Assessing preference for types of social interaction

To date, few researchers have evaluated methods for assessing preference for social interactions. Due to concerns that commonly used stimulus preference assessment methods may be inappropriate, or at least cumbersome, for the assessment of social reinforcers, we developed and evaluated a new method of assessing preference for social interactions. A social interaction preference assessment (SIPA) and a concurrent operant reinforcer assessment were conducted with five participants diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder. A differentially preferred and reinforcing social interaction was identified for all five participants. The SIPA procedures, results, and the implications of these results are discussed.     

Cognitive reappraisal attenuates the association between depressive symptoms and emotional response to stress during adolescence

Depression is associated with increased emotional response to stress. This is especially the case during the developmental period of adolescence. Cognitive reappraisal is an effective emotion regulation strategy that has been shown to reduce the impact of emotional response on psychopathology. However, less is known about whether cognitive reappraisal impacts the relationship between depressive symptoms and emotional responses, and whether its effects are specific to emotional reactivity or emotional recovery. The current study examined whether cognitive reappraisal moderated the relationship between depressive symptoms and trait or state measures of emotional reactivity and recovery. A community sample of 127 adolescents (M-age?=?15.28; 49% female, 47% Caucasian), at an age of risk for depression, completed self-report measures of trait emotional responding and depressive symptoms. In addition, they completed an in vivo social stress task and were assessed on state emotional reactivity and recovery from the stressor. Findings suggested that cognitive reappraisal was associated with an attenuated impact of depressive symptoms on trait and state emotional recovery. These results provide evidence that cognitive reappraisal may be an effective strategy for improving some aspects of emotional responding in relation to depressive symptoms among adolescents.     

Helping Those Who Help Themselves: Does Counseling Enhance Retention?

This study examined how academic distress changed over the course of counseling and predicted retention. The sample comprised students receiving services at the campus counseling center (n = 404), students from a psychology department subject pool (n = 311), and students from the general campus population (n = 75,748). The analyses performed included t test, analysis of covariance, chi‐square test, and logistical regression. The results suggested that students whose academic distress did not decrease had lower retention rates than both clients whose academic distress improved and the general student body.     

Technological advances in the assessment of impulse control in offenders: A systematic review

Deficits in impulse control have been linked to criminal offending, risk of recidivism, and other maladaptive behaviours relevant to the criminal justice system (e.g. substance use). Impulse control can be conceptualized as encompassing the broad domains of response inhibition and impulsive/risky decision‐making. Advancements in technology have led to the development of computerized behavioural measures to assess performance in these domains, such as go/no‐go and delay discounting tasks. Despite a relatively large literature examining these tasks in offenders, findings are not universally consistent. This systematic review aims to synthesize the literature using computerized neurocognitive tasks to assess two domains of impulse control in offenders: response inhibition and impulsive/risky decision‐making. The review included 28 studies from diverse geographic locations, settings, and offender populations. The results largely support the general conclusion that offenders exhibit deficits in impulse control compared with non‐offenders, with studies of response inhibition more consistently reporting differences than studies using impulsive and risky decision‐making tasks. Findings are discussed in the context of contemporary neuroimaging research emphasizing dysfunction in prefrontal cortex as a key contributor to impulse control deficits in offenders.     

Gritting their teeth to close the sale: the positive effect of salesperson grit on job satisfaction and performance

This research is the first to examine the effect of “grit” – defined here as perseverance in pursuit of long-term goals – on salesperson performance and job satisfaction in a business-to-business (B2B) sales context. While more commonly studied in the psychology and education literatures, grit has heretofore been underexplored in sales research, a notable omission given its importance in predicting performance outcomes across multiple domains. In response, we demonstrate that gritty salespeople perform better and enjoy greater job satisfaction than their less gritty counterparts. Moreover, we show that competitiveness and self-efficacy help to develop grit and reveal important moderating effects; grit is highest when salespeople are self-efficacious and socially astute. Moreover, the results also suggest that need for power attenuates the positive effect of grit on performance, revealing a potential “dark side” of grit. We then provide some future research ideas involving grit in an effort to encourage further exploration of this construct in sales research. Finally, we conclude by offering cautions to future researchers as they decide whether to examine this interesting construct in a sales context.     

