Relational and Social Aggression and Reflective Processing in a University Sample

This study examined whether the dimension of reflective processing (e.g., deep and elaborative processing) was connected to the use of relational aggressions, social aggression, or both. A convenience sample of 629 college students (66% female, 91.6% White) was surveyed to ascertain the relation between self-reported relational and social aggression and deep and elaborative processing. The overall multivariate regression model was significant, Wilks’s λ = .12, F(4, 2162) = 1010.80, p < .001. Univariate results were used to show that the two predictors (relational and social aggression) significantly and strongly positively predicted the use of deep processing, R² = .81, p < .001, as well as the use of elaborative processing, R² = .87, p < .001. In summary, higher levels of social and relational aggression were related to higher levels of deep and elaborative processing. Implications for these findings are presented.     

Theravada Buddhism and Roman Catholicism on the Moral Permissibility of Palliative Sedation: A Blurred Demarcation Line

Journal of Religion and Health - Although Theravada Buddhism and Roman Catholicism agree on the moral justification for palliative sedation, they differ on the premises underlying the...     

Be a Mom: Formative Evaluation of a Web-Based Psychological Intervention to Prevent Postpartum Depression

A formative evaluation (consisting of two phases: a scoping literature review and a focus group with mental health professionals) was conducted to inform the design of a web-based intervention to prevent postpartum depression, in terms of its characteristics and content: the Be a Mom program. The results showed that the web-based intervention should be short-term, delivered postnatally, and grounded in cognitive-behavior therapy principles. Moreover, the intervention should include weekly sessions targeting basic contents: motherhood changes, reorganizations and emotional experience; cognitions, self-criticism, and self-compassion; parenting values, social support, and assertive communication skills; couple relationship, negotiation and conflict resolution skills; and postpartum depression signs and professional help-seeking. These results may improve the Be a Mom’s adequacy, implementation success, and effectiveness.     

Manipulating informational constraints shapes movement reorganization in interceptive actions

Movement organization of cricket batters' actions was analyzed under three distinct experimental task constraints: a representative condition of a practice context in which the batters batted against a "live" bowler, a ball projection machine, and a near life-size video simulation of a bowler. Results showed that each distinct set of task constraints led to significant variations in the patterns of movement control. Removal of advanced information sources from a bowler's actions when the batters faced the ball projection machine caused significant delays in movement initiation, resulting in reduced peak bat swing velocities and a reduction in the quality of bat-ball contact, when compared with batting against a "live" bowler. When responding to a two-dimensional video simulation, batters were able to use information from the bowlers' action, enabling fidelity of initial behavioral responses consistent with the task of batting against a "live" bowler. However, without interceptive task requirements or actual ball flight information, significant variations in downswing initiation timing and peak bat velocities were demonstrated. Findings stress the need for representative experimental and learning designs in fast ball sports for developing performers.     

Telling what they want to know: participants tailor causal attributions to researchers' interests

Based on a conversational analysis of experimental procedures and consistent with the principle of relevance, we predicted that participants' verbal responses will be influenced by their tacit inferences about the researcher's epistemic goals, derived from their knowledge of the researcher's academic affiliation. We tested this prediction in a core area of social‐personality and cultural psychology, causal attribution. University students provided causal attributions about mass murder cases, while the questionnaire identified the researcher either as a social scientist or a personality psychologist. The results indicated that attributions were overall more situational than dispositional, and as predicted, this main effect was qualified by an interaction between conversational cue and type of attribution. Thus, participants gave relatively more situational explanations when the letterhead of the questionnaire identified the researcher as a social scientist compared to when the researcher was identified as a personality psychologist. The reverse pattern emerged for dispositional attributions. Methodological and conceptual implications are discussed. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Narrative Practices and Positive Aging: A Reflection about Life Celebration in a Group of Old Women

