes in key hypothesized intervention mediators were large (d > .70), suggesting that MBCP is achieving its intended effects on maternal well-being during pregnancy. Qualitative reports from participants expand upon the quantitative findings, with the majority of participants reporting perceived benefits of using mindfulness practices during the perinatal period and early parenting. Our future research will involve conducting a randomized controlled trial of MBCP to test effects on psychophysiological stress mechanisms and to examine effects on birth outcomes, family relationship quality, and child development outcomes

Early stage spinodal decomposition in viscoelastic fluids

The effect of viscoelasticity on the early stages of spinodal decomposition is examined. In addition to the concentration and momentum equations for the fluid, the effect of viscoelasticity is included using a linear Maxwell equation for the stress tensor. The growth in the amplitude of the fluctuations depends on the transport coefficient, the viscosity of the fluid, and the relaxation time in the Maxwell model. For simplicity, the nonlinearity due to the quartic term in the expression for the Landau–Ginzburg expression for the free energy is neglected, as are the inertial terms in the momentum conservation equation. The momentum and Maxwell equations are solved exactly to obtain the velocity as a function of concentration, which is then inserted into the concentration equation. There are two types of nonlinearities in the conservation equation—one proportional to the cube of the concentration which leads to a four point vertex, and one proportional to the product of the concentration and the random noise in the stress equation which leads to a three point vertex. In the leading approximation, the renormalization of the transport coefficient due to these vertices is determined using the Hartree approximation, and the renormalization of the noise correlation due to the three point vertex is determined using a one-loop expansion. The renormalized transport coefficient and noise correlation are inserted into the concentration equation to determine the effect of the nonlinearities on the growth of the structure factor. It is found that an increase in the relaxation time tends to increase the rate of growth of the structure factor, and tends to decrease the wave number of the peak in the structure factor