Do egalitarians always help the disadvantaged more than the advantaged? Testing a value‐norm conflict hypothesis in Malaysia

Do egalitarians always express greater compassion toward the disadvantaged than toward the advantaged? A closer look at existing scholarship on the topic suggests that they likely do. Here, we investigated whether such tendency is also apparent within interdependent, high power distance cultures where the high‐status privilege prevails. Given the emphasis on harmony in social relations in interdependent cultures, we reasoned that egalitarians might experience a dissonance between their private equity values and a societal norm prescribing high‐status privilege, which we refer to as the value‐norm conflict. We therefore proposed and found evidence in Malaysia (N = 273) that egalitarians succumbed to the normative high‐status privilege in their culture: They displayed greater compassion towards higher than lower status victims, but only when the political cost of doing so was low. Interestingly, anti‐egalitarians displayed equitable levels of compassion for high‐ and low‐status victims, but only when the political cost for taking such action also was low. Hence, we show that even egalitarians can, at times, favor the privileged and that anti‐egalitarians can act equitably, so long as the political cost of doing so is trivial for them.     

Scientific Integrity Principles and Best Practices: Recommendations from a Scientific Integrity Consortium

Science and Engineering Ethics - A Scientific Integrity Consortium developed a set of recommended principles and best practices that can be used broadly across scientific disciplines as a mechanism...     

Developing countertransference awareness as a therapist in training: The role of containing contexts

The psychodynamic literature suggests that countertransference is an inevitable part of therapy and a significant feature of the client-therapist relationship. However, countertransference is also considered to be a ‘double-edged sword’: when it is reflected on by the therapist, it can offer valuable insights into the therapeutic relationship, but when it remains outside of awareness and therefore unmanaged it can result in the therapist unwittingly acting out in the therapeutic relationship and responding in counter-therapeutic ways. The purpose of this research was to explore the factors involved in the development of countertransference awareness in therapists and to construct a grounded theory of the process. Fifteen qualified therapists were recruited and interviewed, either face to face or via Skype, using a semi-structured interview schedule. The grounded theory constructed from the data suggests that during training participants initially experienced countertransference as threatening and overwhelming. When this experience was contained in supervision and therapy, the organisational context and by participants’ theoretical framework, they could reflect on their countertransferential responses and make sense of their experience, which then developed their self-awareness and other insights to the benefit of the therapeutic relationship. Conversely, a lack of containment in these domains resulted in participants acting out their countertransference and becoming either over or under available in the therapeutic relationship. The findings offer a useful process model on the role containing contexts play in the development of countertransference awareness for therapists in training.     

Self-Appropriation between Social Mourning and Individuation: a Qualitative Study on Psychosocial Transition among Jehovah’s Witnesses

Pastoral Psychology - Loss and its associated grief are important elements of many adverse life events. The focus of this study is centred on a particular form of mourning: the affliction derived...     

On a Generalization of Local Independence in Item Response Theory Based on Knowledge Space Theory

Psychometrika - Knowledge space theory (KST) structures are introduced within item response theory (IRT) as a possible way to model local dependence between items. The aim of this paper is...     

The Attributes Adolescents Associate with Peer Popularity and Teacher Preference

Perceived popularity and perceived teacher preference were investigated in a sample of 351 (179 boys, 172 girls) 10th-grade students from an urban community experiencing a moderate degree of economic distress. Students completed rating scale sociometric and behavioral nomination measures. Data on GPAs and unexplained absences were obtained from the school. Multiple regression analyses revealed that different behaviors were associated with perceived popularity and perceived teacher preference. Low GPA, low submissiveness, and high rates of absenteeism were associated with high perceived popularity and a low perceived teacher preference. Snobbishness and prosociality were more strongly associated with perceived popularity than perceived teacher preference. Students who were perceived as high on both dimensions simultaneously maintained a commitment to their scholastic success at school while behaving in a highly friendly nonsubmissive manner. A relation was also found between individuals' ratings of students' peer popularity and their own behavioral and academic attributes.     

Räumliches Schließen als Sprachverstehen

dThe other side of mental models: theories of language comprehension” reads the title of a paper of Garnham (1996). At the opposite side is inference (see subtitle of Johnson-Laird, 1983). Inference as well as language comprehension have been extensively examined within the framework of the mental model theory. But investigations in these two areas seem to be pursued largely independently of each other, looking at the coin from only one of both sides. Taking spatial inference as an example, we argue that inferring a conclusion from premises describing a definite spatial layout is reducible to language comprehension, namely the construction of a single mental model; no model variation is performed to evaluate a tentative conclusion. The constitutive process in spatial reasoning is therefore the integration of the information of several premises into one mental model. This process is enlightened by figural effects that refer to principles of model construction that might conflict with one another. We suggest it to be helpful to consider anaphora resolution as part of the integration process.     

Electrophysiological response during source memory decisions in older and younger adults

We recorded event-related potentials (ERPs) as individuals made source monitoring decisions in a paradigm in which the influence of item familiarity and goal relevance could be separately evaluated. Younger and older adults read a list of words and subsequently distinguished these words from foils in a running recognition test in which some foils were repeated after a lag of 6 items, creating familiar lures. Behaviorally, older and younger adults performed equally well in the recognition of study words and the rejection of singly presented foils. However, older adults were more likely to respond to the familiar lures as though they had come from the study list, thus producing the expected group difference in source-monitoring error. For younger adults the ERPs elicited by the targeted study words were maximal at posterior sites and significantly greater than those elicited by either familiar lures or foils. Older adults generated far less differentiated ERP waveforms but with a markedly greater amplitude at frontal sites. We interpret this frontal maximum in the context of poorer source monitoring as suggesting that older adults are more dependent on controlled processes to make discriminations that seem to occur much earlier and more automatically for younger adults.     

Psychometric properties of an adolescent version of the Barratt Impulsiveness Scale-11 for a sample of Italian high school students

The purpose of this study was to extend the development of the Italian version of the Barratt Impulsiveness Scale for use with adolescents. The analyses which led to the development of this version were based on data from 563 high school students. The internal consistency was good (Cronbach alpha=.78). A confirmatory factor analysis identified six first-order factors which converged into two second-order factors, a General Impulsiveness factor and a Nonplanning Impulsiveness factor. The General Impulsiveness factor included motor and attention or cognition items. The second-order factors differed from those obtained with the adult Italian version as well as the American version. Possible reasons for these differences are discussed. The new version correlated significantly with self-report measures of aggression and Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder as well as with frequency of alcohol use and cigarette smoking.     

Logical reasoning and probabilities: A comprehensive test of Oaksford and Chater (2001)

We report two experiments testing a central prediction of the probabilistic account of reasoning provided by Oaksford and Chater (2001): Acceptance of standard conditional inferences, card choices in the Wason selection task, and quantifiers chosen for conclusions from syllogisms should vary as a function of the frequency of the concepts involved. Frequency was manipulated by a probability-learning phase preceding the reasoning tasks to simulate natural sampling. The effects predicted by Oaksford and Chater (2001) were not obtained with any of the three paradigms.