Correlates of therapist's religious attitude and conservatism

This study examined the relationship between therapists' religious attitude in therapy, measured by the Therapist's Religious Attitude Scale and conservatism measured by the Wilson–Patterson Attitude Inventory. The 80 participants, 22 males and 58 females, were solicited from the American Psychological Association list server. Participants who endorsed a religious affiliation reported a more positive attitude to discuss religion in therapy and a higher conservatism and anti-hedonism. The higher score on the Therapist's Religious Attitude Scale was positively correlated with higher scores on conservatism, antihedonism, religion, and militarism subscales, and negatively correlated with the realism subscale score of the Wilson–Patterson Attitude Inventory. The clinical implications of these findings and the impact in therapy were discussed. It was advised that the therapists seek consultation when necessary.     

Reconceptualizing Excitation Transfer as Motivational Activation Changes and a Test of the Television Program Context Effects

This study theorizes that activation and decay of dual motivational systems function as the mechanisms underlying excitation transfer theory. Following this reconceptualization, a physiological experiment simultaneously examines the influence of program valence and arousing content on subsequent ads. As predicted, sympathetic arousal (indicated by skin conductance) was greater during ads following arousing compared to calm programs, and in both conditions, it decreased across ad blocks. Cognitive effort was higher (indicated by slower heart rate) during ads following the positive arousing program and was lower (indicated by faster heart rate) following the negative arousing program. The recognition and free recall data generally support the prediction that, immediately following the program, they would be at the levels predicted by the motivational activation elicited by the program context.     

Who Fights,Who Flees? An Integration of the LC4MP and Psychological Reactance Theory

ABSTRACT

This study tests the hypothesis that defensive message processing, like defensive behaviors in the real world, has two directions, fight-and-flight. The Limited Capacity Model of Motivated Mediated Message Processing (LC4MP) characterizes defensive message processing by increases in unpleasantness and arousal reports, and accelerated heart rate indicating either a focus on internal processing (internal thoughts) or the active withdrawal of cognitive resources from processing highly arousing and unpleasant media messages. However, the LC4MP has not included direct measures that allow discrimination between fight-and-flight responses. Psychological reactance theory (PRT) predicts defensive responses including anger and counterarguments (reactance) when media messages threaten viewers’ freedom and autonomy. We hypothesized that PRT provides the LC4MP with the appropriate measures (anger and counterarguments) needed to discriminate fight-or-flight responses. Results supported this prediction. Participants (N = 49 adult-smokers) high in defensive and low in appetitive reactivity (risk-avoiders) withdrew from the message (fled: characterized by low anger and counterarguments) while those high in appetitive and low in defensive reactivity (risk-takers) experienced reactance (fought: characterized by high anger and counterarguments) in response to freedom threatening antitobacco messages that are highly arousing and unpleasant. Moreover, both reactance and message withdrawal yielded the same cognitive, emotional, and physiological responses predicted by the LC4MP as indicators of defensive message processing. Theoretical and message design recommendations are discussed.     

Text On Screen: Can Emotionally Incongruent Combinations of Media Frames and Messages Elicit Coactivation in the Motivational Systems

ABSTRACT

Social media is becoming one of the most common deployment methods for antidrug and risk message campaigns. This is largely due to the low cost and high distribution that social media affords. This article argues that the social media approach to antidrug messaging also results in greater attention to the message over time. This article reports results from a study that examined how the combination of a short gain-or-loss framed text message interacts with a subsequent pleasant or unpleasant antidrug video message to influence motivational activation and information processing. Based on previous work investigating how different emotional trajectories in public service announcements (PSAs) elicit different patterns of motivational activation and cognitive processing, it was predicted, and found, that emotionally incongruent combinations of the text frame and video content resulted in the coactivation of the motivational systems. Placing a gain frame before a video message affects the overall processing of the subsequent message such that even an unpleasant message is rated more positively and results in a pattern of resource availability more like what we see for pleasant messages. Motivational activation and the subsequent effects on cognitive and emotional reactions are discussed within the context of multi-modal anti-drug campaigns.     

