COGNITIVE COMPLEXITY MEASURES AND THE RELATIONSHIP OF COGNITIVE COMPLEXITY TO COMMUNICATION

This review assesses the adequacy of several commonly employed cognitive complexity measures on the basis of five criteria: high test-retest reliability with adults, association with chronological age across childhood and adolescence, independence from intelligence and verbal abilities, association with other indices of developed social cognition, and association with measures of developed communicative functioning. Extant research indicates that only one complexity measure—Crockett's Role Category Questionnaire—is satisfactory on all these criteria, whereas Bieri's widely used measure is deficient on most. However, research to date concerning the relationship of cognitive complexity (as assessed by Crockett's measure) to communication has failed to illuminate the specific role played by complexity as opposed to other social-cognitive factors with which it is associated.     

The placebo phenomenon and medical ethics: Rethinking the relationship between informed consent and risk–benefit assessment

It has been presumed within bioethics that the benefits and risks of treatments can be assessed independently of information disclosure to patients as part of the informed consent process. Research on placebo and nocebo effects indicates that this is not true for symptomatic treatments. The benefits and risks that patients experience from symptomatic treatments can be shaped powerfully by information about these treatments provided by clinicians. In this paper we discuss the implications of placebo and nocebo research for risk–benefit assessment and informed consent.     

Task relevance modulates processing of distracting emotional stimuli

Relatively little is known about the integration of people's fear-related dispositions and their expectations about stressful events. This research used information integration theory to examine how participants’ anxiety sensitivity and event expectancy are integrated to determine their social anxiety. Three studies were conducted—two with university students and one with anxiety clinic patients—in which participants were presented with multiple scenarios of a socially embarrassing event, each representing a different degree of event probability, from which subjective expectancies were derived. Independent variables included anxiety sensitivity (low, moderate, high) and event expectancy (low, medium, high, no probability information). Participants were asked to indicate their anxiety (dependent measure) in each expectancy condition in this 3 × 4 mixed, quasi-experimental design. The results of all three studies strongly suggest that anxiety sensitivity and event expectancy are integrated additively to produce social anxiety. Additional results and their implications for the treatment of anxiety-related disorders are also discussed.     

A Thought or Two on the Future of Research in Career Counseling

The advantages of a shift in focus in research—a shift more in keeping with the counselor's genuine interest in the individual client—are explored.     

Evasion, private events, and pragmatism: A Reply to Moore's response to my review of Conceptual Foundations of Radical Behaviorism

Moore's screed in response to my review of his book uses several rhetorical tricks to counter criticism without actually addressing it: he tries to preempt the transparency of his own orthodoxy by groundlessly accusing me of orthodoxy; he caricatures my criticisms to make them appear obviously wrong; he professes lack of understanding so as to dodge having to attempt a genuine response; and he engages in pejorative labeling to dismiss the criticisms without analysis. From a scientific and pragmatic point of view, private events are a mistake, precisely because they are private. They cannot serve as independent variables, as Moore suggests, because they cannot be measured; “private independent variable” is a contradiction in terms. When we carefully examine locutions like “observe” and “report on,” we discover that they entail only public verbal and nonverbal behavior, not objects and not private events as objects. A person in pain is not reporting on anything, is engaging in public verbal and nonverbal pain‐behavior, and an infant or a dog may be considered to be in pain. The public behavior is all that matters, because determining whether a person is really in pain privately is impossible. The same is true of any private event, and the control of the public behavior on which the verbal community comments lies in the public environment. We cannot have two sets of principles, one for verbal behavior and one for nonverbal behavior or one for humans and one for other animals.     

Marijuana Revisited

This review examines recent research on the psychological effects of marijuana. The article contains material on potency, research problems, use patterns in the United States, and expectancy, as well as a review of research on acute effects, including psychosis, toxic delerium, acute anxiety, and brain damage. Nonacute effects are also examined, with material on studies of amotivational syndrome, intellectual functioning, memory, sexual activity, and driving. Research on marijuana's relationship to other drugs and to criminal behavior is also evaluated. Implications for counselors are discussed. Counselors are urged to help provide accurate information to users and to encourage an informed-decision approach. The significance of marijuana use to value and life-style choice and the counselor's role in considering marijuana law changes are evaluated.     

‘We Pray by His Mouth’: Karl Barth,Erving Goffman,and a Theology of Invocation

Rereading the opening question of the Westminster Catechism, “What is the chief end of man?”, I contend in this essay that the act of invocation — giving God thanks, praise, and petitions — is the act in and through which human being itself is founded, constituted and achieved. I take important cues from Karl Barth's Church Dogmatics and The Christian Life, and from sociologist Erving Goffman's work on the shifting “footings” involved in everyday interactions. I argue for an account of the human being as a being‐with‐God, human acting as acting‐with‐God, and human salvation as a restoration to the genuine human partner's work — indeed, the true leitourgia— of thanks, praise and petition to God.     

