Humor and coping with stress: A test under real-life conditions

The relationship between humor and coping with stress was investigated for trainees in a course for combat NCOs in the Israel Defense Forces. Measures of humor through self-report and peer-ratings were administered to 159 soldiers. Coping with stress was assessed through ratings by commanders and peers, and through final course grades. The findings showed that humor as rated by peers (but not by self-report) was positively related to performance under stress. This was especially true for active humor (self-produced as opposed to reactive humor). No differences were found between individuals characterized by self-directed humor and other-directed humor in performance under stress. The implications in terms of humor theories and further research are discussed.     

Upsetting Behavior: Reactions to Personal and Bystander Sexual Harassment Experiences

The current research was designed to examine objective and contextual factors related to the appraisal of potentially sexually harassing situations. Working female participants (n = 208) from a mid-sized southwestern university completed a workplace experiences survey in small groups. The majority of participants were Hispanic/Latina (77.9%). We predicted that characteristics of personal harassment experiences (e.g., number of distinct types of behaviors experienced, frequency, duration) and bystander harassment experiences would contribute independently to how upset women were by their own sexual harassment experiences. Results indicated that characteristics of personal harassment experiences and bystander experiences did predict how upset women were by their own gender harassment and by unwanted sexual attention experiences. Results are discussed in terms of the importance of considering multiple types of workplace stressors (e.g., personal and bystander sexual harassment experiences) and their relation to the appraisal process.     

Intact attentional control of working memory encoding in schizophrenia

This study reports evidence that individuals with schizophrenia (SC) demonstrate intact attentional selection for visual working memory (WM) storage. A group of 62 participants with SC and 55 control participants without SC were studied in a series of 5 experiments that examined the ability to use top-down and bottom-up cues to guide WM encoding, as well as the ability to spontaneously select a subset of representations for storage. Participants with SC exhibited a consistent and robust ability to use selective attention in the control of WM in all 5 experiments, demonstrating a remarkable island of preserved functioning given the broad spectrum of impairments of attention and WM that have been widely reported in those with SC. These findings indicate that attention is not globally impaired in SC and make it possible to delineate more precisely the nature of the specific impairment of attention in this disorder.     

Is Moral Responsibility Essentially Interpersonal? A Reply to Zimmerman

According to Michael Zimmerman, no interpretation of the idea that moral responsibility is essentially interpersonal captures a significant truth. He raises several worries about the Strawsonian view that moral responsibility consists in susceptibility to the reactive attitudes and claims that this view at best supports only an etiolated interpretation of the idea that moral responsibility is essentially interpersonal. He outlines three problems. First, the existence of self-reactive attitudes may be incompatible with the interpersonal nature of moral responsibility. Secondly, Zimmerman questions the significance of the interpersonal nature of moral responsibility, according to the Strawsonian view. Thirdly, he argues that that view may be taken to suggest the wrong kind of priority relation between ‘P is morally responsible’ and ‘it is appropriate to adopt some reactive attitude toward P’. I discuss each of these problems in turn and conclude that Strawsonians can respond to all three problems raised by Zimmerman. The Strawsonian view supports a significant interpretation of the idea that moral responsibility is essentially interpersonal.     

Does Rumination Mediate the Association of Private Prayer,Stress, and Their Interaction with Depression among Christians? A Cross-Sectional Study

Mechanisms underlying significant associations between different types of prayer and depression are unknown. Based on the conceptualization of prayer as stress buffering coping style and the Response Style Theory, we proposed that rumination mediates the association of prayer types and stress with depression. This cross-sectional study (N?=?227 Christians, M_age 41.74, SD 14.82, age range 18–82 years, 76% female) used path modeling to test whether rumination mediated the associations between prayer types and prayer types by stress interactions with depression. Rumination fully mediated the associations of the colloquial and ritual prayer by stress interactions with depressive symptoms, while meditative and petitionary prayer was directly associated with depressive symptoms. Further, petitionary prayer and the ritual prayer by stress interaction were associated with more and not with less rumination and depressive symptoms, respectively. Summarized, first empirical evidence supports an integration of prayer, stress, and rumination into one model of depression. However, the exact nature of their interplay depends on the prayer type. If replicated, our findings allow the integration of prayer into cognitive-behavioral treatment of depression in religious and spiritual clients.     

Effects of feedback reliability on feedback-related brain activity: A feedback valuation account

Adaptive decision making relies on learning from feedback. Because feedback sometimes can be misleading, optimal learning requires that knowledge about the feedback’s reliability be utilized to adjust feedback processing. Although previous research has shown that feedback reliability indeed influences feedback processing, the underlying mechanisms through which this is accomplished remain unclear. Here we propose that feedback processing is adjusted by the adaptive, top-down valuation of feedback. We assume that unreliable feedback is devalued relative to reliable feedback, thus reducing the reward prediction errors that underlie feedback-related brain activity and learning. A crucial prediction of this account is that the effects of feedback reliability are susceptible to contrast effects. That is, the effects of feedback reliability should be enhanced when both reliable and unreliable feedback are experienced within the same context, as compared to when only one level of feedback reliability is experienced. To evaluate this prediction, we measured the event-related potentials elicited by feedback in two experiments in which feedback reliability was varied either within or between blocks. We found that the fronto-central valence effect, a correlate of reward prediction errors during reinforcement learning, was reduced for unreliable feedback. But this result was obtained only when feedback reliability was varied within blocks, thus indicating a contrast effect. This suggests that the adaptive valuation of feedback is one mechanism underlying the effects of feedback reliability on feedback processing.     

Using Scaling to Facilitate Ethical Decision-Making in Family Therapy

Ethical decision-making in family therapy is inherently complex, as it requires therapists to balance competing needs of multiple individuals and subsystems. Scaling offers a potential means of helping facilitate such decision-making, by encouraging attendance to the likely impact of various courses of action on individuals and subsystems as related to each of the core ethical principles underlying psychotherapeutic practice. This article explores the potential use of scaling in family therapists’ ethical decision-making through case examples. Benefits and risks of such an approach are reviewed.     

The Counseling Center Assessment of Psychological Symptoms Distress Index: A pragmatic exploration of general factors to enhance a multidimensional scale

Objective: The authors attempted to develop and validate a general distress index for a multidimensional psychological symptom/outcome measure used in over 300 college counseling centers with more than 100,000 cases annually: the Counseling Center Assessment of Psychological Symptoms (CCAPS). Method: Four models were compared for fit indices (n = 19,247): the existing first-order factor model (without a general factor), a second-order factor model, a bifactor model, and a single factor or “total score” model. In separate clinical and non-clinical samples, concurrent and divergent validity were examined using several well-established measures of psychological symptoms, as well as two-week test–retest and treatment utilization data. Results: Second-order and bifactor models which captured a single “distress” factor both exhibited good fit to the data relative to the baseline and “total score” model. Validity data indicated that factors adequately measured meaningful clinical onstructs. Conclusion: Both the bifactor and second-order models indicated the presence of a “distress index” comprised items across many of the CCAPS subscales. This distress scale has strong applicability for benchmarking the overall severity and complexity of patients at different centers, and can be used to help identify colleges and universities with areas of clinical strength, which can be studied to improve the field. Clinically, the distress index offers a parsimonious and efficient method for clinicians to monitor patients’ progress through treatment.