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Relationships among attributions of responsibility, emotions of anger and sympathy, and willingness to help have been theorized, but questions about the relationship between anger and sympathy remain unclear. The present study examines 306 responses to news stories that manipulated attributions of parental responsibility following the accidental death of a child. Results confirm that attributions of responsibility increase expressions of anger and reduce sympathy and willingness to help. Respondents who express more anger show less sympathy, but anger only indirectly affects the willingness to help. Respondents who attribute less responsibility to parents express greater sympathy and more willingness to help.

Contemporary research on survival-related defensive behaviors has identified physiological markers of freeze/flight/fight. Our research focused on cognitive factors associated with freeze-like behavior in humans. Study 1 tested if an explicit decision to freeze is associated with the psychophysiological state of freezing. Heart rate deceleration occurred when participants chose to freeze. Study 2 varied the efficacy of freezing relative to other defense options and found "freeze" was responsive to variations in the perceived effectiveness of alternative actions. Study 3 tested if individual differences in motivational orientation affect preference for a "freeze" option when the efficacy of options is held constant. A trend in the predicted direction suggested that naturally occurring cognitions led loss-avoiders to select "freeze" more often than reward-seekers. In combination, our attention to the cognitive factors affecting freeze-like behavior in humans represents a preliminary step in addressing an important but neglected research area.

Although the implications of submission and domination sexual fantasies in the general public remain unclear, evidence continues to emerge of a higher prevalence than that suggested by early research. This study identified respondent subsets who acknowledged recurrent (“over 80% of the time”) fantasies of either “asserting dominance over someone” or “being humiliated or made to suffer” by a sexual partner. These domination ( n = 97, 12.1%) and humiliation ( n = 37, 4.6%) groups were contrasted with comparison ( n = 649) respondents who reported never engaging in either fantasy. Both domination and humiliation fantasy contents were associated with hypersexuality, maladaptive personality traits (ie, antagonistic, disinhibited, and psychoticism), and elevated risk of sexual addiction. Victimization by childhood sexual abuse was higher (relative risk = 2.69, P = .007) among the women in the humiliation group. These results contribute to an equivocal evidentiary base regarding the extent and impact of sadomasochistic sexual fantasizing in the general public. [ Psychiatr Ann . 2020;50(10):457–468.]