Agenda 2000 — Social judgment and attitudes: warmer,more social,and less conscious

Developments in social judgment research during the last two decades have broadened the explanatory power of the information processing perspective by paying attention to the social context of human judgment, the importance of ‘warm' cognition, and the role of nonconscious processes. The application of social cognition theorizing to the formation of attitude judgments provided new insights into classic issues of attitude research, suggesting that attitudes may be fruitfully conceptualized as temporary constructions. Implications of these developments, open issues, and potentially fruitful avenues for future research are discussed. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Comparing Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and Systemic Therapy for Social Anxiety Disorder: Randomized Controlled Pilot Trial (SOPHO-CBT/ST)

This randomized controlled trial (RCT) aimed to pilot the newly developed manualized and monitored systemic therapy (ST) for social anxiety disorder (SAD), as compared to manualized and monitored cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). We conducted a prospective multicenter, assessor-blind pilot RCT on 38 outpatients (ICD F40.1; Structured Clinical Interview for DSM (SCID); Liebowitz Social Anxiety Scale, LSAS-SR >30). The primary outcome was level of social anxiety (LSAS-SR) at the end of treatment. A total of 252 persons were screened, and 38 patients were randomized and started therapy (CBT: 20 patients; ST: 18 patients; age: M = 36 years, SD = 14). Within-group, simple-effect intent-to-treat analyses (ITT) showed significant reduction in LSAS-SR (CBT:d = 1.04; ST:d = 1.67), while ITT mixed-design ANOVA demonstrated the advantage of ST (d = 0.81). Per-protocol analyses supported these results. Remission based on reliable change indices also demonstrated significant difference (LSAS-SR: 15% in CBT; 39% in ST;h: 0.550), supported by blind diagnosticians’ ratings of those who completed therapy (SCID; 45% in CBT, 78% in ST,p = .083). No adverse events were reported. CBT and ST both reduced social anxiety, supporting patient improvement with the newly developed ST for SAD; this has yet to be verified in a subsequent confirmatory RCT.     

Effects of perceptual fluency on judgments of truth.

Statements of the form "Osorno is in Chile" were presented in colors that made them easy or difficult to read against a white background and participants judged the truth of the statement. Moderately visible statements were judged as true at chance level, whereas highly visible statements were judged as true significantly above chance level. We conclude that perceptual fluency affects judgments of truth.     

Green Dreams of Reason. Green Nanotechnology Between Visions of Excess and Control

Nanotechnology has recently been identified with principles of sustainability and with a ‘green’ agenda generally. Some maintain that this green dream of nanotechnology is a rather ephemeral societal phenomenon that owes its existence to the campaign ploys of politics and business. This paper argues that deeper lying societal and cognitive structures are at work here that complement or even substantiate in some sense the seemingly manipulative saying of a greening of nanotechnologies. Taking seriously the concept of ‘green nano’, this paper examines the common ground between sustainability discourse and the discourse of nanotechnology. Green nanotechnology is understood as a boundary concept in which disparate discourses and concepts join together. The primary concern of the paper is to show that nanodiscourse and ecodiscourse share visions of control and of excess. Both ecotechnology and nanotechnology accept and incorporate arguments about limited growth, and each develops strategies of control—be it through a new-found precision in the control of material flows or through greater efficiency in product design.     

How extending your middle finger affects your perception of others: Learned movements influence concept accessibility

Body movements both express and influence how people feel and think. Conceptualizations of this bidirectional influence assume that movement-concept associations can be innate or learned, although evidence for learned associations remained ambiguous. Providing a conservative test of learned movement-concept associations, two studies investigate the influence of culture-specific body movements, which involve an arbitrary relationship between movements and associated concepts. Paralleling the influence of hostility primes, extending the middle finger influenced the interpretation of ambiguously aggressive behaviors as hostile, but did not influence unrelated trait judgments (Study 1). Paralleling the effects of global evaluative primes, upward extension of the thumb resulted in more positive evaluations of the same target along all trait dimensions and higher liking of the target (Study 2).     

