Keeping the Body in Mind: The Influence of Body Esteem and Body Boundary Aberration on Consumer Beliefs and Purchase Intentions

This research explores the influence of consumers’ body‐related information on beliefs and purchase intentions toward products for which the consumption experience is significantly and directly determined by body‐related information (e.g., feel, fit, sense of safety) when the products are bought in body‐absent purchase environments such as the Internet. We examine the effects of consumers’ body esteem (i.e., like or dislike of one's body) and body boundary aberration (variation in the perceived location of the edges of one's body) in the context of apparel purchases that are made on the Internet. Body esteem had a positive influence on involvement with apparel, and body boundary aberration had a negative influence on consumers’ overall concern with the fit of apparel. Involvement with apparel and overall concern with fit, in turn, significantly influenced consumers’ intentions to purchase apparel online. Consequently, consumers with high body esteem were less likely to buy on the Internet and those with high body boundary aberration were more likely to buy.     

Belonging – Lucinda Mosher

Book reviewed:
Belonging , Lucinda Mosher, Church Publishing 2005 (1-59627-010-1), 186 pp., pb $15.00     

A Bayesian framework for the development of belief-desire reasoning: Estimating inhibitory power

Psychonomic Bulletin & Review - A robust empirical finding in theory-of-mind (ToM) reasoning, as measured by standard false-belief tasks, is that children four years old or older succeed...     

Stress and inflammation among older adults: The moderating role of religiosity

Chronic stress weakens the immune system and leads to heightened bodily inflammation, which in turn is linked with serious health conditions. This study examined whether religiosity moderates the relationship between stress and inflammation (measured by C-reactive Protein (CRP)). A sample of 4,734 community-dwelling older adults was drawn from the 2006 wave of the Health and Retirement Study. Logistic regression was used to analyze the relationship between chronic stress (8-item index), inflammation (high CRP level), and religiosity (organizational, nonorganizational, and intrinsic), controlling for other factors. Higher levels of stress were significantly associated with high inflammation/CRP (p = .039). Further, intrinsic religiosity acted as a moderator of this relationship (p = .024), such that the relationship between stress and inflammation is lessened for persons with higher levels of intrinsic religiosity. Higher intrinsic religiosity attenuated the effects of stress on inflammation, suggesting that individuals with stronger religious commitment/motivation may better cope with stress.     

African American cultural history and reflections on Jung in the African Diaspora

Racism is defined as a psychopathology and the ground in which the covenant of whiteness is rooted and mirrored in the system of apartheid structured by American Constitutional Jurisprudence between 1857 and 1954. This historical period overshadowed Carl Jung's visit to America between 1909 and 1937. The spirit of the times and practices of racism coloured Jung's views, attitudes, and theories about African Americans, just as colonialism coloured his attitudes toward Africa and Africans. Consequently Jung failed to see the African Diaspora and the extraordinary intellectual and artistic period of the Harlem Renaissance (1919‐1929). Its introduction here foregrounds the exceptionalism of African Americans and the cultural continuity of African ancestry. This exceptionalism was not seen by Jung and there have been no attempts to redress its omission from analytical psychology and other sub‐disciplines of Western psychology. Jung's theories of personality and psychoanalysis and his negative projections about primitivism among Africans and African American ‘Negroes’ would have been mediated by knowledge of a legislated American apartheid and the Harlem Renaissance which occurred within the barriers of apartheid. In this paper I posit that culture, kinship libido, and the African principle of Ubuntu are healing modalities that play a critical role in instinct and the relational ground of human psychology and biology, from which culture as an environmental expression constellates around common goals of the human species. Cultural equivalencies and expressions within the wisdom traditions and mythologies of the Africa Diaspora are considered. Specifically, the Bantu principle of Ubuntu or ‘humanity’ is identified as the relational ground in African cultures, while the Kemetic‐Egyptian deity Maat, as an archetypal anima figure and the religio‐mythology offer a transcendent position from which to critique the inequities and constitutional jurisprudence that structured American apartheid. Maat is the personification of truth, justice, balance and weighing of the heart in orderly judicial processes. In her we find the alignment of the spirit and matter in the law and judgement. The paper concludes with reflections on pathways toward healing the psychopathology of racism and recommendations to enhance clinical training and practice.     

Touching the base: heart-warming ads from the 2016 U.S. election moved viewers to partisan tears

Some political ads used in the 2016 U.S. election evoked feelings colloquially known as being moved to tears. We conceptualise this phenomenon as a positive social emotion that appraises and motivates communal relations, is accompanied by physical sensations (including lachrymation, piloerection, chest warmth), and often labelled metaphorically. We surveyed U.S. voters in the fortnight before the 2016 U.S. election. Selected ads evoked the emotion completely and reliably, but in a partisan fashion: Clinton voters were moved to tears by three selected Clinton ads, and Trump voters were moved to tears by two Trump ads. Viewers were much less moved by ads of the candidate they did not support. Being moved to tears predicted intention to vote for the candidate depicted. We conclude that some contemporary political advertising is able to move its audience to tears, and thereby motivates support.     

On the Implicit Anaphoric Argument of Relational Nouns in Mandarin Chinese

Journal of Psycholinguistic Research - This paper provides experimental and theoretical evidence for the syntactic realization of an implicit possessor argument in Relational Nouns (RNs, e.g....     

Intimate partner violence and preschoolers' explicit memory functioning.

This research examines whether parents' intimate partner physical violence (IPV) relates to their preschoolers' explicit memory functioning, whether children's symptoms of hyperarousal mediate this relation, and whether mothers' positive parenting moderates this relation. Participants were 69 mothers and their 4- or 5-year-old child (34 girls). Mothers completed measures of IPV, children's hyperarousal symptoms, parent-child aggression, and positive parenting. Measures of explicit memory functioning were administered to preschoolers. As expected, IPV correlated negatively with preschoolers' performance on explicit memory tasks, even after controlling for parent-child aggression and demographic variables related to preschoolers' memory functioning. Preschoolers' hyperarousal symptoms did not mediate the relation between IPV and explicit memory functioning, but mothers' positive parenting moderated this relation. Specifically, the negative relation between IPV and preschoolers' performance on 2 of the 3 explicit memory tasks was weaker when mothers engaged in higher levels of positive parenting. These findings extend research on IPV and children's adjustment difficulties to explicit memory functioning in preschoolers and suggest that mothers can ameliorate the influence of IPV on preschoolers' memory functioning via their parenting.