The possible benefits of difficulty: how stress can increase and decrease subjective well-being

This study explores the effects of stress, trauma, coping and growth orientation on subjective well-being. Based on cognitive stress theory, it was hypothesized that adversity may contribute to increased or decreased well-being, depending on the subsequent meaning these experiences are given. Survey data from Norwegian UN/NATO veterans (N= 142) showed that stress and well-being were negatively associated (r=-0.20, p < 0.05) at the level of zero-order correlations. However, a full structural equation model revealed that the effect of stress on well-being was mediated positively through a problem-focused coping process combined with a growth component. Stress was negatively mediated through an avoidant-focused coping process and a distress component. The effect from stress was fully mediated in the model. The hypothesis that stress can produce both increased and decreased subjective well-being was confirmed.     

Effects of head orientation on gaze perception: how positive congruency effects can be reversed

Several past studies have considered how perceived head orientation may be combined with perceived gaze direction in judging where someone else is attending. In three experiments we tested the impact of different sources of information by examining the role of head orientation in gaze-direction judgements when presenting: (a) the whole face; (b) the face with the nose masked; (c) just the eye region, removing all other head-orientation cues apart from some visible part of the nose; or (d) just the eyes, with all parts of the nose masked and no head orientation cues present other than those within the eyes themselves. We also varied time pressure on gaze direction judgements. The results showed that gaze judgements were not solely driven by the eye region. Gaze perception can also be affected by parts of the head and face, but in a manner that depends on the time constraints for gaze direction judgements. While “positive” congruency effects were found with time pressure (i.e., faster left/right judgements of seen gaze when the seen head deviated towards the same side as that gaze), the opposite applied without time pressure.     

Everyone can be a winner: The benefits of competing in organized races for recreational runners

ABSTRACT

Participants in the study were 404 recreational runners. At the end of each week for three months they used an online diary to describe their psychological well-being for the week (a total of 4046 weeks), and they indicated if they had participated in an organized race each week (a total of 1111 races). Multilevel modeling analyses (weeks nested within persons) found that well-being, defined in terms of self-esteem, self-efficacy, life satisfaction, positive affect, and depressed affect, was higher during weeks in which participants had run in an organized race than it was during weeks in which they had not run in an organized race. Moreover, well-being was positively related to self-evaluations of performance in races. For recreational runners, finishing an organized race may represent the achievement of a goal, an achievement that increases well-being and may help maintain or increase the motivation to keep running.     

Resistance can be good or bad: how theories of resistance and dissonance affect attitude certainty

This research investigated how lay theories about resisting persuasion can affect attitude certainty. Specifically, people who believed that resistance was negative (i.e., implies close-mindedness) showed different levels of attitude certainty after resisting persuasive messages than people who believed resistance was positive (i.e., implies intelligence). When people held positive lay theories of resistance and overcame ostensibly strong arguments, they showed increased attitude certainty (compared to those who overcame ostensibly weak arguments). However, individuals who believed that resistance was negative did not show increases in attitude certainty when overcoming strong arguments. Experiment 2 suggests that the effect of lay theories and perceived argument strength on attitude certainty was due to dissonance created by believing that resistance is undesirable but nonetheless resisting persuasion.     

Recognising relations: What can be learned from considering complexity

Analogy is an important cognitive process that has been researched extensively. Functional accounts of it typically involve at least four stages of processing (access, mapping, transfer, and evaluation); however, these accounts take the way in which the base analogue is understood, along with its relational structure, for granted. The goal of this paper is to open up a discussion about how this process (which we will call “relational recognition”) may occur. To this end, this paper describes two experiments that vary the level of relational complexity across exemplars. It was found that relational recognition tasks benefit from increased complexity, while mapping tasks suffer from it.     

Spontaneous facial expression in a small group can be automatically measured: An initial demonstration

Manual measurement of facial expression is labor intensive and difficult to standardize. Automated measurement seeks to address the need for valid, efficient, and reproducible measurement. Recent systems have shown promise in posed behavior and in structured contexts. Can automated measurement perform in more natural, less constrained settings? In the present study, previously unacquainted young adults sat around a circular table for 30 min of conversation. Video was selected for manual and automatic coding of Facial Action Coding System action units (AUs), examining, in particular, AU 6 (cheek raise) and AU 12 (lip corner pull), which together signal enjoyment. Moderate out-of-plane head motion and occlusion, which are challenging for automatic processing, were both common, as participants turned toward and away from each other or consumed drinks. Concurrent validity for both AUs was high. This is the first study to find that automated measurement of facial action in relatively unconstrained contexts can achieve results comparable with those of manual coding. Video demos of our software may be downloaded from http://brm.psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental.     