Argumentation and Explanation in Conceptual Change: Indications From Protocol Analyses of Peer-to-Peer Dialog

In this paper we attempt to identify which peer collaboration characteristics may be accountable for conceptual change through interaction. We focus on different socio-cognitive aspects of the peer dialog and relate these with learning gains on the dyadic as well as the individual level. The scientific topic that was used for this study concerns natural selection, a topic for which students' intuitive conceptions have been shown to be particularly robust. Learning tasks were designed according to the socio-cognitive conflict instructional paradigm. After receiving a short instructional intervention on natural selection, paired students were asked to collaboratively construct explanations for certain evolutionary phenomena while engaging in dialectical argumentation. Two quantitative coding schemes were developed, each with a different granularity. The first assessed discrete dialog moves that pertained to dialectical argumentation and to consensual explanation development. The second scheme characterized the dialog as a whole on a number of socio-cognitive dimensions. Results from analyses on the dyadic as well as the individual level revealed that the engagement in dialectical argumentation predicted conceptual learning gains, whereas consensual explanation development did not. These findings open up new venues for research on the mechanisms of learning in and from peer collaboration.     

Financial aspirations,financial success,and overall life satisfaction: who? and how?

Nickerson et al. (2003, Psychological Science 14, pp. 531–536) demonstrated in a longitudinal study that the negative relation between aspirations for financial success and subjective well-being found by other researchers was mitigated by high household income. The present study first refined the analysis in Nickerson et al. (2003) and then explored two additional issues: (a) who aspires to financial success? and (b) how is financial success achieved? Analysis indicated that individuals with strong financial aspirations are socially inclined, confident, ambitious, politically conservative, traditional, conventional, and relatively less able academically, but not psychologically distressed. Financial success is achieved via the job and, for women only, via marriage. Financial aspirations influence job income both by influencing choice of occupation and by influencing job income within occupation; however, achieving financial success depends on having the personal resources to do so. Women with strong financial aspirations tend to marry for money (or money-making potential) regardless of their work status; men with strong financial aspirations do not.     

Context effects in political judgement: assimilation and contrast as a function of categorization processes

Two experiments demonstrate that thinking about a given politician may result in assimilation as well as contrast effects in evolutions of the politician's party. In two experiments, assimilation effects were observed when an experimental categorization task elicited the inclusion of a highly respected politician in the representation formed of his party, whereas contrast effects were observed when the categorization task elicited his exclusion from the representation, with the control group falling in between. Hence, the same information may elicit assimilation as well as contrast effects, depending on its use in mental construal. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Die Zukunft gestalten im Angesicht der Vergangenheit

We report on the 4th Nazareth Conference with Jewish and German participants, most of whom are psychoanalysts. As Herman Beland has observed, these Conferences are intended to be “something like a self-experiment by Germans and Israelis to become, in the presence of the other group, aware of the unconscious identity of both people after the Holocaust.” There is still a widespread inability to mourn for the consequences of the terrible events in the years between 1933 and 1945 and deal satisfactorily with their effects. None of the groups, neither the German, nor the Israeli / Jewish, can do their own inner work without the other. For this reason, the method chosen as appropriate was the Tavistock-style “group relations conference”. This approach was developed by the Institute of Human Relations in London and does not focus on the individual’s behaviour but uses large and small groups to investigate group processes in the here and now. -The present work describes, among other things, the unexpectedly strong resistance towards changes of the conscious and unconscious inner images both of one’s own group and of the other. This process led to a feeling of hopelessness and paralysis within the German group that, due to the presence of the Jewish group, we could not avoid. For the Germans, it was hard to bear and observe the mutually shared history. Jewish participants were not able to accept their own German–Austrian childhood memories as a part of their own identity and connect them to the Germans. Each participant across the groups experienced the fantasy of destruction and the unfruitful effects of division. We had to feel how much the fate of the Germans and the Jews were interlocked to understand the participants’ tensions and efforts for opening new pathways.