Rational Emotive Research Articles

The Logic of Excuses and the Rationality of Emotions

I have previously defended a way of thinking about excuses (in the criminal law and in ordinary life) according to which being excused is a way of living up to standards of reasonableness, not a way (as J.L. Austin and H.L.A. Hart once thought) of being exempted from those standards. This suggestion keeps excuses distinct from denials of responsibility, a distinction which Austin and Hart collapsed. But it may be thought that my suggestion causes a collapse in the opposite direction: it collapses excuses into justifications as the price of keeping them distinct from denials of responsibility. For how could something be reasonable and yet unjustified? Answer: nothing can be both reasonable and unjustified. But an unreasonable action could be performed on the strength of a reasonable motivation. Then the motivation is justified but the action is merely excused. In this paper I explore this possibility in more detail with a particular focus on emotional motivations. I try to establish the logical space for reasonable emotions that lead to unreasonable actions. In the process I both confirm (in part) and challenge (in part) the temptation to assess our emotions as contributors to the practical side of our lives. I speak in favour of a view according to which emotions are highly answerable to reasons but not only, and in a way not primarily, to practical reasons.

Huckleberry Finn – Pionier einer neuen Wertwahrnehmung

After having helped his friend Jim to run away from slavery, Mark Twain's character Huckleberry Finn decides to turn him in, but finds himself doing just the contrary. This example is used in the philosophical literature to illustrate the rationality of emotion: even though his sympathy for Jim causes Huck to act against his better judgement, he seems to be doing exactly the right thing. The question is what is meant by “rationality” here. Three different meanings of this notion are distinguished, in order to show that Huck's sympathy is rational in the cognitive or epistemic sense of being appropriate to some objective feature of his actual situation. It is argued that, to be capable of this kind of rationality, emotions must have an evaluative-representational content. Finally, it is shown that emotional representations are partly determined by society and culture, without this implying the arbitrariness of emotional evaluation. We may then understand Huck's sympathy as a new and better evaluative perception and as a pioneering step in a continuous socio-cultural process of refining and improving our value categories.

Review of Living with “The Gloria Films”: A daughter's memory.

In Everett Shostrom's 1965 film, Three Approaches to Psychotherapy, Carl Rogers (Client-Centered Therapy), Fritz Perls (Gestalt Therapy) and Albert Ellis (Rational Emotive Therapy) conducted demons...

The rational emotions of FC København: a lesson on generating profit in professional soccer

Professional team sports clubs in Scandinavia and Europe operate in a complex combination of rational economic logic and emotional irrational behaviour. With a few exceptions most clubs favour winning over profit, thus producing a range of severe financial problems as a direct consequence. This essay investigates this fact and deals with Danish soccer, its financial problems, as well as the conditions determining the financial instability of the majority of the clubs. Employing a theoretical framework that enables me to describe the financially unstable clubs as well as the financial best performers in the sports business, I explain why only a few clubs are capable of combining economic gain with sporting success. The Danish soccer club FC København is chosen to be the case and turning point in this study, as it serves as a counter example illustrating how profit and championships can actually be combined in certain logic of ‘rational emotionality’. The ‘extremity’ of the case in this respect serves as a way to expose the general rules of commercial sports.

Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy in Improving Retirees' Attitude towards Political Participation

This study investigated the effectiveness of Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy in improving retirees’ attitude towards political participation. Twenty four retirees (mean age = 55.50 years) within Ilorin Metropolis participated in the study. They were randomly assigned to one treatment and one control groups. A validated instrument termed “Retirees’ Attitude towards Political Participation Questionnaire”) was administered to the two groups before and after the experimental programme. ANCOVA was employed for the analysis of data. Results showed that the treatment package (Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy) was effective in improving retirees’ attitude towards political participation, their religious affiliations notwithstanding. Based on the findings, it was recommended that the counseling curriculum in Nigeria be expanded to accommodate this new problem area and that retirees should always seek counseling. Key words: Retirees, attitude, political participation, Rational emotive behaviour therapy.