The placebo effect: dissolving the expectancy versus conditioning debate

The authors review the literature on the 2 main models of the placebo effect: expectancy theory and classical conditioning. A path is suggested to dissolving the theoretical impasse that has long plagued this issue. The key is to make a clear distinction between 2 questions: What factors shape placebo effects? and What learning mediates the placebo effect? The reviewed literature suggests that classical conditioning procedures are one shaping factor but that verbal information can also shape placebo effects. The literature also suggests that conditioning procedures and other sources of information sometimes shape conscious expectancies and that these expectancies mediate some placebo effects; however, in other cases conditioning procedures appear to shape placebo effects that are not mediated by conscious cognition.     

The effects of verbal instruction on affective and expectancy learning

The current research assessed the effects of verbal instruction on affective and expectancy learning during repeated contingency reversals (Experiment 1) and during extinction (Experiment 2) in a picture-picture paradigm. Affective and expectancy learning displayed contingency reversal and extinction, but changes were slower for affective learning. Instructions facilitated reversal and extinction of expectancy learning but did not impact on affective learning. These findings suggest a differential susceptibility of affective and expectancy learning to verbal instruction and question previous reports that verbal instructions can accelerate the extinction of non-prepared fear learning in humans.     

Postmenopausal Motherhood Reloaded: Advanced Age and In Vitro Derived Gametes

In this paper we look at the implications of an emerging technology for the case in favor of, or against, postmenopausal motherhood. Technologies such as in vitro derived gametes (sperm and eggs derived from nonreproductive cells) have the potential to influence the ways in which reproductive medicine is practiced, and are already bringing new dimensions to debates in this area. We explain what in vitro derived gametes are and how their development may impact on the case of postmenopausal motherhood. We briefly review some of the concerns that postmenopausal motherhood has raised—and the implications that the successful development, and use in reproduction, of artificial gametes might have for such concerns. The concerns addressed include arguments from nature, risks and efficacy, reduced energy of the mother, and maternal life expectancy. We also consider whether the use of in vitro derived gametes to facilitate postmenopausal motherhood would contribute to reinforcing a narrow, geneticized account of reproduction and a pro‐reproductive culture that encourages women to produce genetically related offspring at all costs.     

Affect and emotions in placebo and nocebo effects: What do we know so far?

Once considered nuisance variance in clinical trials, placebo effects and nocebo effects are now widely recognized as important and mutable psychobiological contributors to mental and physical health. Psychological theory explaining these effects emphasizes associative learning and conscious expectations. It has long been suggested, however, that affective states such as moods, emotions, and distress could play a significant role. In this paper, we draw together and review the empirical data linking affective states to placebo and nocebo effects. To organize this disparate literature, three questions are addressed: (1) Does pre‐existing state and trait affect modulate placebo and nocebo effects? (2) Does administering placebo and nocebo treatments change affective states, and if so, does the resulting affect causally influence placebo and nocebo effects? Finally, (3) Can placebo treatments be successfully employed as a regulation strategy to modulate different affective states? In reviewing the evidence in relation to these three questions, it is clear that affect does play a key role in placebo and nocebo effects in many circumstances, and further, there may be a reciprocal dynamic at play between a treatment event, affect, and placebo/nocebo effects. The paper concludes by discussing implications for theory and intervention and recommends future research priorities.     

Biological perspectives on the effects of early psychosocial experience

There is much current interest in how adverse experiences early in life might affect certain elements of physiological, behavioral, and psychological functioning across the lifespan. Recent conceptual frameworks for studying the effects of early experience have involved constructs such as experience-expectant, experience-dependent, and experience-adaptive plasticity. The latter construct is related to comparative models of developmental programming which posit the persistence of biological adjustments to the early caregiving environment. We briefly review such models and their translational implications. We then turn to human development and focus on the effects of large changes in children’s life courses as tests of hypotheses related to early experience effects. In particular, the effect of early institutionalization on children’s brain and behavioral development after changes to adoptive families or foster care is used as an example of a research area in which programming hypotheses have been proposed.     

