Influencing light versus heavy engagers of harmful behavior to curb their habits through positive and negative ad imagery

Mass media advertising has increasingly been seen as an important vehicle to influence attitudes and behaviors on issues designed to enhance the well‐being of society overall. However, prior research shows mixed results on the ability of advertising to encourage substantial or long‐term changes in self‐destructive behavior. The current research provides a framework to reconcile previous findings and demonstrates that different psychological processes are occurring when trying to convince light versus heavy engagers to curb their potentially harmful behaviors. Validated across two contexts (texting while driving and excessive gambling), the present study demonstrates that ads containing positive imagery (as opposed to negative imagery) are more effective at influencing heavy engagers to limit their harmful behaviors. Heavy engagers in the harmful behavior seem to resist ads containing negative imagery and do not find them to be more credible or involving. Instead, they are more influenced to curb their harmful behaviors after seeing positive imagery containing characters and situations to which they can relate. On the other hand, light engagers of harmful behavior are more likely to be persuaded to limit their behaviors after exposure to advertising containing negative imagery. The negative imagery evokes perceptions of ad credibility and encourages individuals to think about the advertised problem and consequences. Both credibility and ad involvement are shown to be important mediators of ad effectiveness for light engagers, whereas relatability was not a significant mediator for this group. Implications for the design of effective public service announcements targeted toward these separate groups are discussed. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Identity From Variation: Representations of Faces Derived From Multiple Instances

Research in face recognition has tended to focus on discriminating between individuals, or “telling people apart.” It has recently become clear that it is also necessary to understand how images of the same person can vary, or “telling people together.” Learning a new face, and tracking its representation as it changes from unfamiliar to familiar, involves an abstraction of the variability in different images of that person's face. Here, we present an application of principal components analysis computed across different photos of the same person. We demonstrate that people vary in systematic ways, and that this variability is idiosyncratic—the dimensions of variability in one face do not generalize well to another. Learning a new face therefore entails learning how that face varies. We present evidence for this proposal and suggest that it provides an explanation for various effects in face recognition. We conclude by making a number of testable predictions derived from this framework.     

SUICIDE: A PATIENT’S WISH TO KILL OFF “BAD” INTROJECTS AND THUS ACHIEVE REBIRTH*

Benedict came for treatment because he experienced severe self-deprecating feelings that tortured him. He felt commanded—by what he characterized as internal demons—to kill himself. When he did not do so, he felt humiliated for having been a coward. Simultaneously, he reckoned that if he died his demons would be killed off, but that he would arise brand new. Because Benedict had already “killed off” several earlier therapists, he needed someone who could feel his pain, but would neither die from his emotional storms, nor give up on him. With considerable mutual work, he began to identify with my dogged determination to both survive his fierce attacks and to locate the source of the introjected demons that viciously attacked him (and others). When his emotionally-driven storms finally ebbed, he combined forces with me and began the ordeal of overcoming his fears and relinquishing his delusional system.     

Facial expression coding in children and adolescents with autism: Reduced adaptability but intact norm-based coding

Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) can have difficulty recognizing emotional expressions. Here, we asked whether the underlying perceptual coding of expression is disrupted. Typical individuals code expression relative to a perceptual (average) norm that is continuously updated by experience. This adaptability of face-coding mechanisms has been linked to performance on various face tasks. We used an adaptation aftereffect paradigm to characterize expression coding in children and adolescents with autism. We asked whether face expression coding is less adaptable in autism and whether there is any fundamental disruption of norm-based coding. If expression coding is norm-based, then the face aftereffects should increase with adaptor expression strength (distance from the average expression). We observed this pattern in both autistic and typically developing participants, suggesting that norm-based coding is fundamentally intact in autism. Critically, however, expression aftereffects were reduced in the autism group, indicating that expression-coding mechanisms are less readily tuned by experience. Reduced adaptability has also been reported for coding of face identity and gaze direction. Thus, there appears to be a pervasive lack of adaptability in face-coding mechanisms in autism, which could contribute to face processing and broader social difficulties in the disorder.     

