Psychometric Qualities of Turkish Version of Perseverative Thinking Questionnaire (PTQ)

Repetitive negative thinking (RNT) is an umbrella term that refers to an individual’s tendency to have negative thoughts in an uncontrollable and repetitive manner regardless of their content and temporal focus. RNT is suggested to be a transdiagnostic factor that may be associated with vulnerability for many different psychological disorders. The aim of the present study is to examine the psychometric qualities of Perseverative Thinking Questionnaire (PTQ), which is a scale that assesses non-disorder-specific form of RNT. The data was gathered from 446 Turkish individuals between the ages of 18 and 58 years through a web based data collection method. In addition to PTQ, the participants also completed questionnaires that measure worry, rumination, anxiety, depression, and thought suppression. Two models were tested, and CFA revealed a better fit for the 3-factor model. Results indicated that the scale has satisfactory levels of internal consistency, split-half reliability, and test–retest reliability. Further, correlation analyses showed moderate correlations with measures of worry, rumination, anxiety, and depression; which is indicative of satisfactory levels of both convergent and concurrent validity. In sum, Turkish version of PTQ is a psychometrically sound measure that researchers can utilize in research focusing on transdiagnostic processes.     

The role of honour in interpersonal,intrapersonal and intergroup processes

In this article, we review research in psychology and other related social science fields that has adopted an honor framework to examine intrapersonal, interpersonal, and intergroup processes taking a culture-comparative or individual differences approach. In the sections below, we will first review research on the role of honor in interpersonal processes focusing primarily on interpersonal aggression including in close relationships, non-aggressive ways of responding to threats (e.g., forgiveness), and reciprocity. Next, we move onto reviewing research on the role of honor in intrapersonal processes, specifically in the domains of emotional responses to honor-threatening situations, mental, and physical health. Finally, we review research emerging from social and political psychology and political science that have utilized the honor framework to understand and explain group processes and intergroup relations at different level of analyses (e.g., social groups, nations). Given the limited space, our goal was to emphasize major and emerging areas of research on honor and provide food for thought for future research.     

Children's Ideas About What Can Really Happen: The Impact of Age and Religious Background

Five- to 11-year-old U.S. children, from either a religious or secular background, judged whether story events could really happen. There were four different types of stories: magical stories violating ordinary causal regularities; religious stories also violating ordinary causal regularities but via a divine agent; unusual stories not violating ordinary causal regularities but with an improbable event; and realistic stories not violating ordinary causal regularities and with no improbable event. Overall, children were less likely to judge that religious and magical stories could really happen than unusual and realistic stories although religious children were more likely than secular children to judge that religious stories could really happen. Irrespective of background, children frequently invoked causal regularities in justifying their judgments. Thus, in justifying their conclusion that a story could really happen, children often invoked a causal regularity, whereas in justifying their conclusion that a story could not really happen, they often pointed to the violation of causal regularity. Overall, the findings show that children appraise the likelihood of story events actually happening in light of their beliefs about causal regularities. A religious upbringing does not impact the frequency with which children invoke causal regularities in judging what can happen, even if it does impact the type of causal factors that children endorse.     

The Relation Between Religious Coping,Adjustment to Fertility,Being Affected by Infertility,and Satisfaction with Life in Turkish Women with Infertility

Journal of Religion and Health - Religion has been an important tool in treating the difficulties expereinced by infertile females. This study was conducted to determine the relationship...     

The role of culture in appraisals,emotions and helplessness in response to threats

In honour cultures, such as Turkey, reputation management is emphasised, whereas in dignity cultures such as northern US, self-respect and personal achievements are central. Turkey is also a collectivistic culture, where relationship harmony is as important as reputation management. When Turkish people's reputation is threatened, they may experience an internal conflict between these two motives and display helplessness. The purpose of the present study was to examine how people from Turkey (an honour culture; n = 52) and northern US (a dignity culture; n = 48) would perceive and respond to reputation threats as opposed to self-respect threats. As predicted, Turkish participants anticipated stronger anger, shame, and helplessness in response to reputation threats than self-respect threats, whereas differences were smaller or non-existent in northern US. Moreover, shame was a mediator between appraisal and helplessness for reputation threats in Turkey (shame positively predicted helplessness); anger was a mediator between appraisal and helplessness for self-respect threats in northern US (anger negatively predicted helplessness). These results are novel in their inclusion of helplessness and appraisal theory of emotions when examining responses to threats in honour and dignity cultures.     

In the footsteps of biological motion and multisensory perception: judgments of audiovisual temporal relations are enhanced for upright walkers

Observers judged whether a periodically moving visual display (point-light walker) had the same temporal frequency as a series of auditory beeps that in some cases coincided with the apparent footsteps of the walker. Performance in this multisensory judgment was consistently better for upright point-light walkers than for inverted point-light walkers or scrambled control stimuli, even though the temporal information was the same in the three types of stimuli. The advantage with upright walkers disappeared when the visual "footsteps" were not phase-locked with the auditory events (and instead offset by 50% of the gait cycle). This finding indicates there was some specificity to the naturally experienced multisensory relation, and that temporal perception was not simply better for upright walkers per se. These experiments indicate that the gestalt of visual stimuli can substantially affect multisensory judgments, even in the context of a temporal task (for which audition is often considered dominant). This effect appears to be constrained by the ecological validity of the particular pairings.     

The cultural congruency effect: Culture, regulatory focus, and the effectiveness of gain- vs. loss-framed health messages

The present study contributes a cultural analysis to the literature on the persuasive effects of matching message frame to individuals’ motivational orientations. One experiment examines how members of cultural groups that are likely to differ in their regulatory focus respond to health messages focusing on either the benefits of flossing or the costs of not flossing. White British participants, who had a stronger promotion focus, were more persuaded by the gain-framed message, whereas East-Asian participants, who had a stronger prevention focus, were more persuaded by the loss-framed message. This cultural difference in persuasion was mediated by an interaction between individuals’ self-regulatory focus and type of health message. Thus health messages framed to be culturally congruent led participants to have more positive attitudes and stronger intentions to perform the health behaviors, and the interaction between self-regulatory focus and message frame emerged as the pathway through which the observed cultural difference occurs. Discussion focuses on the integration of individual difference, socio-cultural, and situational factors into models of health persuasion.     

How do we evaluate future gambles? Experimental evidence on path dependency in risky intertemporal choice

This study reports three experiments which demonstrate path dependency in risky intertemporal choice. Consider a lottery to be resolved and paid in a future time period. One can obtain the present value of this lottery in three different ways: (1) eliciting directly the present certainty equivalent (CE) of the future lottery (direct path); (2) eliciting the future CE and then discounting this amount to the present (risk‐time path); and (3) eliciting the present value of the risky prospect and then determining the CE of this current lottery (time‐risk path). Standard rational choice models such as the discounted expected utility model, assume a multiplicative model, where all three methods mentioned above would yield the same value. We conducted three studies to examine if this is the case: Experiments 1 and 2 were based on a set of matching‐task questions and Experiment 3 used a process‐tracing design to analyze the natural sequence of decision making by the subjects. These three studies show that the evaluation of future gambles is path‐dependent. The present values elicited under the time‐risk and direct paths are, on average, higher than those reported under the risk‐time path. In addition, we found evidence for a two‐stage evaluation of risky future prospects: When evaluating a future gamble, individuals first assess the present value of the gamble (time discounting) and then they determine a certainty equivalent (probability discounting). Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.