A Terror Management Perspective on the Persuasiveness of Fear Appeals

We use terror management theory (TMT) to show that the nature of the threatening consequences included in fear‐appeal communications influences the responses to the messages promoted in such communications. On the basis of differences between death‐related consequences and non‐death‐related consequences, they provide an explanation for maladaptive responses to fear appeals. Results from 2 experiments indicate that participants who were highly committed to a worldview of drinking alcohol rejected socially acceptable attitudes toward drinking and driving when the message containing such attitudes was accompanied by a fear appeal that contained death as a consequence, but not when fear appeals contained the fear of arrest or serious injury. Participants perceived their level of experienced fear to be the same across the experimental conditions. The results have implications for considering the qualitative nature of the threatening consequence in fear‐appeal research and for using TMT to understand maladaptive responses to fear‐appeal communications.     

Alpha and the gay issue: a lesson in homophobia?

The Alpha course is possibly the most widespread and best‐known evangelizing initiative of recent times. Billing itself as an introduction into ‘basic Christianity’, Alpha is a programme that has been adopted worldwide by tens of thousands of churches. This paper overviews Alpha’s attitude towards one of the most controversial debates in the Church today, the so‐called ‘gay issue’. The paper, largely based on literature research and a national survey, will explore the broad controversy in the churches and argue that how it is approached through the Alpha programme provides an insight into contemporary views in Christian constituencies.     

Understanding pro‐environmental intentions by integrating insights from social mobility,cosmopolitanism, and social dominance

To offer an integrative account bridging individuals’ sociocultural orientations with pro‐environmentalism, the current research tested the mediating and moderating relationships among pro‐environmental intentions and three person‐level factors: perceived social mobility, cosmopolitan orientation, and social dominance orientation (SDO). With a Singaporean college student sample (N = 220), we found support for the hypothesized second‐stage moderation model that perceived social mobility positively predicts cosmopolitan orientation, and in turn, cosmopolitan orientation is moderated by SDO to positively predict pro‐environmental intentions. Specifically, lower levels of SDO strengthen the pro‐environmental advantages of endorsing higher levels of cosmopolitan orientation. These findings add novel knowledge to the environmental psychology literature by advancing an integrative approach that demonstrates how the interplay of people's perceptions about the social, cultural, and group standing impacts their likelihood to engage in pro‐environmental actions. We discuss the implications that an egalitarian worldview toward other cultures, social groups, and human–nature relations might be the key to addressing the global challenge of climate change.     

The means-end account of scientific,representational actions

Synthese - While many recent accounts of scientific representation have given a central role to the agency and intentions of scientists in explaining representation, they have left these agential...     

School Counselors,Multiple Student Deaths,and Grief: A Narrative Inquiry

A team of 5 school counselors were interviewed to learn how they professionally and personally experienced the deaths of multiple students in 1 year in their school while attending to the needs of the school community. By using narrative inquiry, 5 themes emerged from the analysis: gravity of the losses, logistics of care, personal vs. professional conflicts, increased student cohesion, and efficacy. Recommendations for counselor preparation, research, and counseling practice are offered.     

The impact of proficiency testing information and error aversions on the weight given to fingerprint evidence

Fingerprint examiners regularly participate in tests designed to assess their proficiency. These tests provide information relevant to the weight of fingerprint evidence, but no prior research has directly examined how jurors react to proficiency testing information. Using a nationally representative sample of American adults, we examined the impact of proficiency testing information on the weight given to the opinions of fingerprint examiners by mock jurors considering a hypothetical criminal case. The fingerprint examiner's level of performance on a proficiency test (high, medium, low, or very low), but not the type of error committed on the test (false positive identifications, false negative identifications, or a mix of both types of error), affected the weight that jury‐eligible adults gave to an examiner's opinion that latent fingerprints recovered from a crime scene matched the defendant's fingerprints, which in turn affected judgments about the defendant's guilt. Jurors who had no information about proficiency gave similar weight to the testimony as jurors exposed to highly proficient examiners, suggesting that jurors assume fingerprint examiners perform at high levels of proficiency unless informed otherwise. We also found that a plurality of Americans deems false acquittals just as aversive as false convictions and a significant minority deems false acquittals more serious. These differences in error aversions predicted differences in evidentiary assessments, suggesting that error aversions of jurors may play an important role in criminal trials.     

Towards Multi-positioned Live Supervision in Family Therapy: Combining Treatment and Observation Teams with First- and Second-order Perspectives

This article describes a process of live supervision that has been designed to encourage trainees to experience competing theoretical perspectives. It involves the use of separate T (treatment) and O (observation) teams who conceptualise the same case from two broadly defined theoretical perspectives, variously called first and second order, modern and postmodern, or family systems and social constructionist. The process requires trainees to adopt multiple positions rather than identify with one perspective, and provides a basis for comparing and potentially integrating them. We provide examples of the approach, discuss important contextual issues for supervisors to consider when implementing it, and examine ways of adapting it to a wide range of training contexts.