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Emotion

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Emotion

The Logic of Excuses and the Rationality of Emotions

I have previously defended a way of thinking about excuses (in the criminal law and in ordinary life) according to which being excused is a way of living up to standards of reasonableness, not a way (as J.L. Austin and H.L.A. Hart once thought) of being exempted from those standards. This suggestion keeps excuses distinct from denials of responsibility, a distinction which Austin and Hart collapsed. But it may be thought that my suggestion causes a collapse in the opposite direction: it collapses excuses into justifications as the price of keeping them distinct from denials of responsibility. For how could something be reasonable and yet unjustified? Answer: nothing can be both reasonable and unjustified. But an unreasonable action could be performed on the strength of a reasonable motivation. Then the motivation is justified but the action is merely excused. In this paper I explore this possibility in more detail with a particular focus on emotional motivations. I try to establish the logical space for reasonable emotions that lead to unreasonable actions. In the process I both confirm (in part) and challenge (in part) the temptation to assess our emotions as contributors to the practical side of our lives. I speak in favour of a view according to which emotions are highly answerable to reasons but not only, and in a way not primarily, to practical reasons.

The Economic Behavior of Human Beings: The Institutional/Post-Keynesian Model

:This paper attempts to present the basic features that would define a model of behavior suited to an institutional and post-Keynesian approach. To facilitate explanation, human behavior is divided into three phases: motivation, cognition and reasoning and decision-making. Motivation appears as a process directed toward the satisfaction of a complex structure of various needs and wants. The role of emotions and the social and cognitive aspects of motivation are recognized. Moreover, it is also recognized that human beings have limited cognitive and rational capacities, and it is accepted that they are potentially creative. Partly as a consequence of that, cognition becomes a social act and knowledge of reality is subject to fundamental uncertainty. Finally, human rationality (or intelligence) is associated with a search for good solutions, and it includes elements of procedural rationality, creativity and emotional rationality. The role of habits and institutions in all these phases is stressed.

Rational emotive behaviour therapy in improving retirees' attitude towards political participation

This study investigated the effectiveness of Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy in improving retirees’ attitude towards political participation. Twenty four retirees (mean age = 55.50 years) within Ilorin Metropolis participated in the study. They were randomly assigned to one treatment and one control groups. A validated instrument termed “Retirees’ Attitude towards Political Participation Questionnaire”) was administered to the two groups before and after the experimental programme. ANCOVA was employed for the analysis of data. Results showed that the treatment package (Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy) was effective in improving retirees’ attitude towards political participation, their religious affiliations notwithstanding. Based on the findings, it was recommended that the counseling curriculum in Nigeria be expanded to accommodate this new problem area and that retirees should always seek counseling. Key words: Retirees, attitude, political participation, Rational emotive behaviour therapy.

Friedrich Försterling: January 25, 1953 – August 6, 2007

On August 6, 2007 Friedrich Forsterling died at the age of 54, a year after receiving a terminal diagnosis. It was one of his core beliefs that it is logically not possible to make a global overall evaluation of a human being, because any person consists of literally millions of different deeds and traits. We agree with him that even after the death of a person it is not possible to do such a final evaluation. Therefore, in the following we try to simply describe his professional life, his belief in rationality, his persistence in his scientific work, and his humorous equanimity. Friedrich Forsterling was born in Braunschweig, Germany on January 25, 1953. He studied psychology at the Universities of Graz and Salzburg in Austria, where he received his Ph.D. in 1977. During this period, he developed his interests in attribution theory and cognitive behavior modification. To develop his expertise in these areas, he pursued advanced training as a Postdoctoral Scholar for two years, first in 1977 at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he studied with Bernard Weiner and subsequently at the Institute for Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT) in New York, NY, where he received clinical supervision from Albert Ellis. These experiences provided the foundation for his conviction that attribution theory could be a key element in cognitive behavior modification. When he returned to Germany in 1979, he acquired a position as lecturer in the Department of Psychology at the University of Bielefeld, under the direction of Wulf–Uwe Meyer, where he Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, Vol. 27, No. 2, 2008, pp. i–iv

