Thinking outside the ballot box

A deeply heterogeneous set of ideological cohorts have shaped the course of history. From anarchists and authoritarians to Zionists and Zapatistas, the expansive alphabet of politics demands an equally expansive psychological vocabulary to describe political belief systems. We propose that constructing such a vocabulary is best facilitated by decentering familiar models that emphasize psychological differences between leftists and rightists. Synthesizing recent developments in the fields of personality, political science, and psychopathology, we characterize individual variation in politics as high-dimensional, heterarchical, intrapersonally eclectic, and contextually shaped and activated. Developing a data-driven taxonomic model of political-psychological phenomena will help create a foundational base of knowledge within political psychology that is more rigorous, more replicable, and certainly richer to investigate.     

Thinking outside the box: a metacognitive / theory of mind perspective on concrete thinking

Concrete thinking, an extraordinarily difficult condition to treat, has been psychoanalytically theorized to result from failures of symbolization-problems forming, linking, or fathoming the meaning of symbols-and/or failures of differentiation, resulting in difficulties distinguishing symbols from the thing being symbolized, fantasy from reality, self from other. Though difficulties symbolizing and differentiating are clearly evident in patients whose thinking is concrete, these may be a manifestation of concrete thinking rather than a root cause. Childhood thinking is characteristically concrete, and a persistence of such thinking into adulthood can be adequately explained as a failure to develop a more sophisticated theory of mind. Given that patients who exhibit such thinking tend to respond poorly to classic psychoanalytic interpretations, alternative technical approaches have been proposed. One such approach, "metacognitive" in nature, draws on a mode of thought used by gifted individuals that helps them "think outside the box" by dispensing with a typical pattern-recognition search so that novel meanings might be discovered. Metacognition, thoughts about one's thoughts and thought processes, facilitates symbolic thinking by creating sufficient distance from one's thoughts to allow the consideration of alternative meanings.     

Thinking outside of the box: Transfer of shape-based reorientation across the boundary of an arena

The way in which human and non-human animals represent the shape of their environments remains a contentious issue. According to local theories of shape learning, organisms encode the local geometric features of the environment that signal a goal location. In contrast, global theories of shape learning suggest that organisms encode the overall shape of the environment. There is, however, a surprising lack of evidence to support this latter claim, despite the fact that common behaviours seem to require encoding of the global-shape of an environment. We tested one such behaviour in 5 experiments, in which human participants were trained to navigate to a hidden goal on one side of a virtual arena (e.g. the inside) before being required to find the same point on the alternative side (e.g. the outside). Participants navigated to the appropriate goal location, both when inside and outside the virtual arena, but only when the shape of the arena remained the same between training and test (Experiments 1a and 1b). When the arena shape was transformed between these stages, participants were lost (Experiments 2a and 2b). When training and testing was conducted on the outside of two different-shaped arenas that shared local geometric cues participants once again explored the appropriate goal location (Experiment 3). These results provide core evidence that humans encode a global representation of the overall shape of the environments in, or around, which they navigate.     

Domestic violence and sexual assault services: Inside the black box

Research examining the efficacy of community-based domestic violence and sexual assault services is yielding promising findings; however, little is known about the structure, components, and content of these services. Although service guidelines exist, a critical gap persists because review, comparison, and synthesis of these recommendations have not been undertaken. This research addresses this knowledge gap through a review of the domestic violence and sexual assault services literature. We gathered relevant literature by conducting systematic searches of databases, and by soliciting the service guidelines and training manuals from all the Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault Coalitions in the United States. These efforts yielded 43 articles, books, or manuals for review. The findings show strong consensus on core services for survivors, including crisis services, legal and medical advocacy, support groups, individual counseling, and shelter. This article presents the review results in tables comparing the service goals, intervention strategies, and recommendations for service delivery. We also found areas of contention (e.g., whether to continuously staff domestic violence shelters, and whether combined agencies can effectively offer both domestic violence and sexual assault services). Building upon the review findings, we discuss the implications for domestic violence and sexual assault services and intervention research.     

Mental disorder as a black box essentialist concept.

