Does attitude certainty beget self-certainty?

This research explores the possibility that changes in attitude certainty can affect general self-certainty and, thus, have consequences that extend beyond the attitude domain. Across two studies, attitude certainty is manipulated using repeated attitude expression and attitude consensus paradigms. The implications of these manipulations are tested for feelings of general self-uncertainty (Study 1) and global self-doubt about one’s abilities (Study 2). In each study, it is demonstrated that participants feel greater self-certainty under conditions of high rather than low attitude certainty, but only when they view aspects of the attitude as central to their self-concept.     

Collaborative planning and prediction: Does group discussion affect optimistic biases in time estimation?

Intuition and previous research indicate that individuals commonly display an optimistic bias in time prediction. The present studies extend research on task completion forecasts to examine tasks performed collaboratively by groups, and predictions generated through group discussion. Participants predicted—individually and collaboratively—when they would complete upcoming group projects ranging from brief laboratory tasks to extensive real-world projects, and their actual completion times were measured. Results supported the three guiding hypotheses. First, there was an optimistic bias for both individual (Studies 1 and 2) and group predictions (Studies 1–3). Second, predictions generated through group discussion were more optimistic than those generated individually. Third, this “group accentuation” effect was mediated by the informational focus at the time of prediction. Group discussion heightened participants’ tendency to focus primarily on factors promoting successful task completion, and this selective focus on “planning for success” enhanced their optimistic outlook. Discussion centers on theoretical contributions to the individual and group decision making literatures, as well as applied implications for planning and forecasting within organizational contexts.     

Does organization improve priming?

In five experiments, the effects of organization on implicit memory or priming tests were compared with its effects on the explicit memory tests of free and cued recall. Organization was manipulated by varying list structure (blocked vs. random presentation of categorized items) and by instructions. The results showed that organization had parallel effects on the category-production priming test and free- and cued-recall tests; performance was enhanced by organization on both types of tests. It was also demonstrated that the effect of organization on priming was limited to the category-production test and was not obtained with the word-identification priming test. These results suggest that performance on implicit and explicit memory tests is similarly affected by experimental manipulations when both types of tests rely on conceptually driven processing. In addition, performance on two implicit tests is dissociated when one test relies on conceptually driven processing and the other on data-driven processing.     

Do smokers have a negative implicit attitude toward smoking?

Swanson, Rudman, and Greenwald (2001 Swanson, J. E., Rudman, L. A. and Greenwald, A. G. 2001. Using the Implicit Association Test to investigate attitude-behavior consistency for stigmatised behaviour. Cognition and Emotion, 15: 207–230. [Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) used an Implicit Association Test (IAT) to measure attitudes toward smoking and found that smokers have negative implicit attitudes toward smoking. In a first experiment, we replicated the results of Swanson et al. but showed that scores on an attitude IAT do discriminate between smokers and nonsmokers to the same extent than scores on an IAT that is designed to measure associations between smoking and approach or avoidance. In a second experiment, we did find positive implicit attitudes toward smoking in smokers when we used a personalised version of the IAT that was designed to be less susceptible to effects of societal views. Our results indicate that implicit attitudes should not be dismissed as a causal factor in the maintenance of smoking behaviour.     

Does eye gaze indicate implicit knowledge of false belief? Charting transitions in knowledge

Three-year-olds sometimes look to the correct location but give an incorrect verbal answer in a false belief task. We examined whether correct eye gaze among 3- to 5-year-old children indexed unconscious knowledge or low confidence conscious knowledge. Children "bet" counters on where they thought a story character would go. If children were conscious of the knowledge conveyed by their eye gaze then they should have bet modestly on their explicit answer (i.e., been unsure whether this answer or the answer conveyed through eye direction was correct). We found that children bet very highly on the location consistent with their explicit answer, suggesting that they were not aware of the knowledge conveyed through their eye gaze. This result was supported by a number of conditions that showed that betting was a sensitive measure of even small degrees of uncertainty. The results shed light on false-belief understanding, the implicit-explicit distinction, and transitional knowledge. We argue that the transition to a full understanding of false belief is marked by periods of implicit knowledge and explicit understanding with low confidence.     

Does knowledge secure warrant to assert?

This paper fortifies and defends the so called Sufficiency Argument (SA) against Classical Invariantism. In Sect. 2, I explain the version of the SA formulated but then rejected by Brown (2008a). In Sect. 3, I show how cases described by Hawthorne (2004), Brown (2008b), and Lackey (forthcoming) threaten to undermine one or the other of the SA’s least secure premises. In Sect. 4, I buttress one of those premises and defend the reinforced SA from the objection developed in Sect. 3.     