Emotions in the Everyday Life of a Dance School: Articulating Unspoken Values

In everyday thinking art is very often linked to emotion and, more generally, to a kind of emotional and spontaneous way of relating to the world that contrasts with the rational and controlled intellect that, for example, science is understood to cultivate. Emotion is also commonly linked, via bodily existence, to femininity and the private sphere—the home (see, for example, Heinämaa and Reuter 1994; Sihvola 1999. These conceptualizations reveal a tendency toward typically Western dichotomies between art and science, emotion and reason, body and mind, private and public, and woman and man (see also Domagalski 1999; Sandelans and Boudens 2000).Furthermore, working life and emotion have long been seen as separate; only emotion-free employees and institutions have been perceived as being efficient because emotional control, self-restraint, and rationality bolster stability and predictability in working life. Thus, emotions belong somewhere else. In fact, Lloyd Sandelans and Connie Boudens (2000, 48) note that we have had the habit of building special quarters for the exercise and display of emotion such as concert halls, movie theaters, football fields, and therapist's offices. This does not mean, however, that emotions can be eliminated from working life, as many studies on emotion at work have shown (Ashkanasy, Hartel, and Zerbe 2000; Fineman 2000, 2003; Hochschild 1983).

Cognitivism about Instrumental Reason

Cognitivism about Instrumental Reason

Emotion and Rationality: A Critical Review and Interpretation of Empirical Evidence

The relation between emotion and rationality is assessed by reviewing empirical findings from multiple disciplines. Two types of emotional phenomena are examined—incidental emotional states and integral emotional responses—and three conceptions of rationality are considered—logical, material, and ecological. Emotional states influence reasoning processes, are often misattributed to focal objects, distort beliefs in an assimilative fashion, disrupt self-control when intensely negative, but do not necessarily increase risk-taking. Integral emotional responses are often used as proxies for values, and valuations based on these responses exhibit distinct properties: efficiency, consistency, polarization, myopia, scale- insensitivity, and reference-dependence. Emotions seem to promote social and moral behavior. Conjectures about the design features of the affective system that give rise to seeming sources of rationality or irrationality are proposed. It is concluded that any categorical statement about the overall rationality or irrationality of emotion would be misleading.

On the irrationality of emotion and the rationality of awareness

It is argued that one answer to the question of the rationality of emotion hinges on the different roles in action selection played by emotions when one is aware of them versus when one is not aware of them (awareness being indexed by the ability to report one’s emotion). When unaware of one’s emotions, they are: (a) not able to enter into one’s deliberations about what to do, and (b) more likely to be automatically acted out. This is a problem for rationality because (partly due to the logic of signal detection theory) emotional action urges are often “false positives”. In contrast, awareness of emotions crucially allows emotional responses to be inhibited: such inhibition is necessary for truly rational action selection. Furthermore, awareness enables Reflective Revision—the modification of one’s theories and action plans as a result of awareness of inconsistencies between theories and data, and action plans and goals.

Nursing Schadenfreude: The culpability of emotional construction

The purpose of this paper is to examine the concept of Schadenfreude--the pleasure felt at another's misfortune--and to argue that feeling it in the course of health care work, as elsewhere, is evidence of a deficient character. In order to show that Schadenfreude is an objectionable emotion in health care work, I first offer some conceptual remarks about emotions generally and their differential treatment in Kantian and Aristotelian thought. Second, I argue that an appreciation of the rationality of the emotions is crucial to our self-understanding as persons in general and nurses in particular. Third, I present a critique of Portmann's (2000, When Bad Things Happen to Other People. London: Routledge) defence of Schadenfreude with examples from both nursing and medical scenarios. Specifically, I show how his exculpation of the emotion in terms of low self-esteem and a commitment to justice are not compelling. I argue that we are active in the construction of our emotional experiences of Schadenfreude, how we may indeed 'nurse' the emotion, and thus become culpable for them in ethical terms.