On how to be unpredictable: evidence from the voluntary task-switching paradigm

The voluntary task-switching paradigm requires subjects to select randomly between tasks and promises to provide a window into executive task selection independent of exogenous influences present in standard task-switching situations. We show here that the degree to which subjects perseverate on tasks across trials captures unique individual differences variance, but also that the switch rate is under strong stimulus-driven control: "Voluntary" switches are much more frequent when the stimulus changes than when it repeats. Most important, we show that individuals whose no-switch trials are selectively slowed exhibit less perseveration and stimulus-driven effects (and thus more voluntary selection) than individuals whose no-switch trials do not show this slowing. We suggest that selective slowing indicates a strategy of treating trials as discrete events--possibly through inhibition of the preceding task set. These results not only demonstrate massive nonvoluntary influences on voluntary selection that are largely untapped by standard task-switching measures, but also show how such influences can be counteracted through strategic adaptations.     

Extinction can be enhanced by a concurrent excitor

Five experiments used rat subjects to investigate the impact on extinction of the presence of other conditioned stimuli. In Experiments 1 (Pavlovian magazine approach) and 2 (instrumental discriminative training), an excitatory stimulus (X) was extinguished alone, in conjunction with a previously reinforced other stimulus (A), in conjunction with previously nonreinforced other stimulus (B), or it was spared extinction. Responding during extinction was greatest to AX, and subsequent testing of X alone showed AX extinction to have produced the most decrement to X. Experiment 3 found similar results using a within-subject design. Experiment 5 continued separate reinforced presentations of A during extinction. This procedure not only promoted extinction of X but also converted it into a conditioned inhibitor. These experiments bear on the mechanisms of overshadowing and stimulus processing, as well as provide information on the determinants of extinction.     

Good design as design for good: exploring how design can be ethically and environmentally sustainable by co-designing an eco-hostel within a Mayan community

Designers acknowledge that their skills can assist the visualization and materialization of a desirable future and have gone as far as proposing that design can achieve societal change. Designing for a better world is associated with decreasing environmental depletion impacts while making good for both people and the environment, if possible. Evidently, this is a space where design deals with ethical matters, defining what is good or questioning if good has a universal meaning. This paper discusses the case of Aalto LAB Mexico's (ALM) Eco-hostel project, a practical and ethical design exploration. It shares the impressions of the design team when co-designing with(in) the Mayan community of ‘20 de Noviembre’ (20 Nov), located in Calakmul, Campeche, México. The Eco-hostel project was proposed as an element which can play a central role in achieving betterment of several aspects of the community's daily life. Several of those aspects were communicated by the inhabitants of 20 Nov, and some others were identified by ALM's experts. Whereas some universal principles were applicable to the construction, the context-centred approach of ALM generated a unique proposal, conceptualized to achieve harmony with the local environmental and cultural conditions.     

Even cowboys sing the blues: Difficulties experienced by men trying to adopt nontraditional sex roles and how clinicians can be helpful to them

Difficulties clinicians experience in appropriately treating men attempting to adopt nontraditional sex roles are discussed and suggestions made to ameliorate these difficulties. While the impact of the women's movement has made therapists more sensitive to societal influences on the behavior of women, comparable attention has not been paid to societal influences on the sex-role stereotypical behavior or to the price paid by men who violate stereotypical sex-role expectations. Further, clinicians who have been socialized into dominant societal values may have difficulty tolerating men who are trying to abandon higher status traditional masculine values for nontraditional ones; such clinicians are unlikely to provide decent treatment for males espousing new sex roles.     

Great oaks from giant acorns grow: How causal‐impact judgments depend on the strength of a cause

Causal impact is maximal when weak causes have strong effects. Do people understand this logic when they assess causal impact? In four experiments, participants judged the causal impact of strong or weak dietary treatments leading to strong or weak health effects in fictitious health studies. Rather than following the ratio of effect strength to treatment strength, judgments were influenced by three aspects of the detectability of a cause–effect relation. First, because detectability depends on the effect being strong more than on the cause being subtle, causal judgments were mainly determined by effect strength, whereas the strength of the causal treatment necessary to induce an effect was often neglected. Second, if causal input was not ignored, judgments increased when the maximal covariation between a strong causal treatment and a strong effect rendered the causal link most detectable. Or, third, causal judgments increased when a plausible causal schema facilitated detection. Consistent with sampling models of judgment and decision making, causal‐impact ratings were driven by an uncritical assessment of a detectable difference in a study sample. However, ratings were insensitive to the logical implications of the underlying causal treatment that was necessary to induce a detectable effect. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Two noncontiguous locations can be attended concurrently: Evidence from the attentional blink