The main objective of this article is to address the impact of narrative practices in life celebration after the age of 80 and in the co-construction of a community-positive future. We share here an exploratory reflection about the narratives of a group of older women integrated in a community project. The Wednesday Tea Project (Chá das Quartas) has been ongoing for 4 years, and involves a group of old women experiencing high levels of loneliness and isolation in their small village in Portugal. The Wednesday Tea Project is based on positive psychology methodologies and consists of ritualized sessions that encourage participatory group dynamics. To describe how this project has highlighted the benefits of narrative practices, we utilized a series of scaffolding questions. Some of the most relevant outcomes of this project are: (a) the deconstruction of the dominant social discourse; (b) the publication of a book; (c) the reduction of loneliness feelings by re-membering significant figures; and (d) new levels of action both to women and the community as a consequence of a re-authoring process. Narrative practices seem to have contributed to the consolidation of all time dimensions, giving these women the opportunity to celebrate life after the age of 80, while also allowing the community to be part of and to benefit from the process. A reflection about the contributions of this article to a paradigm change toward positive aging is presented.     

Cognitive Pathways to Belief in Karma and Belief in God

Supernatural beliefs are ubiquitous around the world, and mounting evidence indicates that these beliefs partly rely on intuitive, cross-culturally recurrent cognitive processes. Specifically, past research has focused on humans' intuitive tendency to perceive minds as part of the cognitive foundations of belief in a personified God—an agentic, morally concerned supernatural entity. However, much less is known about belief in karma—another culturally widespread but ostensibly non-agentic supernatural entity reflecting ethical causation across reincarnations. In two studies and four high-powered samples, including mostly Christian Canadians and mostly Hindu Indians (Study 1, N = 2,006) and mostly Christian Americans and Singaporean Buddhists (Study 2, N = 1,752), we provide the first systematic empirical investigation of the cognitive intuitions underlying various forms of belief in karma. We used path analyses to (a) replicate tests of the previously documented cognitive predictors of belief in God, (b) test whether this same network of variables predicts belief in karma, and (c) examine the relative contributions of cognitive and cultural variables to both sets of beliefs. We found that cognitive tendencies toward intuitive thinking, mentalizing, dualism, and teleological thinking predicted a variety of beliefs about karma—including morally laden, non-agentic, and agentic conceptualizations—above and beyond the variability explained by cultural learning about karma across cultures. These results provide further evidence for an independent role for both culture and cognition in supporting diverse types of supernatural beliefs in distinct cultural contexts.     

Like a camera in the sky? Thinking about God increases public self-awareness and socially desirable responding

Believers describe God as a strategic social agent who perceives human thoughts and actions. Thinking about God therefore might make believers feel as if their behavior is being monitored, a possibility we call the supernatural monitoring hypothesis. Three studies offered new and converging empirical support for this hypothesis using two variables that are sensitive to perceived social surveillance: public self-awareness and socially desirable responding. For believers, the effect of an explicit God prime on public self-awareness was comparable to the effect of thinking about how other people view oneself (Experiment 1). An implicit God concepts prime increased public self-awareness (Experiment 2) and socially desirable responding (Experiment 3) among believers. These studies offer the first direct evidence that thinking of God triggers perceived social surveillance.     

The interaction between surface color and color knowledge: behavioral and electrophysiological evidence

In this study, we used event-related potentials (ERPs) to evaluate the contribution of surface color and color knowledge information in object identification. We constructed two color-object verification tasks - a surface and a knowledge verification task - using high color diagnostic objects; both typical and atypical color versions of the same object were presented. Continuous electroencephalogram was recorded from 26 subjects. A cluster randomization procedure was used to explore the differences between typical and atypical color objects in each task. In the color knowledge task, we found two significant clusters that were consistent with the N350 and late positive complex (LPC) effects. Atypical color objects elicited more negative ERPs compared to typical color objects. The color effect found in the N350 time window suggests that surface color is an important cue that facilitates the selection of a stored object representation from long-term memory. Moreover, the observed LPC effect suggests that surface color activates associated semantic knowledge about the object, including color knowledge representations. We did not find any significant differences between typical and atypical color objects in the surface color verification task, which indicates that there is little contribution of color knowledge to resolve the surface color verification. Our main results suggest that surface color is an important visual cue that triggers color knowledge, thereby facilitating object identification.