Does family therapy produce change? an overview of outcome studies

Summary Families were randomly assigned to one of two forms of conjoint marital therapy: an insight-oriented treatment (n=10) or a problem-solving intervention (n=10.). The results on self-report measures of family functioning indicate that the problem-solving intervention produced more favorable changes after three months. However on long-term follow-up after a year, this more positive effect did not apparently persist, since the insight treatment group reported better results. Experienced therapists did better than inexperienced therapists in the insight treatment condition, but level of experience did not make a difference in the problem-solving intervention. A group of eight families who dropped out of the insight treatment group provided data on correlates of premature termination. Several of the practical obstacles to implementing an experimental design in a clinic setting are illustrated by the research.As we develop more sophisticated methodology, we hope that is the near future family therapy researchers will be better able to state which type of approach is more effective for whom and under what circumstances. A review of current studies of family therapy outcome research indicates that family therapy seems to be as effective as individual psychological treatment.     

Does recognition memory improve with age?

In order to test the hypothesis that recognition is a developmentally stable component of the memory system, age differences in recognition of faces were examined while controlling for nonmemory factors that might contribute to differences between the groups. Three groups of children (mean ages: 3 years, 4 months; 4 years, 9 months; and 6 years, 11 months) and a group of college students were tested on a recognition task and a similar matching task. The results indicated no change in recognition across the preschool years but an improvement from the later preschool period to the first grade. Further analyses indicated that this improvement was not due to changes in decision criteria or perceptual skills. These findings call into question the view that recognition is a developmentally invariant component of the memory system.     

Does the presentation of multiple facial composites improve suspect identification?

Previous research that has evaluated the accuracy of facial composites has reported low identification rates. Two studies are reported here that consider whether showing more than one composite of the same suspect might improve the rate of identification. Sixteen participant‐witnesses saw one of two staged events, each involving a different unfamiliar target. Each participant‐witness worked with a police operator to construct a composite of the target they had seen. One, four or eight composites depicting the same target were then shown to individuals familiar with the target. Overall, the results showed that presenting more than one composite increased the rate of identification. In addition, the results of Study 2 suggest that if the police must select just one composite from a number produced by witnesses, then a promising method might be to choose the one which bears most similarity to the other composites in the set. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Does salary discussion hurt the developmental performance appraisal?

The “split roles of performance appraisal” perspective introduced by H. H. Meyer and associates in 1965 (H. H. Meyer, E. Kay, J. R. P. French, Jr. Harvard Business Review, 43, 123–129) argues that discussing salary has a negative impact on the developmental aspects of performance appraisal (PA). This research provides the first empirical evaluation of that proposition. Of key interest is the relationship between salary discussion and process characteristics (e.g., participation), content characteristics (e.g., work planning), and the outcomes (e.g., utility) of PA. Also, several contingency factors are investigated to see if they moderate the impact of discussing salary. The results indicate that salary discussion has either no impact or a positive impact on PA process, content, and outcomes. Of the five contingency factors, only performance level has a consistent moderating impact. Low performers, compared to high performers, evidence a stronger positive relationship between salary discussion and key PA variables.     

Does the transtheoretical model need an attitude adjustment?: Integrating attitude with decisional balance as predictors of stage of change for exercise

Objectives. To compare conceptually similar decision-making components from the theory of planned behavior (attitude) and the transtheoretical model (pros and cons) to determine the extent to which attitude towards exercise adds to the prediction of stage of exercise behavior beyond that of pros and cons.Method. A sample of college undergraduates (N=223) were given stage of change, attitude and decisional balance measures regarding their exercise behavior. Structural equation modeling (SEM) was used to test the underlying measurement structure of the decision-making components, while a series of discriminant function analyses (DFAs) was performed using a combination of pros, cons, and cognitive and affective attitudes as predictors of membership in one of the five stages of change.Results. SEM determined that a correlated four-factor model, which included pros and cons and two attitude subscales, provided the best fit to the data. The DFAs revealed that the addition of attitude components to pros and cons significantly increased the overall explained variance across the stages of change from 32% to 56%, and improved the predictive ability of pros and cons from 31.2% to 48.2%.Conclusions. Although conceptually related, pros, cons and attitude were not closely linked at a construct-measurement level. Furthermore, the addition of attitude to pros and cons increased the overall explained variance across stages of change and improved the predictive ability of pros and cons alone. The measurement model and DFA results taken in combination strongly suggest that the addition of cognitive and affective attitudes may strengthen the decision-making aspect of the transtheoretical model.     

