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Chapter 6 explores the interrelationships between modern figurations of feeling, familial atmospheres of feeling, and the emotional styles of perpetrators as means of making sense of familicide. One of the hallmarks of modern life is the increasing value attached to controlling one's emotions and one's interactions with others. Such self-control was particularly emphasized among the ranks of bourgeois men. The chapter commences with a discussion of these cultural imperatives toward self-control and emotional restraint. The author underscores the prominent place of anxiety, shame and anger among familicidal hearts, using this analysis as segue into a discussion of the relationship between modernity, emotional styles, hegemonic masculinity, and familicide. Of particular importance is the fact that familicide is gendered, reflecting the greater social disconnection and isolation of men in modern times.

The Stroop task is among the most influential experimental paradigms for the study of cognitive control. Recent variants have sought to extend the Stroop task to the study of emotional regulation. To assess these emotional Stroop tasks, it is important to distinguish between those that seek to disrupt performance purely via distraction by emotional stimuli that engage attention, from those that do so by presenting emotional information that specifically conflicts with task-relevant judgments. The emotional stimuli in distraction-based Stroop tasks typically fail to disrupt the performance of healthy adults, and recent work suggests that when inference does occur, it lags behind goal-directed processing, primarily degrading performance on subsequent trials. Although early neuro-imaging research using the emotional distraction Stroop tasks gave rise to the influential hypothesis of distinct emotional and nonemotional processing regions in the anterior cingulate cortex, subsequent research has provided limited support. Other recent evidence suggests that interference in these distraction tasks might reflect a generic transient surprise rather than inherently emotional processes. In contrast to emotional distraction Stroop tasks, studies of emotional conflict have reported robust congruency effects, but it is unclear that the resolution of stimulus incompatibility is relevant to questions of how one controls one’s emotions. Future research with emotional distraction Stroop tasks should seek to develop variants that evince more robust effects, whereas research on emotional stimulus incompatibility should leverage previous work with nonemotional conflict Stroop variants to explore topics such as the relationship between output modality and dimensional relevancy, and the distinction between categorization and identification task goals.

This chapter reviews the current neuropsychological and physiological evidence linking lateral and orbital prefrontal cortex (PFC) to human cognition and social interchange in an attempt to provide a summary of much of the work presented in this book and elsewhere. It begins with a review of the findings concerning the role of lateral PFC in executive control of cognition, and then discusses the relevant literature on the contributions of orbital PFC to social and emotional control.

This chapter describes a program for grades K-12 that teaches emotional and cognitive control of behavior and general problem solving skills. The program, called BrainWise, uses metaphors taken from neuroscience to help children understand how their brains work and how they can control stressful situations in which they might otherwise make hasty and maladaptive choices.

This chapter discusses the activities, cognitive development, and learning progress of Ricky when he was between 29–30 months old. Ricky started to recognize the special “others” in his social world. He recognized the differences among family members and showed his account of such differences by increasingly differentiating his behaviour towards others in subtle ways. Ricky also showed real advances in social and cognitive understanding, such as gaining the abilities to control his emotions and make inferences about other's knowledge.

In the early years of the American republic, acting manuals narrated an ambivalent relationship between actor, role, and audience. On the one hand, acting manuals coached actors as to how to convey emotion through, essentially, artifice. But, on the other hand, there arose a concurrent belief that the essential characteristic of American manhood was plainspoken honesty. This chapter explores the most popular acting manuals of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to discover the principles that guided early American theatrical performance. Ultimately, once acting manuals were published in the United States, they emphasized both “naturalness” and maximum impact on the audience.

This chapter describes Truman Capote's early childhood experiences. One in particular is the emotional devastation he felt when he was locked in the hotel room by his mother at age two. Another occurred at age three when he was left alone in a zoo by his nanny who fled after two lions were suspected to escape their cages. Capote's biographer, Gerald Clarke, points out that the zoo memory and the memory of the hotel room seemed like two versions of the same basic experience. For Capote, he experienced in both events the loss of emotional control, the sense that the world was dangerous, and that adults who should be responsive in the face of danger simply could not be depended for comfort.

This chapter is a response to certain questions raised by fellow scholars on the author's philosophy of forgiveness. Jerome Neu is concerned about emotional control with regards to resentment, to which the author replies with the fact that forgiveness is not an act, but a change of heart. Benjamin Zipursky searches for a concrete methodology underlying the author's ideas on forgiveness. The author explains that the issue of moral, rational forgiveness is one that a philosopher frequently has to “muddle through” or “stumble along” with, because even those are of better help than mere unified grand theories. Finally, Carol Steiker appeals to a pragmatic mercy in the face of retributive language. While the author has partially shied away from retributivism, the latter can still be applied properly—that is, by respecting human dignity, exacting proportionate justice, and by vindicating the value of the victim.