Conducted in four societies-Taiwan, India, Mainland China, and the United States-this pancultural study extended and replicated a previous finding, with Iranian samples, of the possibility and benefits of expanding our "kind" via priming. The mechanism behind this phenomenon is explained through the principle of ontological parity. Derived from animism as articulated in Chinese folk beliefs, ontological parity refers to perceived sameness in being, a quality that is believed to be expandable. This formulation broadens the conceptual scope of intimacy thereby allow for novel hypothesis testing. It was predicted and found that experimentally expanding ontological parity to nonhuman and nonliving elements of nature was associated with increase in relational solitude, and decrease in negative emotions, especially anger and fear. Far-reaching implications of this investigation, ranging from the possibility of intimacy in solitude to morality and the human machine interface, are discussed.
Extending the humanistic cognitive science project as envisioned by Hovhannisyan (2018), this article proposed and tested an explanatory model of expressive writing, which has been found to increase self-distancing-a form of processing emotional information that is widely recognized to be beneficial to health. The key principle of our model is constraint, which refers to the far from equilibrium conditions (i.e., order) made possible by thermodynamic work that staves off the eventuality of entropy, in the thermodynamic equilibrium of which all things collapse to the most probable, least ordered states. Investigating self-distancing as a case of constraint generated by the intervention/work of expressive writing leads to novel and testable predictions and explains why the narrative-based writing condition that capitalizes on meaning making was found to be more effective than other writing conditions in buffering against the entropy of emotional disturbances. Richly informed by thermodynamics, Shannon information, and the semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce, this explanatory model of expressive writing demonstrates the feasibility of drawing upon resources in cognitive science to ground and enrich the explanatory potential of humanistic psychology.
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