Attribution-based motivation treatment efficacy in an online learning environment for students who differ in cognitive elaboration

Attribution-based motivation treatments can boost performance in competitive achievement settings (Perry and Hamm 2017), yet their efficacy relative to mediating processes and affect-based treatments remains largely unexamined. In a two-semester, pre-post, randomized treatment study (n?=?806), attributional retraining (AR) and stress-reduction (SR) treatments were administered in an online learning environment to first-year college students who differed in cognitive elaboration (low, high). Low elaborators who received AR outperformed their SR peers by nearly a letter grade on a class test assessed 5 months post-treatment. Path analysis revealed this AR-performance linkage was mediated by causal attributions, perceived control, and positive and negative achievement emotions in a hypothesized causal sequence. Results advance the literature by showing AR (vs. SR) improved performance indirectly via cognitive and affective process variables specified by Weiner’s (1985a, 2012) attribution theory of motivation and emotion.     

GENETIC ENGINEERING AND THE SACRED

Abstract. Genetic engineering of life forms could well have a profound effect upon our sense of the sacred. Integrating the experience of the sacred as George Bataille does, we can characterize it as a phenomenological encounter with prelinguistic, noncategoreal experience. This view of the sacred is similar to Friedrich Nietzsche's Dionysian experience or Rudolf Otto's mysterium tremendum and diminishes one's sense of self. It seems similar to the eighteenth‐century aesthetic categorization of “the sublime.” Despite the dominant rational approach to religiosity in the United States, intimations of this experience persist in popular culture. What possible relationship does genetic engineering have to this allegedly inevitable and profound experience? If certain modifications of life occur, they are likely to create such an experience of the sacred in us. In principle, we can now resurrect the mammoth or even create beings designed to directly potentiate our experience of the numinous such as satyrs or centaurs. The creation of such beings could become an art form associated with awaking the sacred, in turn appropriated by religion, as art has always been. Such experimentation, though morally questionable, is probably inevitable.     

Honesty doesn’t Always Pay – The Role of Honesty of Accounts for Success made in an Educational Setting in Inferences of Modesty and Arrogance

Previous research has documented that attributional information contained in causal accounts for success induce impressions of arrogance and modesty. The research further examined the role of accounts as well as level of success when perceivers know the real reason for success. Two studies of university students revealed that honesty strongly decreases arrogance and increases modesty in the case of effort accounts, and not in situations of communicated ability. In addition, honesty was determined not only by the truth value of an account but also by the extent to which the account induced impressions of arrogance and modesty. The present findings provide further understanding of the link between attributional information and social judgments.     

Effect of Political Positioning on Explanations of Delinquency: An Experimental Study of Social Differentiation and Representation

Why and under what conditions do subjects from diverse political orientations tend to offer different explanations of a social problem? Past studies have found evidence of a connection between political orientations and explanations of delinquency, for example. However, observing such differences among subjects with diverse political orientations is not enough to prove the existence of an organic link between social differentiation and the representations of delinquency. The aim of this paper is to provide an experimental proof of such a link. The results show that: (a) right‐wing and left‐wing subjects tend to offer different types of explanations of delinquency, but they refer to several common organizing principles; (b) divergence increases when social comparison between groups is activated; (c) differences are bigger if this comparison induces a discrimination; (d) the bigger the differences the more likely are the groups to resort to their ideological principles. Results are discussed in terms of theoretical, methodological, deontological, and practical implications.     

A Systematic Review of Neurocognitive Functioning in Behçet’s Disease

Neuropsychology Review - Behçet’s disease (BD) is a vascular, inflammatory multisystem disorder with neuro-Behçet’s (NBD) diagnosed in a subset of patients with neurological...     

Optimal response vigor and choice under non-stationary outcome values

Psychonomic Bulletin & Review - Within a rational framework, a decision-maker selects actions based on the reward-maximization principle, which stipulates that they acquire outcomes with the...     

Inward, Outward, Upward Prayer: Scale Reliability and Validation

This study provides support for a model that conceptualizes prayers as the means to establish cognitive connections in three directions: inward (self-connection); outward (human-human connection); and upward (human-divine connections). A confirmatory factor analysis demonstrates a single general prayer factor divisible into three subfactors that are in turn comprised of eight discrete scales. Measures of general religiosity, the need for structure, religious styles of coping, well-being, life-satisfaction, and belief in the paranormal provide evidence of convergent and divergent validity for the theory of prayer as a mechanism for inward, outward, and upward connections.