When two targets (T1 and T2) are inserted in a rapid stream of visual distractors (RSVP), detection/ identification accuracy of T2 is impaired at intertarget lags shorter than about 500 msec. This phenomenon, the attentional blink (AB), has been regarded as a hallmark of the inability of the visual system to process multiple items. Yet, paradoxically, the AB is much reduced when T2 is presented directly after T1 (known aslag-1 sparing). Because lag-1 sparing is said to depend on observers’ spatial attention being set to process the first target, we predicted that if observers are set to monitor two RSVP streams, they could process more than two items; that is, two instances of lag-1 sparing would be obtained concurrently. The results of three experiments indicated that this was the case. When observers searched for two targets in each of two synchronized RSVP streams, lag-1 sparing occurred concurrently in both streams. These results suggest that the visual system can handle up to four items at one moment under RSVP circumstances.     

Assessing the costs, benefits, cost-effectiveness, and cost-benefit of psychological assessment: we should, we can, and here's how

To the extent that assessment improves the effectiveness of treatment, prevention, or other services, it can be said to be effective. If an assessment is as effective as alternatives for improving treatment and less costly, it can be said to be cost-effective. If that improvement in the effectiveness of the service is monetary or monetizable, the assessment can be judged beneficial. And, if the sum of monetary and monetizable benefits of assessment exceeds the sum of the costs of treatment, the assessment can be said to be cost-beneficial. An overview of cost-related issues is followed by practical strategies that researchers and administrators can use to measure incremental costs, incremental effectiveness, and incremental benefits of adding psychological assessments to other psychological interventions.     

Older readers can be distracted by embellishing graphics in text

In most research on graphics in text students learn the content for a test (e.g., Mayer, 2002). The present study examined whether one of the principles from that literature, namely the deleterious effect of extraneous graphic information, would apply to adults who were consulting a leaflet to answer questions. The study used a mixed factorial design with 48 participants from three age bands (young-adult, young-old, old-old). Participants used two leaflets to answer questions, one without graphics and the other with either extraneous embellishing or supportive explanatory graphics. Relative to leaflets without graphics, the old-old participants were significantly slower finding information when leaflets contained embellishing but not explanatory graphics. The graphics had no effect on the other age groups. These findings suggest that either the reading task or the thematic relevance of the extraneous graphics may limit their negative effects for most adults but that negative effects recur for older readers.     

Patients' information needs and decision-making processes: what can be learned from genetic counselees?

This field study investigated the information needs and decision-making strategies of 161 genetic counselees interviewed just prior to counseling. Patients were interested mostly in information about the outcomes and consequences of the alternative options at their disposal and about measures to defuse the risks. They wanted mainly information stated with certainty and were less interested in probability information. There was no difference in the search for information between the alternative eventually chosen and the one not chosen. There was a difference, however, among types of decisions and the interest in the various categories of information. These findings were interpreted within the theoretical model of decision making in natural risky situations (O. Huber, 1997). Practical implications for shared medical decision making are presented.     

Visual mental images can be ambiguous: insights from individual differences in spatial transformation abilities

The debate about whether objects in mental images can be ambiguous has produced ambiguous results. In some studies, participants could not reinterpret objects in images, but even in the studies where participants could reinterpret visualized patterns, the results are not conclusive. The present study used a novel task to investigate the reinterpretation of ambiguous figures in imagery, which required the participants to mentally rotate a figure 180 degrees before attempting to "see" an alternate interpretation. In addition, the participants did not know the purpose of the study in advance, nor did they see alternate interpretations of the stimuli; moreover, we explicitly measured individual differences in key mental imagery abilities. Eight of the 44 participants discovered the alternate version while they were memorizing the figure; 16 reported it after mentally rotating an image; and 20 were not able to "see" the alternate version. The ability to rotate images, assessed with an independent task, was highly associated with reports of image reversals, whereas measures of other imagery abilities were not.     

The role of defensive confidence in preference for proattitudinal information: how believing that one is strong can sometimes be a defensive weakness

This series of studies identified individuals who chronically believe that they can successfully defend their attitudes from external attack and investigated the consequences of this individual difference for selective exposure to attitude-incongruent information and, ultimately, attitude change. Studies 1 and 2 validated a measure of defensive confidence as an individual difference that is unidimensional, distinct from other personality measures, reliable over a 2-week interval, and organized as a trait that generalizes across various personal and social issues. Studies 3 and 4 provided evidence that defensive confidence decreases preference for proattitudinal information, therefore inducing greater reception of counterattitudinal materials. Study 5 demonstrated that people who are high in defensive confidence are more likely to change their attitudes as a result of exposure to counterattitudinal information and examined the perceptions that mediate this important phenomenon.