Discrete Emotion and Motivation: Relative Activation in the Appetitive and Aversive Motivational Systems as a Function of Anger,Sadness, Fear,and Joy During Televised Information Campaigns

This study investigated whether predictable motivational activation in the appetitive and aversive systems underlies the production and experience of discrete emotions (anger, sadness, joy, and fear) experienced while viewing televised public service announcements. This study used both self-reports and physiological measures to index motivational activation and emotional experience. In the joy condition, physiological data provided moderate support for the prediction that strong appetitive motivational activation underlies the experience of joy but did not support the concurrent prediction of aversive motivational inhibition. However, the self-report data provided good evidence for both. In the fear condition, the self-report data supported the prediction of strong aversive and inhibited appetitive activation. The physiological data provide strong support for a highly activated aversive system but no support for an inhibited appetitive system. In the sadness condition, the self-report and physiological data supported the prediction that sadness is a moderately activated aversive condition. In the anger condition, the physiological data supported the prediction that anger is a coactive state with both aversive and appetitive activation. This study suggests that research on cognition, emotion, and motivation can benefit by blending findings and insights from both discrete and dimensional approaches to the study of emotion.     

Cross-National Replication of the Gender Identity Interview for Children

We administered the Gender Identity Interview for Children, a 12-item child-informant measure, to children referred clinically for gender identity problems in Toronto, Ontario, Canada (N = 329) and Amsterdam, The Netherlands (N = 228) and 173 control children. Confirmatory factor analysis identified a Cognitive Gender Confusion factor (4 items) and an Affective Gender Confusion factor (8 items). Patients from both clinics had a significantly higher deviant total score than the controls, and the Dutch patients had a significantly higher deviant score than the Toronto patients. In this cross-national study, we are the first to report on the validity of this measure to discriminate children with gender identity disorder from controls outside of North America.     

Facilitating Effect of Multisensory Letter Encoding on Reading and Spelling in 5‐Year‐Old Children

This study aims at identifying the effect of training in the acquisition of the alphabetic principle in 5‐year‐old children. We compared the effect of multisensory training of letters in visual, haptic, graphomotor, visuo‐haptic, and visuo‐graphomotor groups. For each training type, we contrasted trained versus untrained letters in reading and spelling tasks. First, visuo‐haptic and visuo‐graphomotor training improved letter‐sound correspondence acquisition scores more than the other types of training, and this improvement persisted in the second post‐test. A cross‐modal transfer was revealed by the fact that scores increased after blindfold haptic and graphomotor experiences. Moreover, performance on untrained letters also improved, suggesting an indirect effect following the specific trained letters training. The results argue in favor of a facilitating effect of multisensory encoding on acquisition of the alphabetic principle. Practical implications for the prevention of future reading difficulties are discussed. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Religion,Race, and Discrimination: A Field Experiment of How American Churches Welcome Newcomers

This article reports the results of a nationwide audit study testing how Christian churches welcome potential newcomers to their churches as a function of newcomers’ race and ethnicity. We sent email inquiries to 3,120 churches across the United States. The emails were ostensibly from someone moving to the area and looking for a new church to attend. That person's name was randomly varied to convey different racial and ethnic associations. In response to these inquiries, representatives from mainline Protestant churches—who generally embrace liberal, egalitarian attitudes toward race relations—actually demonstrated the most discriminatory behavior. They responded most frequently to emails with white‐sounding names, somewhat less frequently to black‐ or Hispanic‐sounding names, and much less to Asian‐sounding names. They also sent shorter, less welcoming responses to nonwhite names. In contrast, evangelical Protestant and Catholic churches showed little variation across treatment groups in their responses. These findings underscore the role of homophily, organizational homogeneity, and the costs of racial integration in perpetuating the racial segregation of American religious life.     

The Intersubjective Turn in Psychoanalysis: A Comparison of Contemporary Theorists: Part 1: Jessica Benjamin

This paper on Benjamin is part 1 of a series presenting the wor of three contemporary theorists whose ideas are associated with the intersubjective turn in psychoanalysis. Part 2, on Bollas, and part 3, on Ehrenberg, will appear in subsequent issues of Psychoanalytic Dialogues. Although we have made a minimal attempt to critically review the different theories, we have allowed ourselves the fiction of trying to produce a representational text in which the different arguments of the different theorists are presented, more or less, in their own terms. While this version of textual production on our part may be troubling, as it obscures as much as it reveals, insofar as our own position is never quite declared, our intent is to try to minimize our own mediating voice and focus on the different theorists in their own right by giving clinical examples to demonstrate their claims. The irony, even folly, of attempting to eliminate our own presence from this series on intersubjectivity is not lost on us—and neither is our plea for special circumstances. However, given the growing interest in the intersubjective turn, in order that it not be construed as privileging the emotional authenticity of the two-person exchange, we believe it is absolutely essential to understand the theorists' self-articulated arguments and to keep alive their differences rather than to assimilate the intersubjective perspective as a unified or hegemonic approach. It is in the spirit of keeping alive these differences—itself a crucial commitment of the intersubjective approach—that our somewhat exegetical text should be understood.