Comparing memory skill maintenance across the life span: preservation in adults, increase in children

The authors examined life-span differences in the maintenance of skilled episodic memory performance by assessing 100 individuals (10 -11, 12-13, 21-26, and 66-79 years old) 11 months after termination of an intensive multisession mnemonic training program (Y. Brehmer, S.-C. Li, V. Müller, T. von Oertzen, & U. Lindenberger, 2007). Skill maintenance was tested in 2 follow-up sessions, the first without and the second with mnemonic reinstruction. Younger and older adults' average performance levels were stable across time. In contrast, both younger and older children's memory performance improved beyond originally attained levels. Older adults' performance improved from the first to the second follow-up session, presumably profiting from instruction-induced skill reactivation. Results suggest that (a) skill maintenance is largely intact in healthy older adults, (b) older adults need environmental support to fully reactivate their former skill levels (cf. F. I. M. Craik, 1983), and (c) children adapt a skill learned 11 months ago to their increasing cognitive capabilities.     

Personality as a Prospective Vulnerability to Dysphoric Symptoms Among College Students: Proposed Mechanisms

Personality and psychopathology have long been associated; however, the mechanisms that account for this link are not well understood. Stress generation and cognitive vulnerability are examined as potential mechanisms to explain the association between negative emotionality and dysphoria. To evaluate these mechanisms, college students completed measures of personality, dysfunctional attitudes, negative cognitive style, dysphoric symptoms, and negative events. Two years later the same students reported on the occurrence of negative events and levels of dysphoric symptoms that they had experienced over the 2-year follow-up period. Consistent with hypotheses, negative emotionality predicted prospective increases in dysphoric symptoms and the generation of more stressors over time. Both dysfunctional attitudes and negative cognitive style interacted with these additional stressors to predict prospective elevations in dysphoria, and these cognitive vulnerability–stress components partially mediated the association between negative emotionality and future elevations of dysphoric symptoms.

How do constraints on leaving a marriage affect behavior within the marriage?

Like relationship satisfaction, constraints on leaving a relationship have been described as a component of global commitment. But do constraints increase or decrease efforts to maintain the relationship? To address this question, the authors of the current article describe 3 independent studies of spouses and married couples. Across all studies, wives who perceived more constraints on leaving the marriage exhibited lower levels of negative behavior only when their husbands were relatively unconstrained. In Study 3, this association was especially pronounced among less satisfied wives. In Study 2, spouses' perceived constraint also interacted to predict husbands' behavior, but in the opposite direction: Husbands who perceived more constraints behaved less negatively when their wives were similarly constrained but more negatively when their wives were less constrained. These results highlight differences in behavior between couples who persist in marriage because they desire to and those who endure because they have to, raising questions about measures of global commitment that obscure these distinctions. They also highlight the need for a dyadic perspective on the forces that keep relationships together.     

Guided saccades modulate face- and body-sensitive activation in the occipitotemporal cortex during social perception

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has identified distinct brain regions in ventral occipitotemporal cortex (VOTC) and lateral occipitotemporal cortex (LOTC) that are differentially activated by pictures of faces and bodies. Recent work from our laboratory has shown that the strong LOTC activation evoked by bodies in which the face is occluded is attenuated when the occlusion is removed. We hypothesized that this attenuation may occur because subjects preferentially fixate upon faces when present in the scene. Here, we experimentally manipulated subjects’ fixations while they viewed a static picture of a character whose face, hand, and torso were continuously visible throughout each run. The subject’s saccades and fixations were guided by a small fixation cross that made discrete jumps to a new location every 500 ms. Subjects were instructed to follow the fixation cross and make a button press whenever it changed size. In a series of blocks, the fixation cross shifted from locations on the face, on the hand, and to locations on a background image of a phase-scrambled face. In a second study, the fixation cross moved similarly, but the hand locations were changed to locations along the character’s body or torso. A localizer task was used to identify face- and body-sensitive regions of LOTC. Body-sensitive regions were strongly activated when the subjects’ saccades were guided over the character’s torso relative to when the saccades were guided over the character’s face. Little to no activity occurred in the body-sensitive region of LOTC when the subjects’ saccades were guided over the character’s hand. The localizer task was unable to differentiate body-sensitive regions in lateral VOTC from face-sensitive regions, or body-sensitive regions in medial VOTC from flower-sensitive regions. Guided saccades over the body strongly activated both lateral and medial VOTC. These results provide new insights into the function of body-sensitive visual areas in both LOTC and VOTC, and illustrate the potential confounding influence of uncontrolled eye movements for neuroimaging studies of social perception.