Tomorrow I’ll be me: The effect of time perspective on the activation of idealistic versus pragmatic selves

It is widely accepted that the self-system is dynamic and consists of multiple selves that emerge under different contexts. The present research describes two types of diverging self-conceptions, the idealistic and pragmatic selves. Building on a synthesis of construal level theory with research on the self, we propose that a more distal time perspective activates an idealistic versus a pragmatic self. Self-activation, in turn, influences the preference between two major motives: maximizing identity versus instrumental benefits. A series of five studies supported this conceptualization by demonstrating that: (a) distal rather than proximal time perspective enhances the preference for identity over instrumental benefits; (b) people construe themselves as relatively more idealistic than pragmatic when primed with a distal than proximal time perspective, and (c) self-activation mediates the effect of time perspective on preference. The studies also investigate boundary conditions and process measures that shed light on the interface between time, self, and preference. The final section discusses the theoretical implications for the literatures on construal level, self, and justice and the practical implications for organizational behavior, political psychology, and human decision-making.     

“I’ll never be in a relationship like that again”: Personal growth following romantic relationship breakups

This study investigated the prevalence and correlates of personal growth and distress following romantic relationship breakups. Causal attributions for why the relationship declined and ended, personality factors, gender, and initiator status were examined as correlates of growth and distress in 92 undergraduates who had experienced a recent romantic relationship breakup. In regard to the prevalence of growth, respondents reported, on average, five types of personal growth they thought might improve their future romantic relationships. Correlates of self–reported growth included causal attributions to environmental factors and the personality factor of Agreeableness. Women reported more growth than did men. Factors related to higher levels of distress included causal attributions to the ex–partner and to environmental factors surrounding the previous relationship. The importance of assessing growth following relationship breakups and of accounting for the environmental context of close relationships is discussed.     

If you have a choice,you have trouble: Stimulus valence modulates presentation‐order effects in preference judgment

It is well known that the presentation order of choice options often affects decision outcomes to a significant degree. However, despite the significance and wide occurrence of the effects, they are ignored in most preference models. Furthermore, psychophysical findings of stimulus‐magnitude dependent presentation‐order effects have not been acknowledged previously in the cognitive literature on preference judgments. Thus, the potential moderating effect of the level of stimulus magnitude (here, valence) on the direction and size of order effects in preference judgment has not been investigated previously. In two experiments, participants (117 and 204, respectively) rated their preference for pairs of everyday‐type objects and phenomena (e.g., apple–pear, headache–stomachache). Stimuli were spaced horizontally, and each participant received them in one of two opposite within‐pair presentation orders. Participants also rated the stimuli's valence on a scale from very bad to very good. The results showed a positive correlation between the rated valence and the tendency to prefer the first‐mentioned (left) stimulus; that is, the effect was greatest, and opposite, for choices between the most attractive and the most unattractive options, respectively. In terms of Hellström's ( 1979 ) sensation‐weighting model, the positive correlation is caused by a higher weight (i.e., impact on the preference judgment) for the left stimulus than for the right, which is possibly due to the left stimulus being compared to the right. The results suggest that researchers may have failed previously to find important moderators of presentation‐order effects in preference judgment due to the failure to use sufficiently attractive or unattractive stimuli. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

‘So you did what you wanted then’: Discourse analysis,personal agency,and psychotherapy

This paper explores issues concerning personal agency in discursive psychology and discourse analysis, with a particular emphasis on agency in terms of motivational accounts of the person. Issues are discussed in relation to the efficacy, acceptability, and accessibility of discourse analytic research for the practising psychotherapist. We suggest that such an approach may raise problems in four areas. First, we argue that without explicit theorization of the subject as language user, discourse analysis may be vulnerable to the charge of determinism. Second, theorization of the subject as language user may be required to account successfully for individual consistency and continuity of identity. Third, although claiming to critique commonsense notions of subjectivity, implicit dualist assumptions facilitate a reading of discursive psychology that is compatible with a motivational model of the person. Finally, we argue that discursive psychology itself implies a particular model of the strategically motivated language user. We conclude that, although these issues require clarification, discursive psychology and discourse analysis have much to offer psychotherapy research.     

