The yellow brick road and the emerald city: benefit finding, positive reappraisal coping and posttraumatic growth in women with early-stage breast cancer.

Predictors and outcomes of benefit finding, positive reappraisal coping, and posttraumatic growth were examined using interviews and questionnaires from a longitudinal study of women with early-stage breast cancer followed from primary medical treatment completion to 3 (n=92) and 12 months (n=60) later. Most women (83%) reported at least 1 benefit of their breast cancer experience. Benefit finding (i.e., identification of benefits, number of benefits), positive reappraisal coping, and posttraumatic growth had distinct significant predictors. Positive reappraisal coping at study entry predicted positive mood and perceived health at 3 and 12 months and posttraumatic growth at 12 months, whereas benefit finding did not predict any outcome. Findings suggest that benefit finding, positive reappraisal coping, and posttraumatic growth are related, but distinct, constructs.     

Social influences on cognitive processing in enacted social support: effects on receivers’ cognitive appraisals,emotion, and affiliation

Background and objectives. Social support is linked with psychological health, but its mechanisms are unclear. We examined supporters’ influence on recipients’ cognitive processing as a mechanism of effects of support on outcomes associated with depression.

Design/methods. 2?×?2 between-subjects experiment. 147 participants (1) experienced a negative event (false feedback); (2) received social support modeling one of two contrasting cognitive processing modes (abstract/evaluative or concrete/experiential); (3) generated explanations for the event, later coded for processing mode and internal/external causal attribution; and (4) reported on emotion, perceptions of self and future, and social affiliation. To examine relational effects, half of participants were led to perceive the supporter as similar to themselves via a shared birthday manipulation.

Results. Support condition influenced participants’ processing mode and causal attributions as predicted. Abstract/evaluative support led to more positive emotion and self-perceptions, and less pessimistic expectancies for the future than concrete/experiential support. Perceived similarity moderated effects on beliefs about an upcoming social interaction, magnifying positive affiliation outcomes of abstract/evaluative versus concrete/experiential support.

Conclusions. Processing modes that are generally maladaptive at the intrapersonal level may be adaptive (and vice versa) when they are interpersonally influenced, and perceived similarity may facilitate interpersonal effects of processing mode on affiliation.     

An individual differences perspective on pragmatic abilities in the preschool years

Pragmatic abilities are fundamental to successful language use and learning. Individual differences studies contribute to understanding the psychological processes involved in pragmatic reasoning. Small sample sizes, insufficient measurement tools, and a lack of theoretical precision have hindered progress, however. Three studies addressed these challenges in three- to 5-year-old German-speaking children (N = 228, 121 female). Studies 1 and 2 assessed the psychometric properties of six pragmatics tasks. Study 3 investigated relations among pragmatics tasks and between pragmatics and other cognitive abilities. The tasks were found to measure stable variation between individuals. Via a computational cognitive model, individual differences were traced back to a latent pragmatics construct. This presents the basis for understanding the relations between pragmatics and other cognitive abilities.

Research Highlights

• Individual differences in pragmatic abilities are important to understanding variation in language development.
• Research in this domain lacks a precise theoretical framework and psychometrically high-quality measures.
• We present six tasks capturing a wide range of pragmatic abilities with excellent re-test reliability.
• We use a computational cognitive model to provide a substantive theory of individual differences in pragmatic abilities.