Questioning the preparatory function of counterfactual thinking

Why do individuals mentally modify reality (e.g., “If it hadn’t rained, we would have won the game”)? According to the dominant view, counterfactuals primarily serve to prepare future performance. In fact, individuals who have just failed a task tend to modify the uncontrollable features of their attempt (e.g., “If the rules of the game were different, I would have won it”), generating counterfactuals that are unlikely to play any preparatory role. By contrast, they generate prefactuals that focus on the controllable features of their ensuing behavior (e.g., “If I concentrate more, I will win the next game”). Here, we test whether this tendency is robust and general. Studies 1a and 1b replicate this tendency and show that it occurs regardless of whether individuals think about their failures or their successes. Study 2 shows that individuals generate relatively few controllable counterfactuals, unless explicitly prompted to do so. These results raise some questions regarding the generality of the dominant view according to which counterfactuals mainly serve a preparatory function.     

It Won't Happen to Me: An Investigation of Optimism Bias in Occupational Health and Safety

Optimism bias is the tendency to think that negative events are less likely to happen to oneself than to one's peers. Optimism bias concerning occupational health and safety (OHS) hazards was assessed in 105 postgraduate students and university employees. Significant levels of optimism bias were found for several events (e.g., suffering/causing injury). Though optimism bias was not related to perceived controllability, administration of OHS by management may explain why this observation differs from findings in other domains. While further study is required, the present study demonstrates that people tend to think hazardous events at work are less likely to happen to themselves compared to others doing the same job, which has important implications for management of safety at work.     

Social information processing skills link executive functions to aggression in adolescents with mild to borderline intellectual disability

Executive Functions (EFs) have been associated with aggression in children and adolescents. EFs as higher-order cognitive abilities are assumed to affect cognitive functions such as Social Information Processing (SIP). We explored SIP skills as a mediating mechanism linking EFs to aggression in adolescents with mild to borderline intellectual disability (MBID with IQ from 50–84), a high risk group for aggressive behaviors and EF impairments. A total of 153 adolescents (M_age = 15.24, SD = 1.35; 54% male) with MBID participated. Focused attention, behavioral inhibition, and working memory were tested with multiple neurocognitive tasks to define latent EF constructs. Participants responded to a video-based SIP task. A latent construct for aggression was defined by caretaker, teacher, and adolescent self-reports of aggression (Child Behavior Check List, Teacher Report Form, and Youth Self Report). Structural equation modeling was performed to test mediation. Results were consistent with mediation of the relation between focused attention and aggression by SIP, namely via hostile interpretations and self-efficacy for aggression. Behavioral inhibition was linked to aggression, but this relation was not mediated by SIP. The relation between working memory and aggression was mediated by SIP, namely via hostile interpretations, aggressive response generation and via self-efficacy for aggressive responses. Bearing the cross-sectional design in mind, support was found for SIP skills as a mechanism linking EFs, in particular focused attention and working memory, to aggression, providing a viable explanation for the high vulnerability of adolescents with MBID for aggression.     

The Daily Grind: A Rhizomatic Approach to Narratives of Managing Commuter Stress During Traffic Congestion in Metro Manila

Robust literature on commuter stress has shown the multiple impact of daily commuting in people's lives. Framed within a rhizomatic approach to narratives, we analyzed stories of 11 working and 9 student Filipino commuters by looking at the ways they act on or reconstruct themselves to manage stress. In urban Metro Manila, our findings showed three narrative “stress entryways”: getting caught by the wave, seating privileges, and stuck in transit. Theoretical and practical implications of findings on commuter well-being (e.g., keeping emotions in, releasing tensions), technologies of the “fit” commuter, and enriching conversations in traffic psychology and urban living are discussed.     

Object imagery and object identification: object imagers are better at identifying spatially-filtered visual objects

Object imagery refers to the ability to construct pictorial images of objects. Individuals with high object imagery (high-OI) produce more vivid mental images than individuals with low object imagery (low-OI), and they encode and process both mental images and visual stimuli in a more global and holistic way. In the present study, we investigated whether and how level of object imagery may affect the way in which individuals identify visual objects. High-OI and low-OI participants were asked to perform a visual identification task with spatially-filtered pictures of real objects. Each picture was presented at nine levels of filtering, starting from the most blurred (level 1: only low spatial frequencies—global configuration) and gradually adding high spatial frequencies up to the complete version (level 9: global configuration plus local and internal details). Our data showed that high-OI participants identified stimuli at a lower level of filtering than participants with low-OI, indicating that they were better able than low-OI participants to identify visual objects at lower spatial frequencies. Implications of the results and future developments are discussed.