Grief and trauma intervention for children after disaster: exploring coping skills versus trauma narration

This study evaluated the differential effects of the Grief and Trauma Intervention (GTI) with coping skills and trauma narrative processing (CN) and coping skills only (C). Seventy African American children (6-12 years old) were randomly assigned to GTI-CN or GTI-C. Both treatments consisted of a manualized 11-session intervention and a parent meeting. Measures of trauma exposure, posttraumatic stress symptoms, depression, traumatic grief, global distress, social support, and parent reported behavioral problems were administered at pre, post, 3 and 12 months post intervention. In general, children in both treatment groups demonstrated significant improvements in distress related symptoms and social support, which, with the exception of externalizing symptoms for GTI-C, were maintained up to 12 months post intervention. Results suggest that building coping skills without the structured trauma narrative may be a viable intervention to achieve symptom relief in children experiencing trauma-related distress. However, it may be that highly distressed children experience more symptom relief with coping skills plus narrative processing than with coping skills alone. More research on the differential effects of coping skills and trauma narration on child distress and adaptive functioning outcomes is needed.     

Recognising faces seen alone or with others: why are two heads worse than one?

The ability to identify an unfamiliar target face from an identity lineup declines when the target is accompanied by a second face during visual encoding. This two-face disadvantage is still little studied and its basis remains poorly understood. We investigated several possible explanations for this phenomenon. Experiments 1 and 2 varied the number of potential targets (1 or 2) and the number of faces in a lineup (5 or 10) to explore if this effect arises from the number of identity comparisons that need to be made to detect a target in a lineup. We also explored if this effect arises from an uncertainty concerning which is the to-be-identified target in two-face displays, by cueing the relevant face during encoding. In experiment 3 we then examined whether the two-face disadvantage reflects the depth of face encoding or a memory effect. The results show that this effect arises from the additional comparisons that are necessary to compare two potential targets to an identity lineup when memory demands are minimised (experiment 1), but it reflects a difficulty in remembering several faces when targets and lineups cannot be viewed simultaneously (experiments 2 and 3). However, in both cases the two-face disadvantage could not be eliminated fully by cueing the target. This hints at a further possible locus for this effect, which might reflect perceptual interference during the initial encoding of the target. The implications of these findings are discussed.     

Expecting to lift a box together makes the load look lighter

The action abilities of an individual observer modulate his or her perception of spatial properties of the environment and of objects. The present study investigated how joint action abilities shape perception. Four experiments examined how the intention to lift an object with another individual affects perceived weight. In Experiments 1, 2a, and 2b, participants judged the perceived weight of boxes while expecting to lift them either alone or with a co-actor. In Experiment 3, the co-actor was healthy or injured. Participants intending to lift a box with a co-actor perceived the box as lighter than participants intending to lift the same box alone, provided that the co-actor appeared healthy and therefore capable of helping. These findings suggest that anticipated effort modulates the perception of object properties in the context of joint action. We discuss implications for the role of action prediction and action simulation processes in social interaction.     

National suicide prevention lifeline: enhancing mental health care for suicidal individuals and other people in crisis

Linking at-risk callers to ongoing mental health care is a key goal of crisis hotline interventions that has not often been addressed in evaluations of hotlines' effectiveness. We conducted telephone interviews with 376 suicidal and 278 nonsuicidal crisis callers to the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline (Lifeline) to assess rates of mental health care utilization following Lifeline calls and to assess attitudinal and structural barriers to service utilization. Postcall utilization rates were approximately 50% for suicidal and crisis callers who received mental health care referrals. Lack of health insurance and callers' perceptions about mental health problems emerged as significant barriers to accessing continued help.     

What Does God Know? Supernatural Agents’ Access to Socially Strategic and Non‐Strategic Information

Current evolutionary and cognitive theories of religion posit that supernatural agent concepts emerge from cognitive systems such as theory of mind and social cognition. Some argue that these concepts evolved to maintain social order by minimizing antisocial behavior. If these theories are correct, then people should process information about supernatural agents' socially strategic knowledge more quickly than non-strategic knowledge. Furthermore, agents' knowledge of immoral and uncooperative social behaviors should be especially accessible to people. To examine these hypotheses, we measured response-times to questions about the knowledge attributed to four different agents--God, Santa Claus, a fictional surveillance government, and omniscient but non-interfering aliens--that vary in their omniscience, moral concern, ability to punish, and how supernatural they are. As anticipated, participants respond more quickly to questions about agents' socially strategic knowledge than non-strategic knowledge, but only when agents are able to punish.     

