The world looks better together: How close others enhance our visual experiences

People derive a number of benefits from sharing experiences with close others. However, most research on this topic has been restricted to forms of sharing involving explicit socializing, including verbal communication, emotion expression, and behavioral interaction. In two studies, these complexities were eliminated to find out whether merely experiencing visual stimuli (photographs) simultaneously with a close other—without communicating—enhances people's evaluations of those stimuli relative to coexperiencing the same stimuli with a stranger or alone. Compared to when viewers were alone, visual scenes were enhanced (better liked and seen as more real) when coexperienced with a close other and were liked less when coexperienced with a stranger. Implications for close relationships are discussed.     

Protest,Exit, or Deviance: Adjunct University Faculty Reactions to Occupational Rank‐Based Mistreatment1

University faculty hired for short‐term contracts rated occupational rank‐based mistreatment; as well as willingness to protest, leave their position, or engage in workplace deviance. How respondents reacted to mistreatment was shaped by identification with their occupational rank and source of mistreatment (administrators or colleagues). Administrative mistreatment increased willingness to protest and engage in workplace deviance for respondents who were less identified; faculty mistreatment decreased willingness to protest. Respondents who identified more with occupational rank were less sensitive to differences in mistreatment. These data suggest that if the mistreatment source “fits” the intergroup context, people will challenge the situation, but if it does not fit respondent expectations, collective challenge is less likely, particularly among people who identify less with their group.     

Perceptions of Religious and Nonreligious Targets: Exploring the Effects of Perceivers' Religious Fundamentalism

While research has shown that religious individuals are perceived as being more moral than the nonreligious, the present studies suggest that these findings are affected by in‐group bias. Participants low and high in religious fundamentalism (RF) were asked to form an impression of a target's moral and social dimensions. The target's religious identity was presented either explicitly (in Studies 1 and 2) or implicitly (Study 3). Participants high in RF consistently rated the religious target more favorably than the nonreligious target on both dimensions. In contrast, LF individuals' morality ratings did not differ as a function of target religiosity across all 3 studies. Our results suggest that future research exploring the religion–morality link must control for perceiver religiosity.     

Clinical supervisor training in Australia: A review of current problems and possible solutions

Clinical supervision cuts to the heart of professional psychology training. It is the most expensive single investment of staff time in the training of the psychology practitioner, and it appears to be the single most important contributor to training effectiveness, repaying that investment. Now there are changes afoot internationally which may change its pivotal role. For example, the Psychology Board of Australia has recently proposed that supervisors undergo approved supervisor training; in the USA, a competence‐based emphasis is gaining ground; while in the UK, supervisors within the Improving Access to Psychological Therapies initiative are receiving unprecedented training and support. It is therefore timely to clarify the need for such training and to consider promising options for its effective delivery. Following a summary of the changes within Australia, we next address these emergent problems and promising solutions by examining the available scientific evidence and by considering professional consensus statements.     

Players,Characters, and the Gamer's Dilemma

Is there any difference between playing video games in which the player's character commits murder and video games in which the player's character commits pedophilic acts? Morgan Luck's “Gamer's Dilemma” has established this question as a puzzle concerning notions of permissibility and harm. We propose that a fruitful alternative way to approach the question is through an account of aesthetic engagement. We develop an alternative to the dominant account of the relationship between players and the actions of their characters, and argue that the ethical difference between so‐called “virtual murder” and “virtual pedophilia” is to be understood in terms of the fiction‐making resources available to players. We propose that the relevant considerations for potential players to navigate concern (1) attempting to make certain characters intelligible, and (2) using aspects of oneself as resources for homomorphic representation.