Motivation and anxiety for dental treatment and dental attendance: The roles of the locus of causality personality and treatment styles

The purpose of the present study was to test a self-determination theory model with the following hypotheses: (1) Patients’ autonomous causality personality orientation and oral health care professionals’ autonomy-supportive treatment styles, as perceived by patients, would both be positively indirectly associated with dental attendance through patients’ autonomous motivation for dental treatment. (2) Patients’ controlled causality personality orientation and oral health care professionals’ controlling treatment styles, as perceived by patients, would both be positively indirectly associated with avoidance of making a dental clinic appointment through patients’ anxiety for dental treatment. A sample size of about 200 patients was estimated to be acceptable in detecting moderate effect sizes (independent variables: 5–6; power: .80; p < .05). Student patients (N = 226) responded to a survey with validated questionnaires. Using LISREL, both hypotheses were supported. In addition, patients’ perception of a controlling treatment style moderated the controlled personality—dental anxiety relation, so that a lower controlling treatment style mitigated dental anxiety substantially among patients with a high control orientation. Effect sizes were moderate to large. Analyses (Z-scores) also revealed that the autonomous personality is more strongly linked to situational autonomous motivation than situational autonomy support, whereas a controlled personality and a perceived controlling treatment style are equally and significantly associated to dental anxiety. Both patient personalities and oral health care professionals’ treatment styles are substantially linked to autonomous motivation and anxiety for dental treatment, which are relatively strongly associated with dental attendance and avoiding dental clinic appointments, respectively.     

Promoting the underestimated: A vignette study on the importance of the need for affiliation to successful leadership

Research on the relationship of implicit motives and effective leadership emphasises the importance of a socialised need for power, whereas high levels of the need for affiliation are assumed to thwart a leader’s success. In our study, we experimentally analysed the impact of leaders’ socialised need for power and their need for affiliation on perceptions of transformational leadership and various success indicators. Using paper-people vignettes, we contrasted leaders characterised by either motive with those concerned with personalised power or achievement. Results based on N?=?80 employees show that leaders high in socialised power were rated more successful and elicited more identification and organisational citizenship behaviour (OCB) in followers, and that in most cases this effect was mediated by perceptions of transformational leadership. For all outcomes but OCB, findings remained unchanged when affiliation-motivated leaders were considered. Exploratory analyses contrasting socialised power-motivated and affiliation-motivated leaders show that with regard to attitudinal outcomes affiliation-motivated leaders were, on average, as effective as socialised power-motivated ones.

     

Risk assessment in sentencing and plea bargaining: The roles of prosecutors and defense attorneys

Research on risk assessment in sentencing has focused heavily on the role of judges. Ignoring the role of other courtroom actors in the sentencing process, however, leaves unexamined the potentially significant effects on judicial decision making of arguments made by prosecutors and defense attorneys at sentencing hearings. Unduly focusing on judges also overlooks the vast majority of sentences arrived at through negotiated guilty pleas. We explored the extent to which considerations of risk are made among prosecutors and defense attorneys when advocating for given sentences in open court or during plea negotiations. We surveyed all prosecutors and defense attorneys in 14 judicial circuits in Virginia and found that most prosecutors and defense attorneys at least “sometimes” explicitly invoked actuarial risk estimates both at sentencing hearings and during plea negotiations. However, defense attorneys were much more likely than prosecutors to be averse to the use of risk assessment in either form of case disposition.     

What moderates the attainment gap? The effects of social identity incompatibility and practical incompatibility on the performance of students who are or are not Black,Asian or Minority Ethnic

Social Psychology of Education - A successful journey through higher education is, for many, a once in a lifetime opportunity for social mobility. Unfortunately, one notable feature of higher...     

Where and when to look: Sequential effects at the millisecond level

Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics - Learning and imitating a complex motor action requires to visually follow complex movements, but conscious perception seems too slow for such tasks....     

Reduced or increased influence of non-pertinent information in patients with schizophrenia?

We tested the ability of 18 patients with schizophrenia and 18 matched controls to filter non-pertinent information in orientation matching tasks. The non-pertinent information consisted of pictures conveying semantic information. The pertinent information consisted of oriented line-segments drawn inside pictures or was represented by the overall orientation of the picture itself. The results showed that non-pertinent information interfered with performance of control subjects in all tasks. In contrast, non-pertinent information interfered with the performance of patients with schizophrenia to the same extent as that of matched controls only when non-pertinent and pertinent information was physically mingled, but not when they were separated. Yet, patients processed non-pertinent information in all experiments, as shown by reversed interference effects when non-pertinent and pertinent information was physically separated. These results suggest a deficit at linking physically distinct visual information in patients with schizophrenia. Additionally, performance was more impaired in patients with schizophrenia than in control subjects when the amount of displayed information increased. The results suggest the coexistence, and a possible relationship between attentional deficits and impairments at linking distinct visual information in patients with schizophrenia.     

Tactile "capture" of audition

Previous research has demonstrated that the localization of auditory or tactile stimuli can be biased by the simultaneous presentation of a visual stimulus from a different spatial position. We investigated whether auditory localization judgments could also be affected by the presentation of spatially displaced tactile stimuli, using a procedure designed to reveal perceptual interactions across modalities. Participants made left-right discrimination responses regarding the perceived location of sounds, which were presented either in isolation or together with tactile stimulation to the fingertips. The results demonstrate that the apparent location of a sound can be biased toward tactile stimulation when it is synchronous, but not when it is asynchronous, with the auditory event. Directing attention to the tactile modality did not increase the bias of sound localization toward synchronous tactile stimulation. These results provide the first demonstration of the tactile capture of audition.     

From acquisition to consolidation: on the role of brain-derived neurotrophic factor signaling in hippocampal-dependent learning

One of the most rigorously investigated problems in modern neuroscience is to decipher the mechanisms by which experience-induced changes in the central nervous system are translated into behavioral acquisition, consolidation, retention, and subsequent recall of information. Brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) has recently emerged as one of the most potent molecular mediators of not only central synaptic plasticity, but also behavioral interactions between an organism and its environment. Recent experimental evidence indicates that BDNF modulates synaptic transmission and plasticity by acting across different spatial and temporal domains. BDNF signaling evokes both short- and long-term periods of enhanced synaptic physiology in both pre- and postsynaptic compartments of central synapses. Specifically, BDNF/TrkB signaling converges on the MAP kinase pathway to enhance excitatory synaptic transmission in vivo, as well as hippocampal-dependent learning in behaving animals. Emerging concepts of the intracellular signaling cascades involved in synaptic plasticity induced through environmental interactions resulting in behavioral learning further support the contention that BDNF/TrkB signaling plays a fundamental role in mediating enduring changes in central synaptic structure and function. Here we review recent literature showing the involvement of BDNF/TrkB signaling in hippocampal-dependent learning paradigms, as well as in the types of cellular plasticity proposed to underlie learning and memory.