Perfectionism in African American students: relationship to racial identity, GPA, self-esteem, and depression

This study examined 219 African American college students at predominantly White universities using the constructs of perfectionism, academic achievement, self-esteem, depression, and racial identity. Cluster analysis was performed using the Almost Perfect Scale-Revised (APS-R), which yielded three clusters that represented adaptive perfectionists, maladaptive perfectionists, and nonperfectionists. These three groups were compared on their scores on the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale (RSES), the Center for Epidemiological Studies-Depression Scale (CES-D), the Cross Racial Identity Scale (CRIS), and Grade Point Average (GPA). Adaptive perfectionists reported higher self-esteem and lower depression scores than both the nonperfectionists and maladaptive perfectionists. Adaptive perfectionists had higher GPAs than nonperfectionists. On the racial identity scales, maladaptive perfectionists had higher scores on Pre-Encounter Self Hatred and Immersion-Emersion Anti-White subscales than adaptive perfectionists. The cultural and counseling implications of this study are discussed and integrated. Finally, recommendations are made for future studies of African American college students and perfectionism.     

Producing and recognizing words with two pronunciation variants: evidence from novel schwa words

This study examined the lexical representations and psycholinguistic mechanisms underlying the production and recognition of novel words with two pronunciation variants in French. Participants first learned novel schwa words (e.g., /??nyk/), which varied in their alternating status (i.e., whether these words were learned with one or two variants) and, for alternating words, in the frequency of their variants. They were then tested in picture-naming (free or induced) and recognition memory tasks (i.e., deciding whether spoken items were learned during the experiment or not). Results for free naming show an influence of variant frequency on responses, more frequent variants being produced more often. Moreover, our data show an effect of the alternating status of the novel words on naming latencies, with longer latencies for alternating than for nonalternating novel words. These induced naming results suggest that both variants are stored as lexical entries and compete during the lexeme selection process. Results for recognition show an effect of variant frequency on reaction times and no effect of variant type (i.e., schwa versus reduced variant). Taken together, our findings suggest that participants both comprehend and produce novel French schwa words using two lexical representations, one for each variant.     

Humor styles impact the relationship between symptoms of social anxiety and depression

Recent research suggests that examining humor styles may contribute to our understanding of clinical problems, such as risk and resiliency. The goal of the current study was to examine whether humor styles moderate the association between social anxiety and depressive symptoms in an unselected sample. Three-hundred and six participants (66% female) at a large Southern US university completed self-report measures of humor styles and symptoms of social anxiety and depression. Regression analyses suggested that affiliative and self-defeating humor styles individually moderated the relationship between social anxiety and depressive symptoms. Clinical implications regarding the monitoring of humor use as a means of understanding the maintenance of depressive symptoms among socially anxious individuals are discussed.     

Biases in evaluation of neutral words due to motor compatibility effect

This study aims to demonstrate the effect of action fluency on emotional evaluation, specifically to show that neutral words can be evaluated positively or negatively depending on motor activity and evaluative setting. Right-handers naturally tend to associate positive (negative) valence to the right (left) part of space (Casasanto, 2009). We extend these associations to lateralized behaviors by studying the combined effect of motor fluency of lateral arm movements and the evaluative scale on the subjective evaluation of neutral words. Three experiments evidenced that, for right-handers, the realization of fluent rightward arm movements and the use of an evaluative scale congruent with their valence/laterality associations (left negative, right positive) led to a positive evaluation of neutral words, while non-fluent leftward movements and an incongruent scale led to a negative evaluation. This study demonstrates that emotion–action associations are experience-based, and influenced by functional and situational constraints.     

The Validity of the Role Construct Repertory Test as a Measure of Sexual Identification

Although the majority of research on Therapeutic Assessment (TA) discusses the application of TA in research or private practice settings, we found that the model could be applied in a community mental health setting. We argue that when implementing this model with racially diverse, low socioeconomic status children, it is essential to integrate issues of class, privilege, and race into the assessment process. A case is presented that illuminates the specific concerns and struggles of adapting this model to a community psychology population. This analysis includes the interface with systems, placement stability, and consideration of culturally responsible treatment. We also demonstrate how the support of a treatment team helps the individual clinician process and integrate the levels of trauma and pain with which these families present.     

Concept empiricism, content, and compositionality

Concepts are the constituents of thoughts. Therefore, concepts are vital to any theory of cognition. However, despite their widely accepted importance, there is little consensus about the nature and origin of concepts. Thanks to the work of Lawrence Barsalou, Jesse Prinz and others concept empiricism has been gaining momentum within the philosophy and psychology literature. Concept empiricism maintains that all concepts are copies, or combinations of copies, of perceptual representations—that is, all concepts are couched in the codes of perceptual representation systems. It is widely agreed that any satisfactory theory of concepts must account for how concepts semantically compose (the compositionality requirement) and explain how their intentional content is determined (the content determination requirement). In this paper, I argue that concept empiricism has serious problems satisfying these two requirements. Therefore, although stored perceptual representations may facilitate some traditionally conceptual tasks, concepts should not be identified with copies of perceptual representations.     