Between a rock and a hard place: Damned if you do, damned if you don’t

Individuals are frequently forced to make decisions from among undesirable choice-sets. Raise taxes or cut social services? Lay off workers or go bankrupt? Go deep in debt or forgo a college education? The research presented here suggests that in such situations, decision-makers are often evaluated negatively regardless of the choice they make. In Experiment 1, participants read about a judge deciding which of two seemingly unfit parents to award sole custody in a real-life divorce case. In Experiment 2, participants were led to believe that their partner in the experiment was forced to pick one of two unpleasant tasks for the participant to perform. In both cases, the decision and decision-maker were evaluated negatively regardless of the alternative chosen–and regardless of the fact that they were the only options in the choice-set. Discussion focuses on the source, scope, and consequences of this phenomenon.     

‘It's gotten a bit old,charity’: Young adults in New Zealand talk about poverty,charitable giving and aid appeals

An extensive body of literature exists on the phenomena of poverty, charitable giving and the effectiveness of aid appeals. To date psychological research has predominantly focused on individualistic models to explain people's understandings of poverty and their charitable giving practices. Based upon a social constructionist epistemology, this study investigates how understandings of aid appeals, poverty and charitable giving are discursively produced and constructed in relation to one another through an analysis of New Zealand young adults' talk about these issues. Data were collected from three focus group discussions among pre‐existing friendship groups comprising three male and nine female students aged between 18 and 25. A brief video clip of aid appeals was used to stimulate discussion on poverty and charitable giving. Analysis of these discussions revealed three discursive themes relating to the aid appeals: local versus international need, emotional arousal and insufficient information. Drawing upon these themes the participants constructed poverty as relative or extreme, and largely explained by educational deficits. They constructed charitable giving as solicited through aid appeals, as compromised through immunity to such appeals, and as diminished through positionings of self‐help and self‐responsibility. These discursive constructions were drawn on by participants to legitimate their own non‐donor position. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

"If you and I,if we,in this later day,lose that sacred fire . . .": perspective in political interviews

It is argued in the following that the dialogical complexity of speaker perspective requires a broad empirical analysis. To date, such analyses, particularly of political discourse, have been couched in terms of narrower concepts, such as self-presentation and political positioning or involvement/distancing, and have been typically carried out by means of qualitative methods applied to pronominal usage. The present research applies complementarily both quantitative and qualitative analyses to BBC television interviews of Shimon Peres (January 29, 2001) and of Edward Said (October 18, 2000) by Tim Sebastian in a program entitled HARDtalk. In addition to pronouns, these analyses include a number of other hypothetical indicators of a broad concept of perspective on the part of both interviewer and interviewees: turn-initial words, hesitations, questions, use of yes and no, personal reference utterances (e.g., I think), interjections, number of syllables spoken, and interruptions and overlaps. Quantitative comparisons of interviewer with interviewee revealed important differences on all these measures. Qualitative analyses also confirmed subtle local dynamics of perspective. Accordingly, the findings are interpreted within a general theoretical concept of perspective, derived from Bakhtin's (1981) dialogicity.     

Evolutionary consumer psychology: Ask not what you can do for biology,but…

The commentaries raise questions about modularity, and about the evidence required to establish evolutionary influences on behavior. We briefly discuss evidence leading evolutionary psychologists to assume that human choices reflect evolutionary influences, and to assume some degree of modularity in human information processing. An evolutionary perspective is based on a multidisciplinary nomological network of evidence, and results of particular experiments are only one part of that network. The precise nature of, and number of, information processing systems, is an empirical question. Consumer psychologists need not retrain as biologists to profit from using insights and findings from evolutionary biology to generate new hypotheses, and to contribute novel insights and findings to the emerging nomological network of modern evolutionary science.     