This is a reply to commentaries on the target article (J. C. Wakefield, 1999) on the evolutionary foundations of the concept of mental disorder in defense of the harmful dysfunction analysis (HDA) of disorder. The author argues that the HDA is adequate to explain disorder and nondisorder judgments and is not disconfirmed by any of the claimed counterexamples put forward by the commentators; the commentators' proposed alternatives to the HDA are inadequate to explain disorder and nondisorder judgments; and the concept of natural function is a factual, scientific concept, contrary to K. W. M. Fulford's (1999) claim that it is inherently evaluative. The foundations of the HDA are clarified by providing a black box essentialist analysis (H. Putnam, 1975; J. C. Wakefield, 1997, in press) of the concept of natural function that underlies the concept of disorder.     

Opening the black box: Presenting a model for evaluating organizational-level interventions

Organizational-level occupational health interventions are often recommended when improvements in working conditions, employee health, and well-being are sought within organizations. Research has revealed that these interventions result in inconsistent effects despite being based on theoretical frameworks. This inconsistency indicates that intervention studies need to be designed to examine directly how and why such interventions bring about change and why they sometimes fail. We argue that intervention studies should include a process evaluation that includes a close examination of the psychological and organizational mechanisms that hinder and facilitate desired intervention outcomes. By drawing on existing intervention literature we present an evidence-based model containing three levels of elements that appear to be crucial in process evaluation. We describe how this model may be applied and developed in future research to identify better the mechanisms that link intervention processes to intervention outcomes.     

What wild primates know about resources: opening up the black box

We present the theoretical and practical difficulties of inferring the cognitive processes involved in spatial movement decisions of primates and other animals based on studies of their foraging behavior in the wild. Because the possible cognitive processes involved in foraging are not known a priori for a given species, some observed spatial movements could be consistent with a large number of processes ranging from simple undirected search processes to strategic goal-oriented travel. Two basic approaches can help to reveal the cognitive processes: (1) experiments designed to test specific mechanisms; (2) comparison of observed movements with predicted ones based on models of hypothesized foraging modes (ideally, quantitative ones). We describe how these two approaches have been applied to evidence for spatial knowledge of resources in primates, and for various hypothesized goals of spatial decisions in primates, reviewing what is now established. We conclude with a synthesis emphasizing what kinds of spatial movement data on unmanipulated primate populations in the wild are most useful in deciphering goal-oriented processes from random processes. Basic to all of these is an estimate of the animal’s ability to detect resources during search. Given knowledge of the animal’s detection ability, there are several observable patterns of resource use incompatible with a pure search process. These patterns include increasing movement speed when approaching versus leaving a resource, increasingly directed movement toward more valuable resources, and directed travel to distant resources from many starting locations. Thus, it should be possible to assess and compare spatial cognition across a variety of primate species and thus trace its ecological and evolutionary correlates. This contribution is part of the special issue “A Socioecological Perspective on Primate Cognition” (Cunningham and Janson 2007b)     

Unlocking the black box: exploring the link between high-performance work systems and performance

With a growing body of literature linking systems of high-performance work practices to organizational performance outcomes, recent research has pushed for examinations of the underlying mechanisms that enable this connection. In this study, based on a large sample of Welsh public-sector employees, we explored the role of several individual-level attitudinal factors--job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and psychological empowerment--as well as organizational citizenship behaviors that have the potential to provide insights into how human resource systems influence the performance of organizational units. The results support a unit-level path model, such that department-level, high-performance work system utilization is associated with enhanced levels of job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and psychological empowerment. In turn, these attitudinal variables were found to be positively linked to enhanced organizational citizenship behaviors, which are further related to a second-order construct measuring departmental performance.     

Applying theory to the black box: A model for empirically scoring biodata

Despite being an effective predictor of job performance, empirically keyed biodata assessments have been criticized as black box empiricism unlikely to generalize to new contexts. This paper introduces a model that challenges this perspective, explicating how biodata content, job demands, and criterion variables collectively influence the construct validity, and generalizability of empirically scored biodata. Across two field studies, expected changes in scale correlations with external measures were found that coincided with changes in the contextual similarity between calibration and holdout contexts, the criteria used, and the content validity of biodata items. Collectively, this paper offers a framework that helps understand and optimize empirical biodata keying in practice, furthering confidence for their use in applied settings.     

Thinking outside the cortex: social motivation in the evolution and development of language

Alteration of the organization of social and motivational neuroanatomical circuitry must have been an essential step in the evolution of human language. Development of vocal communication across species, particularly birdsong, and new research on the neural organization and evolution of social and motivational circuitry, together suggest that human language is the result of an obligatory link of a powerful cortico-striatal learning system, and subcortical socio-motivational circuitry.     