Feeling Food: The Rationality of Perception

Regulatory bodies tend to treat people’s emotional responses towards foods as a nuisance for rational opinion-formation and decision-making. This position is thought to be supported by such evidence as: (1) people showing negative emotional responses to the idea of eating meat products from vaccinated livestock; and (2) people showing positive emotional responses to Magnum’s “7 sins” marketing campaign. Such cases are thought to support the idea that regulatory communication about foods should abstract from people’s emotional perceptions and that corporate marketing of foods should show restraint in capitalizing upon these weaknesses of the heart. This paper, on the contrary, argues that people’s emotional perceptions of foods represent valuable sources of knowledge. This argument is developed by making the dominant reception of people’s emotions intelligible by tracing its roots through the history of the Platonic paradigm. Although this paradigm has dominated the philosophical and psychological debate about emotions, the idea that emotions are sources of knowledge has recently gained force. This paper also traces the historical roots of the alternative Aristotelian paradigm. The cases of meat products from vaccinated livestock and Magnum’s 7 sins serve to illustrate this controversy. The paper concludes by showing that a neo-Platonic emphasis on the irrationality of emotions does not contribute to a fruitful discussion about implications of people’s perceptions for agricultural and food politics, whereas a neo-Aristotelian account of rational emotions could enable regulatory bodies to engage people in a fruitful process of opinion-formation and decision-making about food production and consumption.

A Review of the Children’s Inventory of Anger (ChIA): A Needed Measure

A review and critique of the Children’s Inventory of Anger (ChIA) is presented. The ChIA is a 39-item measure that operationalizes anger according to the conceptualization set forth by Ellis in Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy. The ChIA consists of four subscales (Frustration, Physical Aggression, Peer Relationships, and Authority Relations) which provide information regarding situations that are commonly associated with the experience of anger. Preliminary validity studies demonstrate that the ChIA has excellent reliability and high face validity. The forms are user friendly and easily scored, with norms tables conveniently located within the form. A computer-scoring program is available which significantly reduces clerical errors. The application of the instrument in practice is discussed. Due to the fact that the ChIA attempts to link assessment and intervention it should be useful in advancing the field in regard to treatment evaluation and substantiation of treatment validity. It is also expected to have considerable research utility.

Logotherapy-Enhanced REBT: An Integration of Discovery and Reason

Viktor Frankl’s Logotherapy and Albert Ellis’s Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT) are at seemingly opposite ends of the psychotherapeutic spectrum. However, a close review of the assumptions and philosophy of each school of therapy reveals that these two systems are compatible. We propose that a Logotherapy-enhanced REBT can increase human achievement and happiness by balancing the individual discovery of meaning with the pursuit of reason. This integrated and enhanced therapy will help human beings participate in positive life experiences and take greater responsibility for change. Fruitful and beneficial aspects of a Logotherapy enhanced-REBT are explored with respect to cognitions, emotions, and the reduction of rumination. Conclusions are drawn, limitations are discussed, and future recommendations are outlined.

Mindsets, rationality and emotion in Multi-criteria Decision Analysis

This paper discusses the paradigm of multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA), and relates it to other disciplines. It concludes that MCDA needs a larger, not smaller, emphasis on values and subjectivity to increase rationality in decision-making. The paper bases the argument on a conciliation of ethics, philosophy, neuro-psychology and management paradigms. It observes that the MCDA ‘mindset’ relates to consequentialism, as opposed to virtue ethics and rule based ethics. Virtues and rules play an important role in practical decision-making, however. Findings in neuro-psychology show that reliable decision-making requires emotions. Elicitation of emotions is therefore required in MCDA value trade-off processes. This leads to a concept of emotional rationality, which defines rationality as a four-dimensional concept that includes well-founded values and breaks radically with common notions of rationality. Virtues do not easily lend themselves to value trade-off, but questions of virtue usually creates strong social emotions, as opposed to the feebler global emotions that may arise in connection conventional trade-off of end values. The conclusion is that MCDA should not be shy of subjectivity and emotion, but instead put more emphasis on it to increase rationality. A part of this challenge is how to deal with questions of virtue in decision-making. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Albert Ellis and the Buddha: rational Soul Mates? A comparison of Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy (REBT) and Zen Buddhism

Although religion and psychology are generally conceived of as distinct domains, the theoretical underpinnings of certain psychological theories are inextricably related to religious ideology. This relationship is perhaps best exemplified by the theoretical and applied similarity between Buddhist principles and Albert Ellis's Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy (REBT). Sharing a common purpose, both the Buddha and Ellis set out to improve the human condition, and to do so in a rational, empirical manner. The significance of these parallels is discussed in relation to the incorporation of early Buddhist and Zen Buddhism concepts into the current practice of REBT.