The Hidden Genius of Emotion

Abstract

This thoughtful and beautifully written book demonstrates compellingly that emotions are central to personality development across the lifespan. Carol Magai and Jeannette Haviland-Jones draw on a wealth of textual and film material to forge an original empirical and theoretical analysis of the dynamics of emotion in human development. For its content, the work examines the lives of three mid-century psychologists, Carl Rogers, Albert Ellis, and Fritz Perls. Each man adopted a unique stance on the question of emotion in personality and in therapeutic interventions and, tellingly, the therapeutic methods they developed necessarily reflected their own emotional dynamics. Drawing on the most important research in clinical, social, and personality psychology, the authors reveal the pervasive influence of emotional organization in the lives of these individuals. Having presented a new approach to personology, autobiography, autobiography, narrative studies, psychotherapy and the theory of emotions on its publication in 2002, this book is essential reading.

Dispositional contempt: A first look at the contemptuous person.

“…Personality traits themselves are seen as enduring patterns of feelings , thoughts, and behaviors that reflect characteristic ways of interacting with the world (Roberts & Jackson, 2008; Tellegen, 1991). Individual differences in emotions, like contempt, are thus deemed key ingredients of personality that help organize its stable aspects (Izard, 1977; Magai & Haviland-Jones, 2002; Magai & Nusbaum, 1996; Tomkins, 1962, 1963). We investigated the association of contempt-proneness with major dimensions of personality in hoping to differentiate dispositional contempt from similar emotion dispositions but also in moving toward the goal of understanding it as a stable configuration of feelings, thoughts, and behaviors that likely extends to many areas of personality functioning.…”

The Art of Collaborative Autoethnography: Exploring the Evolution of a Self-Organizing, Non-Traditional Doctoral Cohort

“…In this study, systems theory and communities of practice provide the theoretical framework for our discussion. Systems theory is used frequently in academic literature to describe and explore the communicative behavior of dyads, specifically the behavior of individuals in face-to-face interaction [14]- [16]. Systems-whether they are physical systems such as tornados, or living systems with concepts of self, identity and consciousness-can emerge spontaneously and grow over time, as was the case with our particular cohort.…”

Signs, signals, and symbols in olfactics.

“…The result could be a disgust face in his greeting, and the encounter could become conflictual. One of the pair might be characteristically contemptuous or dismissive (see Magai & Haviland-Jones, 2002), and any prompt to search for contempt would quickly initiate a welllearned dismissive set of behaviors and attributions.…”