Caught in a Lie: The Rise and Fall of a Respectable Deviant

ABSTRACT

In this study, we draw on the concept of respectable deviance to understand the journey into deviance – from her rise as an alternative health expert through to her public disgrace – of Belle Gibson, a young Australian blogger, app publisher, and alternative medicine advocate who falsely claimed to have cured cancer without reverting to science-based medicine. Through the rigorous analysis of a series of media and documentary sources where Ms Gibson provided autobiographical accounts of her life experience, the argument is presented that the promotion of one’s self as a health expert and subsequently being outed as a fraudster encourages techniques of neutralization and particular presentations of self to respond and manage negative labeling and the stigma attached.     

Forecasting Psychological Consequences of Car Use Reduction: A Challenge to an Environmental Psychology of Transportation

Au cours du troisième millénaire, la pénurie d'énergie et la pollution de l'air vont probablement imposer une réduction des transports motorisés des personnes et des marchandises. En se focalisant sur la réduction du trafic des voitures privées dans les zones urbaines, l'objectif des recherches passées a souvent été l'évaluation du rapport coût-efficacité des stratégies sociales de réduction. En complément, on essaie, dans cet article, de prévoir les conséquences psychologiques de la réduction de l'utilisation de l'automobile.
In the third millennium energy shortage and air pollution are likely to necessitate a reduction of motorised transport of people and cargo. Focusing on reduction in travel by private cars in urban areas, the aim of previous research has frequently been to evaluate the cost-effectiveness of societal reduction strategies. A complementary attempt is made in this article to forecast psychological consequences of car use reduction.     

Coping with the threat of severe acute respiratory syndrome: Role of threat appraisals and coping responses in health behaviors

The present study examines the psychological impact of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) by exploring the coping strategies and health behaviors enacted in response to the SARS epidemic. Hierarchical linear regression indicated that the use of wishful thinking in response to the threat of SARS was related to both avoiding public places and avoiding people perceived to be possible carriers of the SARS virus, but was not associated with the use of more adaptive health behaviors, such as using disinfectants and hand washing. Conversely, those who reported engaging in empathic responding in response to the threat of SARS were both less likely to report avoiding people perceived as being at a high risk for SARS and more likely to report engaging in effective health behaviors. Support seeking was not a significant predictor of the health behaviors examined in the present study. Results are discussed in terms of coping with health threats and health promotion.     

Playing it cool: Temperament, emotion regulation, and social behavior in preschoolers

The contributions of temperamental styles and emotional coping strategies to the development of preschoolers' social competence and behavior problems were investigated. The ability to cope with emotion was found to be more important than temperament alone in the development of prosocial behavior. Our results indicate that the use of passive coping strategies may play a significant role in the development of maladaptive behaviors in young children. Specifically, the use of passive coping strategies was found to moderate the relationship between temperament dimensions in predicting externalizing and internalizing maladaptive behaviors. When combined with extremely negative temperamental dispositions, just facing the problems was discovered to be beneficial for preschoolers, which encourages the use of preventative or interventional strategies in the classroom to develop constructive emotion regulation skills in young children.     

Emotional eating and Pavlovian learning: evidence for conditioned appetitive responding to negative emotional states

Appetitive learning has been demonstrated several times using neutral cues or contexts as a predictor of food intake and it has been shown that humans easily learn cued desires for foods. It has, however, never been studied whether internal cues are also capable of appetitive conditioning. In this study, we tested whether humans can learn cued eating desires to negative moods as conditioned stimuli (CS), thereby offering a potential explanation of emotional eating (EE). Female participants were randomly presented with 10 different stimuli eliciting either negative or neutral emotional states, with one of these states paired with eating chocolate. Expectancy to eat, desire to eat, salivation, and unpleasantness of experiencing negative emotions were assessed. After conditioning, participants were brought into a negative emotional state and were asked to choose between money and chocolate. Data showed differential conditioned responding on the expectancy and desire measures, but not on salivation. Specific conditioned effects were obtained for participants with a higher BMI (body mass index) on the choice task, and for participants high on EE on the unpleasantness ratings. These findings provide the first experimental evidence for the idea that negative emotions can act as conditioned stimuli, and might suggest that classical conditioning is involved in EE.     

Forgetting of Foreign‐Language Skills: A Corpus‐Based Analysis of Online Tutoring Software

We explore the nature of forgetting in a corpus of 125,000 students learning Spanish using the Rosetta Stone^® foreign‐language instruction software across 48 lessons. Students are tested on a lesson after its initial study and are then retested after a variable time lag. We observe forgetting consistent with power function decay at a rate that varies across lessons but not across students. We find that lessons which are better learned initially are forgotten more slowly, a correlation which likely reflects a latent cause such as the quality or difficulty of the lesson. We obtain improved predictive accuracy of the forgetting model by augmenting it with features that encode characteristics of a student's initial study of the lesson and the activities the student engaged in between the initial and delayed tests. The augmented model can predict 23.9% of the variance in an individual's score on the delayed test. We analyze which features best explain individual performance.     

Social allergies in romantic relationships: Behavioral repetition,emotional sensitization,and dissatisfaction in dating couples

A social allergy is a reaction of hypersensitive annoyance or disgust to a repeated behavior. Two studies were conducted on the social allergen categories of uncouth habits, inconsiderate acts, intrusive behaviors, and norm violations. Study 1 focused on hypothetical male and female partner behaviors at 2 and 12 months in a dating relationship. Study 2 obtained reports of social allergens performed by the individual and partner in dating couples, as well as the individual's emotional responses and relationship outcomes. Social allergens were perceived to increase in frequency over time in both studies, with some indications that men were more uncouth and norm violating and women were more inconsiderate and intrusive. Study 2 also found that the more often that the partner performed an allergenic behavior, the stronger was the individual's negative emotional reaction. Further, frequent and emotionally intense social allergens were associated with relationship dissatisfaction, and with termination assessed a year later.