What you don’t know won’t hurt me: Costly (but quiet) exit in dictator games

We used simple economic games to examine pro-social behavior and the lengths that people will take to avoid engaging in it. Over two studies, we found that about one-third of participants were willing to “exit” a $10 dictator game and take $9 instead. The exit option left the receiver nothing, but also ensured that the receiver never knew that a dictator game was to be played. Because most social utility models are defined over monetary outcomes, they cannot explain choosing the ($9, $0) exit outcome over the dominating $10 dictator game, since the game includes outcomes of ($10, $0) and ($9, $1). We also studied exiting using a “private” dictator game. In the private game, the receiver never knew about the game or from where any money was received. Gifts in this game were added innocuously to a payment for a separate task. Almost no dictators exited from the private game, indicating that receivers’ beliefs are the key factor in the decision to exit. When, as in the private game, the receivers’ beliefs and expectations cannot be manipulated by exit, exit is seldom taken. We conclude that giving often reflects a desire not to violate others’ expectations rather than a concern for others’ welfare per se. We discuss the implications of our results for understanding ethical decisions and for testing and modeling social preferences. An adequate specification of social preferences should include “psychological” payoffs that directly incorporate beliefs about actions into the utility function.     

On this,that, and the other: Nonegocentrism in very young children

The development of comprehension and production of spatial deictic terms “this/that”, “here/there”, “my/your”, and “in front of/behind” was investigated in the context of a hide-and-seek game. The first three contrasts are produced according to the speaker's perspective, so comprehension requires a nonegocentric viewpoint. The contrast “in front of/behind” is produced relative to the hearer, i.e., production is nonegocentric. The subjects were 39 children, rangin in age from 2.5–4.5 years, and 18 college undergraduates. The 2.5-year-old children were best at those contrasts which do not require a shift in perspective. The 3- and 4-year-old children were adept at switching to the speaker's perspective for comprehension of the terms requiring this shift, i.e., were nonegocentric. Four-year-olds were also capable of nonegocentric production of “in front of/behind”.     

‘You were not born here,so you are classless,you are free!’ Social class and cultural complex in analysis

The unconscious impact of differences in culture and social class is discussed from the perspective of an analyst practising in London whose ‘foreign accent’ prevents patients from placing her within the social stratifications by which they feel confined. Because she is seen by them as an analyst from both ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ the British psycho‐social fabric and cultural complex, this opens a space in the transference that enables fuller exploration of the impact of the British social class system on patients’ experience of themselves and their world. The paper considers this impact as a trans‐generational trauma of living in a society of sharp socio‐economic divisions based on material property. This is illustrated with the example of a patient who, at the point of moving towards the career to which he aspired, was unable to separate a sense of personal identity from the social class he so desperately wanted to leave behind and walk the long avenue of individuation. The dearth of literature on the subject of class is considered, and the paper concludes that not enough attention is given to class identification in training.     

Now you see me,now you don't: evidence that chimpanzees understand the role of the eyes in attention

Chimpanzees appear to understand something about the attentional states of others; in the present experiment, we investigated whether they understand that the attentional state of a human is based on eye gaze. In all, 116 adult chimpanzees were offered food by an experimenter who engaged in one of the four experimental manipulations: eyes closed, eyes open, hand over eyes, and hand over mouth. The communicative behavior of the chimpanzees was observed. More visible behaviors were produced when the experimenter's eyes were visible than when the experimenter's eyes were not visible. More vocalizations were produced when the experimenter's eyes were closed than when they were open, but there were no differences in other attention getting behaviors. There was no effect of age or rearing history. The results suggest that chimpanzees use the presence of the eyes as a cue that their visual gestures will be effective.     

‘Something in the way you move’: Infants are sensitive to emotions conveyed in action kinematics

Body movements, as well as faces, communicate emotions. Research in adults has shown that the perception of action kinematics has a crucial role in understanding others’ emotional experiences. Still, little is known about infants’ sensitivity to body emotional expressions, since most of the research in infancy focused on faces. While there is some first evidence that infants can recognize emotions conveyed in whole‐body postures, it is still an open question whether they can extract emotional information from action kinematics. We measured electromyographic (EMG) activity over the muscles involved in happy (zygomaticus major, ZM), angry (corrugator supercilii, CS) and fearful (frontalis, F) facial expressions, while 11‐month‐old infants observed the same action performed with either happy or angry kinematics. Results demonstrate that infants responded to angry and happy kinematics with matching facial reactions. In particular, ZM activity increased while CS activity decreased in response to happy kinematics and vice versa for angry kinematics. Our results show for the first time that infants can rely on kinematic information to pick up on the emotional content of an action. Thus, from very early in life, action kinematics represent a fundamental and powerful source of information in revealing others’ emotional state.     