Acoustic signaling in the black rat (Rattus rattus)

This study surveyed the vocalization repertoire of descendants of wild-trapped Rattus rattus. Sound recordings synchronized with behavioral observations were conducted in an animal colony living undisturbed under seminatural conditions. Analyses of sound recordings revealed 10 distinct acoustic signals, 5 of which were in the ultrasonic frequency range. The time course and the frequency pattern of the analyzed sounds were similar to those described for R. norvegicus, and they occurred in comparable situations. A species-specific difference may be the intensity of the emitted sounds. The possible communicative function of the acoustic signals is discussed.     

Thinking within the box: The relational processing style elicited by counterfactual mind-sets

By comparing reality to what might have been, counterfactuals promote a relational processing style characterized by a tendency to consider relationships and associations among a set of stimuli. As such, counterfactual mind-sets were expected to improve performance on tasks involving the consideration of relationships and associations but to impair performance on tasks requiring novel ideas that are uninfluenced by salient associations. The authors conducted several experiments to test this hypothesis. In Experiments 1a and 1b, the authors determined that counterfactual mind-sets increase mental states and preferences for thinking styles consistent with relational thought. Experiment 2 demonstrated a facilitative effect of counterfactual mind-sets on an analytic task involving logical relationships; Experiments 3 and 4 demonstrated that counterfactual mind-sets structure thought and imagination around salient associations and therefore impaired performance on creative generation tasks. In Experiment 5, the authors demonstrated that the detrimental effect of counterfactual mind-sets is limited to creative tasks involving novel idea generation; in a creative association task involving the consideration of relationships between task stimuli, counterfactual mind-sets improved performance.     

Thinking outside the body: an advantage for spatial updating during imagined versus physical self-rotation

Three studies examined effects of different response measures on spatial updating during self-rotation. In Experiment 1, participants located objects in an array with a pointer after physical self-rotation, imagined self-rotation, and a rotation condition in which they ignored superfluous sensorimotor signals. In line with previous research, updating performance was found to be superior in the physical self-rotation condition compared with the other 2. In Experiment 2, participants performed in identical rotation movement conditions but located objects by verbal labeling rather than pointing. Within the verbal modality, an advantage for updating during imagined self-rotation was found. In Experiment 3, participants performed physical and imagined self-rotations only and used a pointing response offset from their physical reference frames. Performance was again superior during imagined self-rotations. The results suggest that it is not language processing per se that improves updating performance but rather a general reduction of the conflict between physical and projected egocentric reference frames.     

Anxiogenic-like effects of gamma-hydroxybutyric acid (GHB) in mice tested in the light-dark box

Gamma-hydroxybutyric acid (GHB) is a drug with abuse potential, popularly known as "liquid ecstasy". It is an endogenous compound of the mammalian brain which satisfies many of the criteria for consideration as a neurotransmitter or neuromodulator. In this study, the effects of acute administration of GHB (40, 80 and 120 mg/kg, ip) on anxiety, tested in the light/dark box, were examined in male mice of the OF.1 strain. Likewise, we compared the behavioural profile of GHB with that induced by mCPP (1 mg/kg, ip), a compound with known anxiogenic actions. GHB-treated mice spent notably less time in the lit area (40 and 80 mg/kg) and more time in the dark area (all doses), whereas the total number of 'rearings', transitions and latency were significantly reduced. A very similar behavioural profile was observed in mCPP-treated animals. Overall, these findings indicate that GHB exhibits anxiogenic-like properties in male mice. It is suggested that the anxiogenic effects of GHB could be related to its ability to modulate GABA and/or dopaminergic receptors.     

Construct validity of global life-satisfaction judgments: A look into the black box of self–informant agreement

Life-satisfaction judgments are ubiquitously used as indicators of wellbeing. The construct validity of these judgments relies heavily on self–informant agreement. However, agreement is necessary, but not sufficient to claim that life-satisfaction judgments are valid. In addition, self–informant agreement should be based on the use of valid information about satisfaction with important life domains. An alternative possibility is that agreement is based on impressions about personality traits. We tested these two hypotheses in a model that predicted self-ratings and informant ratings of life satisfaction from shared perceptions of personality and satisfaction with life domains. In a round-robin study of families, we found that life-domains were the key predictor of self–informant agreement. However, the Depressiveness facet of Neuroticism had a small direct effect. In addition, it was indirectly related to self–informant agreement because it predicts lower satisfaction in important life-domains that were used to form life-satisfaction judgments.