Does episodic future thinking improve prospective remembering?

Extant findings suggest interesting avenues for the investigation of the potential relationship between EFT and PM. However, as they stand, they are inconclusive as to the causal role that EFT may play in aiding prospective remembering. In one Experiment, we showed that accuracy in a prospective memory (PM) task performed on the second day was significantly higher when participants, on the first day, had mentally simulated the sequence of events expected to occur on the second day, including the PM task, than when they had performed control tasks. These data extend previous findings on the functional benefit of future simulations in different domains by revealing a substantial facilitation effect of future-oriented thoughts on PM performance when the mentally simulated future task matched the actually executed task.     

Does jury deliberation really improve jurors' memories?

The courts assume that jury deliberation corrects errors in jurors' memories, so that the verdict is based on accurate memory for the trial. We evaluated the validity of this assumption by examining jurors' memories and verdicts both before and after deliberation. Unlike previous studies, we tracked how event memories changed as a function of how they were discussed in deliberation. Overall, deliberation resulted in only a slight memory improvement. Deliberation corrected errors and did not introduce distortions. Reasons for such slight memory improvement are that jurors did not think they had memory gaps and thus did not use the deliberation process to improve their memory, and jurors who controlled deliberation were not always the most accurate in their memories. Finally, those most likely to change their verdict as a result of deliberation were not those who had the least accurate memories, but rather those who had the least confidence in their memories. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Does visual expertise improve visual recognition memory?

In general, humans have impressive recognition memory for previously viewed pictures. Many people spend years becoming experts in highly specialized image sets. For example, cytologists are experts at searching micrographs filled with potentially cancerous cells and radiologists are expert at searching mammograms for indications of cancer. Do these experts develop robust visual long-term memory for their domain of expertise? If so, is this expertise specific to the trained image class, or do such experts possess generally superior visual memory? We tested recognition memory of cytologists, radiologists, and controls with no medical experience for three visual stimulus classes: isolated objects, scenes, and mammograms or micrographs. Experts were better than control observers at recognizing images from their domain, but their memory for those images was not particularly good (D’ ~ 1.0) and was much worse than memory for objects or scenes (D’ > 2.0). Furthermore, experts were not better at recognizing scenes or isolated objects than control observers.     

Does prior knowledge facilitate the detection of visual targets in random noise?

The detectability of forms embedded within random visual noise has been found to be predictable from the autocorrelation transform of the stimulus pattern (Uttal, 1975). A basic assumption in the autocorrelation theory of form detection is that detectability is determined by the organization of the stimulus pattern, irrespective of the observer’s prior knowledge or expectations about the characteristics of the form. This assumption was tested by determining the effect of the size of the set of alternative target forms on performance of a forced-choice detection task. The targets were composed of dots in a straight line, appearing in one of a specified set of 2, 4, or 8 alternative positions in a pattern of randomly distributed masking dots. Detection accuracy was found to decrease as set size increased, but this decrease was close to what was predicted on the assumption that the random background was independently confusable with the target at each of the alternative positions. Thus, prior knowledge of the set of alternative targets appeared to have no effect on thevisual process, but only on thedecision process by virtue of the features that were relevant criteria for deciding which of the two patterns on each trial was most likely to contain the target. This result is consistent with the autocorrelation theory. This experiment may illustrate how the decision process has influenced the performance in many other experiments that have been assumed to demonstrate an effect of prior knowledge on perception.     

Does enhanced cognitive behaviour therapy for eating disorders improve quality of life?

Quality of life (QOL) is the degree of enjoyment and satisfaction experienced in life, and embraces emotional well-being, physical health, economic and living circumstances, and work satisfaction. QOL recovery with eating disorder treatment has received sparse attention, and until now, no study has investigated QOL recovery with enhanced cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT-E). Patients (n?=?196) admitted to a specialist eating disorders outpatient programme and receiving CBT-E completed measures of QOL, eating disorder psychopathology, depression, anxiety and self-esteem, before and after treatment. QOL at intake was compared with community norms, and QOL below the norm was predicted from sociodemographic and clinical correlates with logistic regression. Baseline QOL below the norm was associated with depression and anxiety Axis I comorbidity, and severity of depressive symptoms. Predictors of post-treatment QOL were baseline QOL and level of depressive symptoms and self-esteem at post-treatment. CBT-E was associated with gains in QOL over the course of treatment, in addition to eating disorder symptom relief. Copyright ? 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and Eating Disorders Association.