Professional Financial Advice and Subjective Well-Being

In this paper, we examine the relationship between professional financial advice (PFA) and subjective well-being (SWB). Utilizing the Dutch Household Survey 1995–2018, we find that regarding a professional financial advisor as most important source of financial advice is associated with higher levels of SWB. This association is stronger for households that experienced an increase in income, individuals who do not consider themselves financially knowledgeable, and individuals that have a weaker internal locus of control and have a lower degree of conscientiousness.

     

Measuring Implicit Gender-Role Orientation: The Gender Initial Preference Task

Individuals prefer their name letters over nonname letters, which is known as the name-letter effect (NLE). This research aimed to examine a possible NLE for gender-role orientation (GRO) by rating letters for their gender-typicality in an initial preference task (Gender-IPT). Indeed, a clear NLE appeared: Men rated their initials as more male-typical, whereas women rated them as more female-typical. The Gender-IPT showed good convergent validity with other direct and indirect (Gender Implicit Association Test) measures of GRO as well as predictive validity with sensation seeking and gender-typical everyday life behaviors. The Gender-IPT seems to be a useful and practical indirect measure to assess GRO in a short, convenient, and computer-independent way, complementing other indirect measures of GRO.     

The number line effect reflects top-down control

Recent evidence indicates that central directional stimuli, such as eyes and arrows, trigger rapid, reflexive shifts of spatial attention. A study by Fischer, Castel, Dodd, and Pratt (2003) suggested that a similar effect might also apply to central numbers, as if a digit's meaning causes attention to be oriented to its relative position on a left-to-right mental number line. However, unlike central eyes and arrows, the orienting effect for central digits emerges slowly, suggesting that top-down endogenous processes may be mediating this effect. Here, we report a series of three experiments that strongly support this hypothesis. Experiment 1 replicated Fischer et al.'s left-to-right number line effect. Experiment 2 showed that this effect could be completely reversed by merely asking participants to imagine a number line running from right to left. Experiment 3 showed that a left-to-right number line effect could be abolished by presenting targets above and below central fixation, as well as to the left and right of center. Experiment 3 also showed that other mental sets, such as imagining a clock, result in attention's being oriented in accordance with where the central digits are represented on a clock face. Together, these data indicate that the spatial representations and attentional orienting related to the perception of digits are both fragile and flexible and depend critically on the top-down spatial mental sets adopted by individuals.     

The Assessment of Alexithymia in Medical Settings: Implications for Understanding and Treating Health Problems

The construct of alexithymia encompasses the characteristics of difficulty identifying feelings, difficulty describing feelings, externally oriented thinking, and a limited imaginal capacity. These characteristics are thought to reflect deficits in the cognitive processing and regulation of emotions and to contribute to the onset or maintenance of several medical and psychiatric disorders. In this article, we review recent methods for assessing alexithymia and examine how assessing alexithymia can inform clinical practice. Alexithymia is associated with heightened physiological arousal, the tendency to notice and report physical symptoms, and unhealthy compulsive behaviors. Alexithymic patients may respond poorly to psychological treatments, although perhaps not to cognitive-behavioral techniques, and it is unclear whether alexithymia can be improved through treatment. Interpretive problems regarding alexithymia include its overlap with other traits, whether it is secondary to illness or trauma, the possibility of subtypes, and low correlations among multiple measures. Nonetheless, we encourage the assessment of alexithymia in applied settings.     

The role of controlled attention on recall in major depression

Information processing biases are hallmark features of major depressive disorder (MDD). Depressed individuals display biased memory and attention for negative material. Given that memory is highly dependent on attention for initial encoding, understanding the interplay of these processes may provide important insight into mechanisms that produce memory biases in depression. In particular, attentional control—the ability to selectively attend to task-relevant information by both inhibiting the processing of irrelevant information and disengaging attention from irrelevant material—may be one area of impairment in MDD. In the current study, clinically depressed (MDD: n = 15) and never depressed (non-MDD: n = 22) participants' line of visual gaze was assessed while participants viewed positive and negative word pairs. For each word pair, participants were instructed to attend to one word (target) and ignore one word (distracter). Free recall of study stimuli was then assessed. Depressed individuals displayed greater recall of negatively valenced target words following the task. Although there were no group differences in attentional control in the context of negative words, attention to negative targets mediated the relationship between depression status and recall of negative words. Results suggest a stronger link between attention and memory for negative material in MDD.     

Merging Inference and Conjecture by Information

The intuitive notion of a binary relation on information-bearers, comparingthem with respect to their closeness to the available information, is oftenconstrued in terms of comparing their symmetric difference with, orcompositional similarity to, the available information. This happens forinstance in some treatments of verisimilitude. We expound an abstractmathematical rendering of the relevant data-dependent relation in theframework of Boolean algebras. For every element t of a Boolean algebra B we construct the t-modulated Boolean algebra B_tin which the order relation represents `is at most as compatible with t as' or `is at best as similar to t as'. In the case of Lindenbaum-Tarskialgebras, t expresses the available information, and the compatibilityrelation turns out to be an entwinement of inferential and conjecturalrelations. It is just classical entailment when no information is available(i.e., when t is logically true) and becomes more boldly abductive themore information is available. The rich algebraic structures of a Boolean algebra –- including its Boolean group structures –- play a significant role in this combination of deduction and abduction and also induce cautious anddaring variants of the compatibility relation. Links with the literature onverisimilitude, abduction, and related topics are indicated.     

Goals-feedback conditions and episodic memory: Mechanisms for memory gains in older and younger adults

Research has established that challenging memory goals always lead to score increases for younger adults, and can increase older adults' scores under supportive conditions. This study examined beliefs and on-task effort as potential mechanisms for these self-regulatory gains, in particular to learn whether episodic memory gains across multiple trials of shopping list recall are controlled by the same factors for young and old people. Goals with feedback led to higher recall and strategic categorisation than a control condition. Strategy usage was the strongest predictor of gains over trials for both age groups. Age, goal condition, and effort also predicted scores across the entire sample. Older adults' gains, but not younger adults' gains, were affected significantly by the interaction of self-efficacy beliefs and goal condition, and condition interacted with locus of control to predict younger adult gains. These results emphasise the importance of self-regulatory effort and positive beliefs for facilitating goal-related memory gains.     

Subjective Well-Being During the 2008 Economic Crisis: Identification of Mediating and Moderating Factors

We examine the effects of the 2008 economic crisis on the reported subjective well-being (SWB) of nationally representative samples in 36 mainly European countries between 2002 and 2013. We study how SWB fluctuates along the business cycle, and how it is mediated by individual and country-level socioeconomic factors. Our key finding is that the economic crisis had a negative and S-shaped effect on SWB, implying diminishing marginal sensitivity at higher income losses and gains. During the economic downturn, roughly half of individual-level and macro-level determinants exhibit notable changes in significance and/or magnitude of the effect on SWB. This is taken as an indication of psychological adaptation and shifting reference frames. Five factors display an augmented effect on happiness and life satisfaction during the crisis (below-average income, the Gini index, attitude towards income equality, religiosity, and conscientiousness), while two determinants exhibit attenuated impact on the SWB measures (relationship status and unemployment rate).