Emotion regulation and its effects on mood improvement in response to an in vivo peer rejection challenge

This study examined children's spontaneous use of behavioral emotion regulation (ER) strategies and their effects on subsequent mood change in response to an in vivo peer rejection manipulation. Participants (N = 186), ranging between 10 and 13 years of age, played a computer game based on the television show Survivor and were randomized to either peer rejection (being voted out of the game) or nonrejection control. In response to rejection, more than one third of the participants (38%) displayed a marked worsening (i.e., reliable change) in state mood. After receiving feedback, time spent on several behavioral ER strategies during a 5-minute postfeedback period was assessed. At the end of the postfeedback period, children's cognitive activity was also assessed. More time spent on behavioral distraction was positively linked to subsequent increases in positive affect, whereas the reverse pattern was found for disengagement/passive behavior. Moreover, higher endorsement ratings for the strategy of "cognitive analysis" were associated with stronger increases in negative affect.     

Manipulating inattentional blindness within and across sensory modalities

People often fail to consciously perceive visual events that are outside the focus of attention, a phenomenon referred to as inattentional blindness or IB (i.e., Mack & Rock, 1998). Here, we investigated IB for words within and across sensory modalities (visually and auditorily) in order to assess whether dividing attention across different senses has the same consequences as dividing attention within an individual sensory modality. Participants were asked to monitor a rapid stream of pictures or sounds presented concurrently with task-irrelevant words (spoken or written). A word recognition test was used to measure the processing for unattended words compared to word recognition levels after explicitly monitoring the word stream. We were able to produce high levels of IB for visually and auditorily presented words under unimodal conditions (Experiment 1) as well as under crossmodal conditions (Experiment 2). A further manipulation revealed, however, that IB is less prevalent when attention is divided across modalities than within the same modality (Experiment 3). These findings are explained in terms of the attentional load hypothesis and suggest that, contrary to some claims, attention resources are to a certain extent shared across sensory modalities.     

Spoonish spanerisms: A lexical bias effect in Spanish

Lexical bias is the tendency for phonological errors to form existing words at a rate above chance. This effect has been observed in experiments and corpus analyses in Germanic languages, but S. del Viso, J. M. Igoa, and J. E. García-Albea (1991) found no effect in a Spanish corpus study. Because lexical bias plays an important role in the debate on interactivity in language production, the authors reconsidered its absence in Spanish. A corpus analysis, which considered relatively many errors and which used a method of estimating chance rate that is relatively independent of total error number, and a speech-error elicitation experiment provided converging evidence for lexical bias in Spanish. The authors conclude that the processing mechanisms underlying this effect hold cross-linguistically.     

Children's coping with in vivo peer rejection: an experimental investigation

We examined children's behavioral coping in response to an in vivo peer rejection manipulation. Participants (N=186) ranging between 10 and 13 years of age, played a computer game based on the television show Survivor and were randomized to either peer rejection (i.e., being voted out of the game) or non-rejection control. During a five-min. post-feedback waiting period children's use of several behavioral coping strategies was assessed. Rejection elicited a marked shift toward more negative affect, but higher levels of perceived social competence attenuated the negative mood shift. Children higher in depressive symptoms were more likely to engage in passive and avoidant coping behavior. Types of coping were largely unaffected by gender and perceived social competence. Implications are discussed.     

Gaze avoidance in social phobia: Objective measure and correlates

Gaze aversion could be a central component of the physiopathology of social phobia. The emotions of the people interacting with a person with social phobia seem to model this gaze aversion. Our research consists of testing gaze aversion in subjects with social phobia compared to control subjects in different emotional faces of men and women using an eye tracker. Twenty-six subjects with DSM-IV social phobia were recruited. Twenty-four healthy subjects aged and sex-matched constituted the control group. We looked at the number of fixations and the dwell time in the eyes area on the pictures. The main findings of this research are: confirming a significantly lower amount of fixations and dwell time in patients with social phobia as a general mean and for the 6 basic emotions independently from gender; observing a significant correlation between the severity of the phobia and the degree of gaze avoidance. However, no difference in gaze avoidance according to subject/picture gender matching was observed. These findings confirm and extend some previous results, and suggest that eye avoidance is a robust marker of persons with social phobia, which could be used as a behavioral phenotype for brain imagery studies on this disorder.     

Does the Need for Role Clarity Moderate the Relationship between Role Ambiguity and Athlete Satisfaction?

The purpose of the present study was to investigate the need for role clarity as a potential moderator of the role ambiguity–satisfaction relationship among interdependent sport athletes. Competitive “Junior B” ice hockey players (N = 112) representing eight teams completed the Role Ambiguity Scale, five subscales of the Athlete Satisfaction Questionnaire, and a measure of need for role clarity at approximately the mid-point of their competitive season. Correlational findings indicated that greater role ambiguity was associated with lower athlete satisfaction. However, consistent with the moderator hypothesis, the relationships between role ambiguity and various manifestations of satisfaction were only evident for those athletes who had a higher need for role clarity. Implications of the results are discussed and several avenues for application and future research are suggested.     

The moral significance of the material culture

Ethics as a philosophical discipline has always been preoccupied with theory to the detriment of practice and the exclusion of material culture. Lately, practice has been rehabilitated, but material culture continues to be ignored. Cultural critics and sociologists have attended to it but have also refrained from a moral assessment of it. The findings of Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg‐Halton, however, reflect two kinds of cultural realities that sponsor two kinds of conduct. The first kind, represented by musical instruments, I call commanding reality. It invites social and physical engagement and provides orientation within the world. The second kind, exemplified by stereos, consists of consumable commodities and conduces to a life of distraction and disorientation. I conclude that ethics is not just a matter of conduct within whatever reality but of deciding which kind of reality we favor over the other. My plea is on behalf of commanding reality.

Modern philosophy has been at two removes from the real world. First, in aspiring to theory, it has been distanced from practice. Theory can inform practice, but practice is richer than theory and, above all, self‐sustaining. Practice can survive without theory while theory arises from a practice and perishes without the nourishment of a practice. Practice, as philosophers have always seen it, is in turn removed from its tangible setting. Yet material culture constrains and details practice decisively. Practice, abstracted from its tangible circumstances, is reduced to gesturing and sometimes to posturing.