It's the way that you, er, say it: hesitations in speech affect language comprehension

Everyday speech is littered with disfluency, often correlated with the production of less predictable words (e.g., Beattie & Butterworth [Beattie, G., & Butterworth, B. (1979). Contextual probability and word frequency as determinants of pauses in spontaneous speech. Language and Speech, 22, 201-211.]). But what are the effects of disfluency on listeners? In an ERP experiment which compared fluent to disfluent utterances, we established an N400 effect for unpredictable compared to predictable words. This effect, reflecting the difference in ease of integrating words into their contexts, was reduced in cases where the target words were preceded by a hesitation marked by the word er. Moreover, a subsequent recognition memory test showed that words preceded by disfluency were more likely to be remembered. The study demonstrates that hesitation affects the way in which listeners process spoken language, and that these changes are associated with longer-term consequences for the representation of the message.     

Servicescapes: The role that place plays in stay‐at‐home mothers’ lives

Over the past decade, increasing attention has been paid to gender‐related consumption behaviour. However, a relative gap in our knowledge still exists when it comes to understanding the changes that occur as a result of motherhood and how this may influence their interactions in the retail environment. The purpose of this article is to explore stay‐at‐home mothers’ experiences in the servicescape to gain a better understanding of how they associate with servicescapes during this transitional period, how they use retail space to suit their needs, and how they use retail space to negotiate their role as a stay‐at‐home mother. Five stay‐at‐home mothers with children younger than 5 years were provided with disposable cameras and asked to photograph servicescapes that they visited regularly. Over a 1‐year period, they were interviewed several times, and photo‐elicitation techniques were used throughout the interviewing process. The results of this study suggest that when consumers undergo role or identity changes, certain places can be used to smooth this process. Not only can the retail environment be used as a coping mechanism for stay‐at‐home mothers, it can also be viewed as a “second place” as opposed to a “third place”, thus enabling isolated consumers to feel connected with the outside world. Last, this study highlights the temporal dimensions of place. Throughout one's lifetime, one will form attachments to and patronise different places, which will evolve and change as individuals, accordingly, take on different roles and identities. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

On the bilingual advantage in conflict processing: Now you see it, now you don’t

We report two experiments exploring more in detail the bilingual advantage in conflict resolution tasks. In particular, we focus on the origin of the bilingual advantage on overall reaction times in the flanker task. Bilingual and monolingual participants were asked to perform a flanker task under different task versions. In Experiment 1, we used two low-monitoring versions where most of the trials were of just one type (either congruent or incongruent). In Experiment 2, we used two high-monitoring versions where congruent and incongruent trials were more evenly distributed. An effect of bilingualism in overall reaction times was only present in the high-monitoring condition. These results reveal that when the task at hand recruits a good deal of monitoring resources, bilinguals outperform monolinguals. This observation suggests that bilingualism may affect the monitoring processes involved in executive control.     

‘Tell us what we need to know to do this!’ Preparing a path to safe uncertainty in assignment writing on a family therapy foundation course

This article describes a single session aimed at helping participants on a family therapy foundation course to move from a position of anxiety and discomfort about completing a written assignment to a position of safe uncertainty. Evaluation from the perspectives of course participants, course facilitators and assignment markers has shown participants engaging more enthusiastically with the writing of the assignment and expressing less anxiety about the process.     

The impacts of an air-crash on students’ transportation choice behaviour: An empirical study undertaken in Taiwan

This research’s objectives are to identify major factors influencing offshore student–commuters’ transportation mode-choice and to develop simple Logit choice models prior and post a major air disaster. The total trip time, trip cost, ease of access to a transportation mode, student–commuters’ household income, and the risk perceived by student–commuters using different transportation modes are found to have impacts on their mode-choice behaviour. Several logit model specifications were tested. The research reveals student–commuters’ transportation mode-choice behaviour significantly changed post the May 2002 Penghu air accident. Reduction in airfares (which most airlines used to promote their services after the air-crash) was less attractive to passengers than convincing them that airline services were safe. Therefore, any post-disaster airline marketing campaign aimed at student–commuters should change from reduced fare promotion to service safety promotion.