Making Sense of Suffering: A Preliminary Study of Changes in Religious Women Adjusting to Severe Adversity

This qualitative study examined interviews from 25 women who held theistic beliefs from Christian, Islamic, or Jewish traditions. All had recently experienced severe adversity but reported they were coping well. Analysis illustrated changes in religious beliefs and attitudes they made as a result of learning to cope. Differences were found among the 3 religious groups. Findings of this preliminary study suggest that religious meaning and experience may change because of the process of learning to cope with severe adversity. Recommendations are made for counseling theistically oriented women.     

Getting less than their fair share: Maltreated youth are hyper‐cooperative yet vulnerable to exploitation in a public goods game

Human cooperative behavior has long been thought to decline under adversity. However, studies have primarily examined perceived patterns of cooperation, with little eye to actual cooperative behavior embedded within social interaction. Game‐theoretical paradigms can help close this gap by unpacking subtle differences in how cooperation unfolds during initial encounters. This study is the first to use a child‐appropriate, virtual, public goods game to study actual cooperative behavior in 329 participants aged 9–16 years with histories of maltreatment (n = 99) and no maltreatment (n = 230) while controlling for psychiatric symptoms. Unlike work on perceived patterns of cooperation, we found that maltreated participants actually contribute more resources to a public good during peer interaction than their nonmaltreated counterparts. This effect was robust when controlling for psychiatric symptoms and peer problems as well as demographic variables. We conclude that maltreatment may engender a hyper‐cooperative strategy to minimize the odds of hostility and preserve positive interaction during initial encounters. This, however, comes at the cost of potential exploitation by others.     

The efficacy of the Triple P-Positive Parenting Program in improving parenting and child behavior: a comparison with two other treatment conditions

The aim of this randomized controlled trial was to evaluate the efficacy of an evidence-based parenting program (the Triple P-Positive Parenting Program), intending to improve parenting skills and children's well-being. Parents participating in a Group Triple P program (n=50 couples) were compared with parents of a non-treated control group (n=50 couples) and parents participating in a marital distress prevention program (couples coping enhancement training (CCET)) (n=50 couples). The two major goals of this study were (a) to evaluate the efficacy of Triple P compared with the two other treatment conditions over a time-span of 1 year and (b) to answer the question whether this program that was developed in Australia is culturally accepted by Swiss parents. Results revealed that Triple P was effective with Swiss families. Mothers of the Triple P group showed significant improvements in parenting, parenting self-esteem, and a decrease in stressors related to parenting. Women trained in Triple P also reported significantly lower rates of child's misbehavior than women of the two other conditions. However, in men only a few significant results were found. Positive effects of the relationship training (CCET) were somewhat lower than those for the Triple P. These findings are further discussed.     

Spanish experience with German psychology prior to World War I

An increase in interest for German scientific psychology followed the rise of liberalism in late nineteenth-century Spain. This paper deals with Spanish scholars' endeavors to participate in German psychology: It outlines the intellectual and institutional background of Spanish preoccupation with German philosophy and psychology, and deals with the personal experience and testimony of two Spanish philosophers, Eloy Luis André and Juan Vicente Viqueira López, who traveled to Leipzig, Berlin, and G?ttingen between 1909 and 1914 to gain firsthand experience in the nascent science of psychology in Germany at that time.     

The influence of reasons on interpretations of probability forecasts

When providing a probability estimate for an event, experts often supply reasons that they expect will clarify and support that estimate. We investigated the possible unintended influence that these reasons might have on a listener's intuitive interpretation of the event's likelihood. Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrated that people who read positive reasons for a doctor's probability estimate regarding a hypothetical surgery were more optimistic than those who read negative reasons for the identical estimate. Experiment 3 tested whether a doctor's failure forecast for a surgery would result in differing levels of pessimism when the potential risk was attributed to one complication that had a probability of 0.30 versus three complications that had a disjunctive probability of 0.30. Overall, the findings are consistent with the argument that a probability estimate, albeit numerically precise, can be flexibly interpreted at an intuitive level depending on the reasons that the forecaster provides as the basis for the estimate. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Some Antiepileptic Compounds Impair Learning by Rats in a Morris Water Maze

In the present experiments, we investigated the effects of several commonly employed antiepileptic drugs on the performance of adult rats in a Morris water maze task. We found that phenytoin treatment produced the most deleterious performance impairments across all days of training, and that these performance deficits are not likely due to any general sensorimotor impairments. Carbamazepine had milder, but detectable negative effects, as carbamazepine-treated animals exhibited initial acquisition deficits, but rapidly achieved escape levels comparable to controls. In marked contrast, valproate and ethosuximide had no detectable effects on learning in the water maze. These results parallel previous findings in rats treated with these compounds and tested in an instrumental learning task, and are in general agreement with the human clinical literature. To the extent that one might wish to minimize learning deficits associated with maintenance on antiepileptic drugs, phenytoin is definitely not the treatment of choice, while valproate or ethosuximide are apparently much less disruptive.     

Student perceptions and motivation in the classroom: exploring relatedness and value

According to Self-Determination Theory, feelings of relatedness and value of a behavior are critical factors that affect internalization and integration. The purpose of the current study was to identify factors that influence relatedness and value in an academic setting. Specifically, the study investigated the effects of autonomy, mastery goals, performance-approach goals, and performance-avoidance goals, on two dependent variables: relatedness to the professor and value of the course. Participants were 222 undergraduate students (90 males) enrolled in introductory psychology classes. Linear regression analyses showed a statistically significant effect of mastery goals and autonomy on relatedness such that higher scores were associated with greater relatedness. A similar pattern emerged for value. Neither performance-approach nor performance-avoidance goals were significantly associated with relatedness or value. Theoretical and practical contributions are discussed.

Attention to adjacent and separate positions in space: An electrophysiological analysis

Some theories of visuospatial attention propose that attention can be divided between separated zones of space that exclude the intervening region, whereas other theories state that the focus of attention must encompass aunitary, continuous zone. These contrasting viewswere evaluated in an experiment 9n which subjects were required to monitor two of four stimulus locations for targets; the two relevant locations were adjacent in one condition and were separated by an intervening irrelevant location in a second condition . To assess the distribution of attention across the relevant and irrelevant locations, event-related brain potentials(ERPa)were recorded to taskirrelevant “probe” stimuli that were occasionally presented at the individual stimulus locations. When the relevant locations were adjacent, probes presented at irrelevant locations elicited smaller sensory-evoked electrophysiological responses than probes presented at relevant locations, consistent with an attentional suppression of inputs from the unattended locations. When the relevant locations were separated by an irrelevant location, however, the sensory responses evoked by probes presented at this intervening irrelevant location were not suppressed, and target detection performance became slower and less accurate. These results suggest that attentionforms a unitary zone that may expand to encompass multiple relevant locations but must also include the area between them; as a result, irrelevant information arising from intervening locations is not suppressed and perceptual processing is compromised.     

On the communication of information by displays of standard errors and confidence intervals

A survey of practices regarding the presentation of information about reliability of means in psychological research publications over the last century reveals some advance in quality of communication, greater for tabular presentations than for graphic presentations, but also substantial room for improvement. In this article, problems of interpretation and communication associated with presentations of standard errors and confidence intervals in research reports are examined from both statistical and psychological perspectives. Four general principles of effective communication are proposed and illustrated in application to presentations of data from common psychological research designs, with special attention to problems arising in connection with repeated measures.