Culture and importance of backgrounds: a cross-cultural study of photograph taking

To compare the focus on targeted people while taking a photograph, samples of American and Chinese college students were randomly selected and asked to take casual pictures of people around them with digital cameras. About 200 photographs were rated for the focus on the intended target in the picture. American students were more likely to focus on the targeted individual, while the Chinese students were more likely to attend to the background and the environment of the targeted individual. The findings imply that for the Chinese college students, the environment can be equally important as the person. Possibly for Americans the environment is less important due to the more individualistic culture.     

Power of being present: the role of mindfulness on the relation between men's alcohol use and sexual aggression toward intimate partners

The primary aim of this investigation was to examine the association between men's level of mindfulness and histories of alcohol consumption and sexual aggression toward intimate partners. Participants were 167 heterosexual drinking males who completed self‐report measures of mindfulness, frequency and quantity of alcohol consumption during the past 12 months and sexual aggression against intimate partners during the past 12 months. Results indicated that a history of consuming larger amounts when drinking was associated with more frequent sexual coercion/aggression among men who reported low, but not high, levels of mindfulness. However, drinking more frequently by itself was not associated with more frequent sexual coercion/aggression. These results support the attention‐allocation model and suggest implications for future intervention research aimed at reducing alcohol‐related aggression. Aggr. Behav. 36:405–413, 2010. © 2010 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.     

Content Analysis of the Journal of Counseling & Development: Volumes 74 to 84

A content analysis of the research published in the Journal of Counseling & Development (JCD) was conducted for Volumes 74 (1996) through 84 (2006). Frequency distributions were used to identify the most published authors and their institutional affiliations, as well as some basic characteristics (type of sample, gender, and ethnicity) of the study samples. Results are compared with 2 previous content analyses (D. M. Pelsma & J. P. Cesari, 1989; M. E. Williams & W. C. Buboltz, 1999).     

Being Examples to the Flock: The Role of Church Leaders and African American Families Seeking Mental Health Care Services

Within the context of Black churches, African American clergy have a significant role in the delivery of mental health care services for parishioners and their families. Working toward better linkages between faith-based communities and more formal mental health care could help to provide more culturally sensitive and timely mental health care for African American families. Using a salient part of an integrative model (Davey and Watson in Contemp Fam Ther 30:31–47, 2008), the roles Black church leaders have historically played for African American families seeking outside mental health care services are considered. We additionally provide an example of a recent collaborative partnership with a Black church that points toward some promising directions for future research and clinical collaborations between the field of couple and family therapy and the Black church community.     

Message Framing,Normative Advocacy and Persuasive Success

In a recent article in Argumentation, O’Keefe (Argumentation 21:151–163, 2007) observed that the well-known ‘framing effects’ in the social psychological literature on persuasion are akin to traditional fallacies of argumentation and reasoning and could be exploited for persuasive success in a way that conflicts with principles of responsible advocacy. Positively framed messages (“if you take aspirin, your heart will be more healthy”) differ in persuasive effect from negative frames (“if you do not take aspirin, your heart will be less healthy”), despite containing ‘equivalent’ content. This poses a potential problem, because people might be unduly (and unsuspectingly) influenced by mere presentational differences. By drawing on recent cognitive psychological work on framing effects in choice and decision making paradigms, however, we show that establishing whether two arguments are substantively equivalent—and hence, whether there is any normative requirement for them to be equally persuasive—is a difficult task. Even arguments that are logically equivalent may not be information equivalent. The normative implications of this for both speakers and listeners are discussed.     

The influence of response grouping on free-choice decision making in a response selection task

Previous research has demonstrated an advantage for the preparation of fingers on one hand over the preparation of fingers on two hands, and for the preparation of homologous fingers over that of non-homologous fingers. In the present study, we extended the precuing effects observed with finger responses to response selection under free-choice conditions. Participants were required to choose from a range of possible responses following the presentation of a precue that indicated which response to prepare (go-to precue) or prevent (no-go-to precue). In Experiment 1 the choice was between homologous and non-homologous finger responses on the hand opposite to the precue while in Experiment 2 the choice was between finger responses on the same or different hand to the precue. In the go-to precue condition, the frequency of homologous finger choices was more frequent than non-homologous finger responses. Similarly, participants chose finger responses on the same hand as the precue regardless of whether they were instructed to prepare or prevent the precued response. The hand effect bias was stronger than the finger effect bias. These findings are consistent with the Grouping Model (Adam, Hommel, & Umilta, 2003).     