Coping with an insecure employment environment: The differing roles of protean and boundaryless career orientations

In this paper, we utilize a sample of working adults (N = 362) in the context of the recent economic recession to explore the coping mechanisms associated with different career attitudes and their subsequent impact on important individual work outcomes. Results of structural equation modeling (SEM) demonstrated that boundaryless mindset and self-directed protean career attitudes were differentially correlated with external support seeking, active coping, and identity awareness, which in turn were differentially correlated with individual work outcomes of job search behavior, performance, career success, and psychological well-being. Evidence for both full and partial mediation within the model tested is presented, as well as the potential implications of these findings and suggested avenues for future research.     

Matching Face Images Taken on the Same Day or Months Apart: the Limitations of Photo ID

It is well‐established that matching images of unfamiliar faces is rather error prone. However, there is an important mismatch between face matching in laboratory and realistic settings. All of the currently available face‐matching databases were designed to establish the baseline level of unfamiliar face perception. Therefore, target and test images for each face identity have been taken on the same day, minimizing within‐face variations. In realistic settings, on the other hand, faces do vary, even day to day. This study examined the proficiency of matching images of unfamiliar faces, which were taken on the same day or months apart. In two experiments, same‐day images were matched substantially more accurately and faster than different‐date photographs using the standard 1‐in‐10 and pairwise face‐matching tasks. This suggests that experimental studies on face matching underestimate its difficulty in real‐world situations. Photographs of unfamiliar faces seem to be unreliable proofs of identity, especially if the ID documents do not use very recent images of the holders. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Implications of Adolescents’ Academic Word Knowledge for Achievement and Instruction

The purpose of the current study was to determine relationships between orthographic and morphological awareness of academic words and achievement across content areas. Participants (n = 256), diverse seventh and eighth graders, took three word knowledge measures; two standardized achievement measures were used as outcomes. Orthographic awareness of academic words explained variance in achievement, beyond overall breadth of vocabulary knowledge, with significant changes in R² ranging from 0.02 to 0.08. Morphological awareness of academic words explained variance in achievement, beyond overall breadth of vocabulary knowledge, with significant changes in R² ranging from 0.06 to 0.16.     

Beyond conscientiousness: Career optimism and satisfaction with academic major

The study focuses on psychological predictors of academic major satisfaction. According to the career construction theory (Savickas, 2005), vocational personality and career adaptability should generate career satisfaction. In this study, vocational personality was operationalised as Big Five conscientiousness, and career adaptability was operationalised as generalised self-efficacy and career optimism. A sample (N = 529) of university students completed an online survey. The resultant data were used to construct a structural model of the hypothesised relationships among variables. A good fitting model [χ² = 10.454 (7) p = .164; GFI = .993; CFI = .999; RMSEA < .031 (< .001–.066)] indicated that career optimism fully mediated the relationship between conscientiousness and academic major satisfaction. Results were consistent with previous research into personality and academic performance. Moreover, the results highlight the significant role of optimism in satisfaction with career generally, and studies, specifically. Suggestions are made for future research into modelling the relationships according to different academic disciplines and for the potential role of optimism as a learning objective for career education and counseling.     

Learning new faces in an interactive activation and competition model

Abstract

Certain contemporary accounts of object and face recognition use connectionist networks with local representations. This paper describes and extends one such account: an interactive activation and competition (IAC) model of face recognition. In contrast to many networks with distributed representations, IAC models do not incorporate a learning mechanism. This limits their use in psychological modelling. This paper describes how a learning mechanism can be built into an IAC model. The mechanism automatically learns new representations and appears to have many of the desirable properties traditionally associated with distributed networks. Some simulations that produce results consistent with our knowledge of human face learning are reported. Finally, the relation between this work and current theories of visual object recognition is discussed.