Sex,Drugs, and Deception: Deviance in the Hair Salon Industry

The unique organizational structure of the hair salon industry fosters an environment in which multiple factors, including varying levels of status, opportunity, and motivation, can create or constrain possibilities for deviant behavior. Using data from participant observation, personal interviews, and systematic introspection, four categories of deviance emerge: theft, hyper-sexualized interactions, drug/alcohol use, and questionable/illegal business practices. This study uses a classification of workplace crime, occupational deviance, and occupational crime to illustrate how the typology applies to salon deviance and how the structural location within the industry predicts the types of deviance that occur in each salon organizational structure.     

Cautious Thoughts on “A Social Priming Data Set With Troubling Oddities”

Pashler, Rohrer, Abramson, Wolfson, and Harris (2016/this issue) identify a number of features of the data in Chatterjee, Rose, and Sinha (2013 Chatterjee, P., Rose, R. L., &; Sinha, J. (2013). Why money meanings matter in decisions to donate time and money. Marketing Letters, 21(2), 1–10. [Google Scholar]), particularly in Study 3, that cause them to question the scientific validity of the conclusions drawn from the data. Based on the critics’ analyses and my own investigation, I concur that Study 3 data are likely unreliable. However, Pashler et al. question the scientific validity of all three studies while providing support for their skepticism only for Study 3, clearly an overgeneralization. The processes leading to the original publication and the critics’ challenge to the original work highlight some crucial questions regarding trust, loyalty, mentorship, and oversight in multiple authored articles.     

Gender differences in salivary alpha-amylase and attentional bias towards negative facial expressions following acute stress induction

This study investigated gender differences in two key processes involved in anxiety, arousal and attentional bias towards threat. Arousal was assessed using salivary alpha-amylase (sAA), a biomarker of noradrenergic arousal and attention bias using a dot-probe task. Twenty-nine women and 27 men completed the dot-probe task and provided saliva samples before and after a stress induction [cold pressor stress (CPS) test]. Women displayed a significant increase in arousal (sAA) following the stressor compared to men, who displayed a significant reduction in arousal. Reaction time data revealed a significant avoidance of threat in women at baseline, but a significant change to an attention bias towards threat following the stressor. Men did not significantly respond to the stressor in terms of attentional bias. These findings suggest that women are more reactive to a stressor than men, and display an initial avoidance response to threat, but an attentional bias towards threat following stress.     

‘Language of the past’ – Exploring past tense disruption during autobiographical narration in neurodegenerative disorders

Compromised retrieval of autobiographical memory (ABM) is well established in neurodegenerative disorders. The recounting of autobiographical events is inextricably linked to linguistic knowledge, yet no study to date has investigated whether tense use during autobiographical narration is disrupted in dementia syndromes. This study investigated the incidence of correct past tense use during ABM narration in patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD, n = 10) and semantic dementia (SD, n = 10) in comparison with healthy older Controls (n = 10). Autobiographical narratives were analysed for episodic content (internal/external) and classified according to tense use (past/present). Across both patient groups, use of the past tense was significantly compromised relative to Controls, with increased levels of off‐target present tense verbs observed. Voxel‐based morphometry analyses based on structural MRI revealed differential associations between past tense use and regions of grey matter intensity in the brain. Bilateral temporal cortices were implicated in the SD group, whereas frontal, lateral, and medial temporal regions including the right hippocampus emerged in AD. This preliminary study provides the first demonstration of the disruption of specific linguistic constructs during autobiographical narration in AD and SD. Future studies are warranted to clarify at what point in the disease trajectory such deficits in tense use emerge, and whether these deficits are a product or contributing factor in memory disruption in these syndromes.     

Vividness of positive mental imagery predicts positive emotional response to visually presented Project Soothe pictures

Lang's bioinformational theory of mental imagery proposes that mental imagery and external stimuli engage emotional information-processing systems in similar ways. However, the positive and negative systems are thought to be distinct, so this similarity is likely to show a valence-specific effect. Therefore, we hypothesized that an individual's ability to construct vivid positive, but not negative, mental imagery would predict positive emotional responding to positive visual stimuli, independently of depressive symptoms. Our stimuli were pictures collected through Project Soothe for possible use in psychotherapy ( www.projectsoothe.com ); as these pictures were intended to induce soothing emotion, we hypothesized that theoretically linked variables Self-compassion and Self-criticism would also predict positive responding to the stimuli. A total of 214 participants completed an online study including validated questionnaire measures, mental imagery tasks, and a picture-rating exercise. Only Positive Imagery Vividness and Self-compassion were significant predictors of positive responding to the soothing pictures, even controlling for depressive symptoms, and Negative and General Imagery Vividness. These findings support Lang's theory and provide evidence for individual differences in a positive processing tendency shared across mental imagery-based and perceptual representations. As this relationship is distinct from depressive symptoms, future imagery-based psychotherapies might aim to influence this positive processing tendency.     

Paying attention to binding: Further studies assessing the role of reduced attentional resources in the associative deficit of older adults

The present experiments investigated whether the observed associative deficit in older adults' episodic memory is mediated by a reduction of attentional resources. Using a dual-task procedure, younger and older participants studied lists of word pairs either under full attention or while performing a concurrent task. Both experiments showed that dividing attention did not cause a greater impairment to memory for associations than to memory for items in either age group. Furthermore, an analysis of concurrent task performance revealed that older adults' attentional costs for both learning and binding items were not larger than for learning items alone, relative to younger adults. These data provide support for a multicausal interpretation of older adults' memory deficits in which common, depleted attentional resources may be a mechanism that reduces memory for components of an episode in both older and younger adults under divided attention at encoding. In addition, older adults have a unique deficit in memory for the associations between the components, which does not seem to be resource dependent.     

Repeating phrases across unrelated narratives: Evidence of text repetition effects

Research has shown that text repetition effects are limited to conditions in which the context remains consistent across the two processing episodes, particularly when readers are focused on comprehension. Despite this, we found evidence of transfer effects across unrelated narratives. In a repeated condition, an ambiguous phrase appeared in two consecutive stories. In Story A, the phrase was presented in a sarcasm-biasing context, and in Story B, the phrase was presented in a neutral context. The pattern of findings from an offline measure (Experiment 1) and a reading time measure (Experiments 2, 3, and 4) indicated that participants were more likely to interpret the phrase in Story B as sarcastic in the repeated version than in a nonrepeated version, in which the phrase was absent from Story A. We conclude that during the reading of Story B, the phrase was reactivated from memory, even though the two stories were unrelated.     

We want the same thing: projection in judgments of sexual intent

This article details two studies investigating the proximal role of social projection (i.e., assumed similarity) in judgments of sexual intent. Study 1 demonstrates that men and women who have a greater desire for casual sex are more likely to perceive sexual intent in others. Study 2 replicates this finding in a more realistic context and, further, situates judgments of sexual intent squarely into the cognitive domain, as results show that projection of casual sexual motivation is more likely when the target is similar to the perceiver and when the target's motivation is relatively ambiguous to begin with.