The benefits of autonomy support for adolescents with severe emotional and behavioral problems

The benefits of autonomy support in the domain of education have been well established within the general population, but have yet to be demonstrated within clinical populations. The present study investigated the benefits of an autonomy-supportive interpersonal style on teenage girls’ internalization of a tedious clinical workshop and their subjective experience during this task. Participants were female teenagers placed in a social rehabilitation center for their severe emotional and behavioral problems (n = 29). An experimental design allowed comparing the impact of learning a tedious, but important workshop with or without autonomy support on internalization and experiential outcomes. Results demonstrate that autonomy support leads to higher perceived task’s value, task liking as well as less negative affect compared to a condition without autonomy-support. Participants in the autonomy-supportive condition also perceived the instructor as more competent. By uncovering benefits of autonomy support to a clinical population of adolescents, the present study supports self-determination theory’s tenet that the benefits of autonomy support are universal.     

The development and analysis of tutorial dialogues in AutoTutor Lite

The goal of intelligent tutoring systems (ITS) that interact in natural language is to emulate the benefits that a well-trained human tutor provides to students, by interpreting student answers and appropriately responding in order to encourage elaboration. BRCA Gist is an ITS developed using AutoTutor Lite, a Web-based version of AutoTutor. Fuzzy-trace theory theoretically motivated the development of BRCA Gist, which engages people in tutorial dialogues to teach them about genetic breast cancer risk. We describe an empirical method to create tutorial dialogues and fine-tune the calibration of BRCA Gist’s semantic processing engine without a team of computer scientists. We created five interactive dialogues centered on pedagogic questions such as “What should someone do if she receives a positive result for genetic risk of breast cancer?” This method involved an iterative refinement process of repeated testing with different texts and successively making adjustments to the tutor’s expectations and settings in order to improve performance. The goal of this method was to enable BRCA Gist to interpret and respond to answers in a manner that best facilitated learning. We developed a method to analyze the efficacy of the tutor’s dialogues. We found that BRCA Gist’s assessment of participants’ answers was highly correlated with the quality of the answers found by trained human judges using a reliable rubric. The dialogue quality between users and BRCA Gist predicted performance on a breast cancer risk knowledge test completed after exposure to the tutor. The appropriateness of BRCA Gist’s feedback also predicted the quality of answers and breast cancer risk knowledge test scores.     

Floral guidance of learning a preference for symmetry by bumblebees

This study examines the mechanism underlying one way in which bumblebees are known to develop a preference for symmetric patterns: through prior non-differential reinforcement on simple patterns (black discs and white discs). In three experiments, bees were given a choice among symmetric and asymmetric black-and-white non-rewarding patterns presented at the ends of corridors in a radial maze. Experimental groups had prior rewarded non-discrimination training on white patterns and black patterns, while control groups had no pre-test experience outside the colony. No preference for symmetry was obtained for any of the control groups. Prior training with circular patterns highlighting a horizontal axis of symmetry led to a specific subsequent preference for horizontal over vertical symmetry, while training with a vertical axis abolished this effect. Circles highlighting both axes created a general avoidance of asymmetry in favour of symmetric patterns with vertical, horizontal or both axes of symmetry. Training with plain circles, but not with deformed circles, led to a preference for symmetry: there was no evidence that the preference emerged just by virtue of having attention drawn away from irrelevant pattern differences. Our results point to a preference for symmetry developing gradually through first learning to extract an axis of symmetry from simple patterns and subsequently recognizing that axis in new patterns. They highlight the importance of continued learning through non-differential reinforcement by skilled foragers. Floral guides can function not only to guide pollinators to the source of reward but also to highlight an axis of symmetry for use in subsequent floral encounters.     

Faces elicit different scanning patterns depending on task demands

Eye movements were recorded while participants discriminated upright and inverted faces that differed with respect to either configural or featural information. Two hypotheses were examined: (1) whether featural and configural information processing elicit different scanning patterns; (2) whether fixations on a specific region of the face dominate scanning patterns. Results from two experiments were compared to examine whether participants’ prior knowledge of the kind of information that would be relevant for the task (i.e., configural vs featural) influences eye movements. In Experiment 1, featural and configural discrimination trials were presented in random order such that participants were unaware of the information that would be relevant on any given trial. In Experiment 2, featural and configural discrimination trials were blocked and participants were informed of the nature of the discriminations. The results of both experiments suggest that faces elicit different scanning patterns depending on task demands. When participants were unaware of the nature of the information relevant for the task at hand, face processing was dominated by attention to the eyes. When participants were aware that relational information was relevant, scanning was dominated by fixations to the center of the face. We conclude that faces elicit scanning strategies that are driven by task demands.