Miller (1944) revisited: Movement times in relation to approach and avoidance conflicts

Three experiments (total N = 291) sought to provide support for the idea that avoidance conflicts, relative to approach conflicts, are more difficult to motorically resolve. Conflicts were instantiated by asking individuals to approach desirable stimuli and avoid undesirable stimuli under conditions in which there was no objectively-correct direction of movement. To control for baseline movement speeds, non-conflict trials presented desirable (e.g., reward) and undesirable (e.g., threat) stimuli in the absence of any spatial conflict. In addition, movement times were isolated through the use of a joystick movement paradigm in which movement speeds were quantified subsequent to some initial tendency to move in one direction or the other. Consistent with hypotheses, all experiments found that movement times were slowed in the context of avoidance conflicts relative to approach conflicts. Results are discussed in terms of theories of motivation, affective processing, conflict, and anxiety.     

Potentiation and overshadowing of shape by wall color in a kite-shaped maze using rats in a foraging task

The interaction between redundant geometric and featural cues in open field search tasks has been examined widely with results that are not always consistent. Cheng (1986) found evidence that when searching for food in rectangular environments, rats used the geometrical characteristics of the environment rather than local featural cues, suggesting that geometry had overshadowed featural cues. More recently, Graham et al. (2006) and Pearce et al. (2006) found that wall color facilitated (potentiated) learning about the shape of the environment by rats in a kite-shaped water maze. The first experiment in the present research replicated the paradigm used by Graham et al. and Pearce et al. using rats in a foraging situation, but with conditions similar, and found the same results, potentiation of shape by color. Experiments 2 and 3 revealed overshadowing instead of potentiation of shape by wall color under the same conditions except that the wall colors of the test environment were not the same as those used during training. The results are consistent with an analysis of the role of associations formed between wall color and geometry in such situations (Rhodes et al., 2009) and extend our understanding of how featural and spatial cues interact.     

Norms of Assertion: The Quantity and Quality of Epistemic Support

We show that the contemporary debate surrounding the question “What is the norm of assertion?” presupposes what we call the quantitative view, i.e. the view that this question is best answered by determining how much epistemic support is required to warrant assertion. We consider what Jennifer Lackey (2010) has called cases of isolated second-hand knowledge and show—beyond what Lackey has suggested herself—that these cases are best understood as ones where a certain type of understanding, rather than knowledge, constitutes the required epistemic credential to warrant assertion. If we are right that understanding (and not just knowledge) is the epistemic norm for a restricted class of assertions, then this straightforwardly undercuts not only the widely supposed quantitative view, but also a more general presupposition concerning the universalisability of some norm governing assertion—the presumption (almost entirely unchallenged since Williamson’s 1996 paper) that any epistemic norm that governs some assertions should govern assertions—as a class of speech act—uniformly.     

The Nonworseness Claim and the Moral Permissibility of Better-Than-Permissible Acts

Grounded in what Alan Wertheimer terms the “nonworseness claim,” it is thought by some philosophers that what will be referred to herein as “better-than-permissible acts”—acts that, if undertaken, would make another or others better off than they would be were an alternative but morally permissible act to be undertaken—are necessarily morally permissible. What, other than a bout of irrationality, it may be thought, would lead one to hold that an act (such as outsourcing production to a “sweatshop” in a developing country) that produces more benefits for others than an act that is itself morally permissible (such as not doing business in the developing country at all) with respect to those same others, is not morally permissible? In this article, I argue that each of the two groups of philosophers that are most likely to accept the nonworseness claim—consequentialists and non-consequentialists—have reason to reject it, and thereby also have reason to reject the belief that better-than-permissible acts are necessarily morally permissible.     

Resources versus respect: Social judgments based on targets' power and status positions

In two experiments, we investigate how individuals' levels of power and status interact to determine how they are perceived by others. We find that power and status have similar, positive, effects on judged dominance. We also find that power has a negative effect on perceived warmth, but status moderates this “power penalty”: high power without status is associated with low warmth, but power with status is judged warm. Consequently, we find high status individuals, regardless of power level, are perceived positively - dominant and warm - whereas high power-low status individuals are judged most negatively — dominant and cold (Experiments 1 and 2). As a result, perceivers expect positive interactions with high status individuals, but negative interactions with high power, low status individuals (Experiment 2). These findings provide insight into power and status social judgments, and further our understanding of similarities and differences between these distinct, yet related, constructs.