Random‐effects meta‐analysis of correlations: Monte Carlo evaluation of mean estimators

Several authors have cautioned against using Fisher's z‐transformation in random‐effects meta‐analysis of correlations, which seems to perform poorly in some situations, especially with substantial inter‐study heterogeneity. Attributing this performance largely to the direct z‐to‐r transformation (DZRT) of Fisher z results (e.g. point estimate of mean correlation), in a previous paper Hafdahl (2009) proposed point and interval estimators of the mean Pearson r correlation that instead use an integral z‐to‐r transformation (IZRT). The present Monte Carlo study of these IZRT Fisher z estimators includes comparisons with their DZRT counterparts and with estimators based on Pearson r correlations. The IZRT point estimator was usually more accurate and efficient than its DZRT counterpart and comparable to the two Pearson r point estimators – better in some conditions but worse in others. Coverage probability for the IZRT confidence intervals (CIs) was often near nominal, much better than for the DZRT CIs, and comparable to coverage for the Pearson r CIs; every approach's CI fell markedly below nominal in some conditions. The IZRT estimators contradict warnings about Fisher z estimators' poor performance. Recommendations for practising research synthesists are offered, and an Appendix provides computing code to implement the IZRT as in the real‐data example.     

Mating competitors increase religious beliefs

It has been presumed that religiosity has an influence on mating behavior, but here we experimentally investigate the possibility that mating behavior might also influence religiosity. In Experiment 1, people reported higher religiosity after looking at mating pools consisting of attractive people of their own sex compared to attractive opposite sex targets. Experiment 2 replicated the effect with an added control group, and suggested that both men and women become more religious when seeing same-sex competitors. We discuss several possible explanations for these effects. Most broadly, the findings contribute to an emerging literature on how cultural phenomena such as religiosity respond to ecological cues in potentially functional ways.     

Anterior insula activity predicts the influence of positively framed messages on decision making

The neural mechanisms underlying the influence of persuasive messages on decision making are largely unknown. We address this issue using event-related fMRI to investigate how informative messages alter risk appraisal during choice. Participants performed the Iowa Gambling Task while viewing a positively framed, negatively framed, or control message about the options. The right anterior insula correlated with improvement in choice behavior due to the positively framed but not the negatively framed message. With the positively framed message, there was increased activation proportional to message effectiveness when less-preferred options were chosen, consistent with a role in the prediction of adverse outcomes. In addition, the dorsomedial and the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex correlated with overall decision quality, regardless of message type. The dorsomedial region mediated the relationship between the right anterior insula and decision quality with the positively framed messages. These findings suggest a network of frontal brain regions that integrate informative messages into the evaluation of options during decision making. Supplemental procedures and results for this article may be downloaded from http://cabn.psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental.     

The Neural Bases of Strategy and Skill in Sentence–Picture Verification

This experiment used functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging to examine the relation between individual differences in cognitive skill and the amount of cortical activation engendered by two strategies (linguistic vs. visual–spatial) in a sentence–picture verification task. The verbal strategy produced more activation in language-related cortical regions (e.g., Broca's area), whereas the visual–spatial strategy produced more activation in regions that have been implicated in visual–spatial reasoning (e.g., parietal cortex). These relations were also modulated by individual differences in cognitive skill: Individuals with better verbal skills (as measured by the reading span test) had less activation in Broca's area when they used the verbal strategy. Similarly, individuals with better visual–spatial skills (as measured by the Vandenberg, 1971, mental rotation test) had less activation in the left parietal cortex when they used the visual-spatial strategy. These results indicate that language and visual–spatial processing are supported by partially separable networks of cortical regions and suggests one basis for strategy selection: the minimization of cognitive workload.