Advertising's misinformation effect

This research explores whether post-experience advertising alters information learned in a consumer's direct experience. An advertising misinformation effect was obtained for colour memory of a previously seen candy bar wrapper upon both visual and verbal misinformation. However, the misleading visual information produced more ‘remember’ judgements than misleading verbal information. This advertising misinformation effect did not dissipate when the source was discredited. We found that such memory changes can be directly linked to consumer subjective judgements and choices when the misleading information is particularly salient. Not only do these findings constitute a novel generalizability of the misinformation effect, they also have implications for social policy research on deceptive advertising. Copyright © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

“WHY BE MORAL?” The Cheng Brothers' Neo‐Confucian Answer

In this article, I present a neo‐Confucian answer, by Cheng Hao and Cheng Yi, to the question, “Why should I be moral?” I argue that this answer is better than some representative answers in the Western philosophical tradition. According to the Chengs, one should be moral because it is a joy to perform moral actions. Sometimes one finds it a pain, instead of a joy, to perform moral actions only because one lacks the necessary genuine moral knowledge—knowledge that is accessible to every common person as long as one makes the effort to learn. One should make the effort to learn such knowledge—to seek joy in performing moral actions—because to be moral is a distinguishing mark of being human. This neo‐Confucian answer seems to be egoistic, as its conception of motivation for morality is based on self‐interest: to seek one's own joy. However, since it emphasizes that one's true self‐interest is to seek joy in things uniquely human, which is to be moral, self‐interest and morality become identical; the more a person seeks one's self‐interest, the more moral the person is, and vice versa.     

The mind beyond our immediate awareness: Freudian, Jungian, and cognitive models of the unconscious

Abstract: Several branches of cognitive science now focus on the nature of the unconscious. This paper explores some of the findings and models from this research. By introducing formulations based on non‐clinical data, the cognitive scientists—in neural linguistics, computational modelling, and neuroscience—may depart from the older psychoanalytic formulations. An understanding of unconscious neural processes is nevertheless emerging showing how synapses are modified by experience and how learning, conscious and unconscious, is due to this important aspect of brain plasticity. Freud and Jung's formulations about the unconscious psyche, representing the main tenets of depth psychology, are also based on a conception of the mind as extending beyond immediate awareness. However, their models are more hypothetical in that their data, almost exclusively, come from treatments of psychotherapy patients and their verbal accounts. So how do these two conceptions of the unconscious match, where do they differ? And how does the neural understanding in the present research support theories and practices of analytic treatments?     

Pragmatism and bivalence

The success of the pragmatic account of truth is often thought to founder on the principle of bivalence—the principle which holds that every genuine statement in the indicative mood is either true or false. For pragmatists must, it seems, claim that the principle does not hold for theoretical statements and observation statements about the past. That is, it seems that pragmatists must deny objective truth‐values to these perfectly respectable sorts of hypotheses. In this paper, after examining three pragmatist attitudes towards bivalence, I shall suggest that the pragmatist's proper stance is to treat bivalence as a regulative assumption of inquiry.     

Cultural sensitivity: Problems and solutions in applied and preventive intervention

Applied and preventive intervention research must consider cultural diversity as a matter of course, not only for reasons of social justice, ethical acceptability, and effectiveness, but given major historical and demographic changes in the United States. This article raises several issues commonly encountered in such research—from key conceptual issues surrounding the construct of race, ethnicity, culture, and minority status, to the conceptualization, design, recruitment, measurement, delivery, data analysis, interpretation, and dissemination of an intervention—and suggests possible solutions aimed at fostering genuine cultural sensitivity while satisfying the demands of rigorous scientific inquiry. This article is not a guide to the do's and don'ts of cultural sensitivity, but rather an attempt to stimulate discussion in an area that should be of concern to all psychologists interested in applied and preventive intervention.     

Reactions of male subordinates to the sex-role congruency of immediate supervision

Male subjects (N=90) worked under supervision for two hours. A 2×2×2 factorial design was employed so that the supervisor was male or female, autocratic or democratic, and possessed a sex-role congruent or incongruent job title. The hypotheses were supported in part: For female supervision only, the more traditionally incongruent the situation, the more unfavorable were the reactions elicited. This finding was true, however, only for subordinates' verbal comments and not for their task performance or written evaluation of the supervisor. Discussion of the specific hypotheses is provided and an alternate explanation concerning the supervisors' alleged prior experience is offered. A more dynamic approach to the study of leader—subordinate relationships — especially in light of the implications for acceptance of female supervision offered by this study — is advocated.     

Science Self-Efficacy and Lifelong Learning: Emerging Adults in Science Museums

Recent research suggests that emerging adulthood—the stage between adolescence and maturity marked by a lengthy process of identity development—constitutes a window of opportunity for museums to influence adults' lifelong science learning trajectories. The current study sought to explore the impact of a single museum visit on emerging adults' science self-efficacy, beliefs about their own abilities to learn or do science. A repeated measures design assessed the science self-efficacy of 244 emerging adults before, immediately after, and three months after a science museum visit. Results from surveys and interviews indicate that self-efficacy increased after the visit, but only females maintained their elevated self-efficacy three months after the visit. Increases were associated with the visit and with self-reports citing mastery at exhibits, vicariously watching others at exhibits, and positive emotional experiences within the museum. The article discusses the study's limitations as well as implications for research and museum practice.