Using the self to change implicit attitudes

Implicit attitudes are automatic evaluations that occur upon encountering an object. Pairing a particular object with one's self should lead to a positive implicit evaluation of that object as, on the whole, people evaluate themselves positively. Study 1 (N = 83) demonstrated that asking participants to associate themselves with a particular drink (A) and others with an alternative drink (B) was enough to enhance implicit preference for drink A over drink B indexed by scores on the Implicit Association Test (IAT). Two further studies were conducted to rule out the possibility that the effects of the manipulation were restricted to the procedure and measures adopted in Study 1. Study 2 (N = 81) tested the mechanism underlying the effects of the manipulation. The results suggested that the change in implicit attitudes towards the drinks varied as a function of the level of one's self‐esteem. Specifically, associating one's self with drink A led to more favourable implicit attitudes towards drink A particularly when one's self was evaluated more positively. In the third study (N = 44), the basic effect of the manipulation was replicated in an alternative measure of implicit attitudes (the Affect Misattribution Procedure). In all three studies, the effects were unique to implicit measures and did not generalize to explicit measures. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Clergy Motivation and Occupational Well-being: Exploring a Quadripolar Model and Its Role in Predicting Burnout and Engagement

Clergy represent a salient group in Western communities, providing a variety of services aimed at supporting diverse members of those communities. Significantly, rates of attrition among clergy are high, suggesting the need to better understand their occupational well-being and factors relevant to it. The present study draws on the quadripolar need achievement framework to hypothesize motivational profiles among clergy and the extent to which these profiles predict occupational well-being, as indicated by low burnout and high engagement. K-means cluster analysis with 200 clergy confirmed a quadripolar motivational profile (success-oriented, overstriving, self-protecting, failure accepting). Using these group profiles as predictors, structural equation modeling identified significant effects on all burnout and engagement factors, with success-oriented, overstriving, self-protecting, and failure accepting groups each reflecting differential occupational well-being profiles. Substantive and applied implications of these findings are discussed.     

Deflationism and the Dependence of Truth on Reality

A common objection against deflationism is that it cannot account for the fact that truth depends on reality. Consider the question ‘On what does the truth of the proposition that snow is white depend?’ An obvious answer is that it depends on whether snow is white. Now, consider what answer, if any, a deflationist can offer. The problem is as follows. A typical deflationary analysis of truth consists of biconditionals of the form ‘The proposition that p is true iff p’. Such biconditionals tell us nothing about what the truth of the proposition that p might depend on. Therefore, it seems that a typical deflationist cannot give an answer. Since we know that an answer is available, this throws doubt over the adequacy of deflationism as an account of truth. Articulated here is a defence of deflationism against this objection. It is argued that although biconditionals of the sort mentioned do not explicitly state a dependency between truth and reality, they nevertheless convey one. The reason is that, given the context in which a deflationist invokes the biconditionals, such a dependency is implicated. A potential problem with this defence is that it leaves the deflationist still unable to give an account of what it is for truth to depend on reality. One might think that a deflationist can offer such an account by appealing to truthmaker theory but, it is argued below, truthmaker theory is unavailable to a deflationist. Instead, the deflationist should question the assumption that an account is available.     

Peer victimization in adolescence has different effects on the sexual behavior of male and female college students

We studied levels of peer victimization from an evolutionary perspective by investigating self-reported victimization during adolescence in relation to sexual behavior in college students. One-hundred and twelve (47 female) undergraduates completed self-report measures of victimization during middle and high school, onset of sexual activity, and number of sexual partners. Nearly 85% of victimization during adolescence was perpetrated by members of the same sex. Furthermore, results show that this intrasexual victimization (particularly indirect forms) was negatively correlated with reproductive opportunities in males, but positively correlated in females. Males who were frequently victimized had fewer total sexual partners and partners per year on average, while females who were often victims of aggression reported having more sexual partners and an earlier onset of sexual activity. Regression analysis revealed that demeaning, diminishing and embarrassing was the most significant predictor of the rate of sexual activity in both sexes (although this relationship was inverted between them), while teasing was the best predictor of total sexual partners in females. This evidence is consistent with evolutionary interpretations regarding human aggression and competition, as well as with recent findings suggesting that indirect victimization during adolescence is a form of intrasexual competition associated with reproductive opportunities.     

British English norms for the spontaneous completion of three-letter word stems

Word stem completion tasks involve showing participants a number of words and then later asking them to complete word stems to make a full word. If the stem is completed with one of the studied words, it indicates memory. It is a test widely used to assess both implicit and explicit forms of memory. An important aspect of stimulus selection is that target words should not frequently be generated spontaneously from the word stem, to ensure that production of the word really represents memory. In this article, we present a database of spontaneous stem completion rates for 395 stems from a group of 80 British undergraduate psychology students. It includes information on other characteristics of the words (word frequency, concreteness, imageability, age of acquisition, common part of speech, and number of letters) and, as such, can be used to select suitable words to include in a stem completion task. Supplemental materials for this article may be downloaded from http://brm .psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental.     

Philosophies in America

A review-article of Loren Baritz, City On a Hill, A History of Ideas and Myths in America, John Wiley and Sons C. Wright Mills, Sociology and Pragmatism, Paine-Whitman Publishers Roderick M. Chisholm, Herbert Feigl, William K. Frankena, John Passmore, Manley Thompson, Philosophy, Prentice-Hall Max Black, Philosophy in America, Cornell University Press     

Hermeneutics and Religious Understanding Part Two: towards a critical theory for religious education

The previous article offered an account of the hermeneutics implicit in religious education from 1960 to the present. It was suggested that an uncritical reliance on the traditions of romanticism and postmodernism serves to impair the emergence of religious literacy. Here an attempt is made to plot the contours of a critical hermeneutical theory for religious education, drawing on the resources of linguistic hermeneutical theory provided by the critical realism of Gadamer and Habermas.     

The pre/post cueing technique in the study of selective attention

Previous studies using pre/post cueing to study selective perception have typically confounded the disruptive effects of the post-cue with the possible facilitative effects of the pre-cue. The present experiments were designed to control for post-cue delay and interference effects by varying presentation rate but with post-cue delay constant. With both dichotic and bisensory presentation pre/post differences were found to decrease as rate increased. This is interpreted as indicating that the pre-cue did enhance performance of the selection task, that is, that selection occurred during not after intake of the split-span list on pre-cued trials. The results are discussed in terms of perceptual selection and response selection theories of attention.     

Champagne,beer, or coffee? A corpus of gender-related and neutral words

A list of gender-related and gender-neutral words for use in testing gender stereotyping and memory was created and evaluated. Words were rated by samples of undergraduates at universities located in the northeast, southeast, and south-central United States. A substantial list of masculine, feminine, and gender-neutral words was identified. These lists allow researchers to construct large lists of gender-associated words while being able to control for extraneous variables, such as word frequency and word length. In addition, the high reliability across the samples suggests that gender ratings are a fairly stable phenomenon. Applications for this list are discussed. The word lists presented in Tables 1–3 and the raw data analyzed in this article may be downloaded fromwww.psychonomic.org/archive/.