The effects of social comparison,emotion induction,and parent vaccination status on parental intentions for COVID-19 vaccine uptake in children

Parental vaccine hesitancy—delays in vaccine uptake for children—is a significant public health concern. Using an online adult sample of U.S. parents (N = 183), the current research experimentally examined how exposure to cautious or risky social comparison models on social media (in terms of their COVID-19 beliefs and behaviors) influenced parental intentions to vaccinate their children against COVID-19 in the early stages of the pandemic. Additionally, we examined whether the influence of social comparison models was moderated by emotional state (fear or contentment) and parental vaccination status. Overall, we found that parents exposed to cautious (vs. risky) comparison models and vaccinated (vs. unvaccinated) parents reported greater vaccine intentions for their children. We further found that vaccination intentions were highest among unvaccinated parents after exposure to cautious (vs. risky) comparison models, whereas intentions were highest among vaccinated parents after exposure to risky (vs. cautious) comparison models (but only when induced to feel content). Overall, our findings highlight the importance of understanding the additive and interactive impact of psychological and situational factors in shaping parental vaccine hesitancy.     

Gender differences over time in medical school stressors,anxiety, and the sense of coherence

Gender differences in the perception of medical school stressors, trait anxiety, and the sense of coherence were investigated in a longitudinal study in an Israeli medical school. The overall stressor score increased for both sexes from orientation to the second year of studies. The increase in the stressor score among women was due primarily to their increasing concern about professional status issues; for men, the academic demands factor contributed most to their increased overall stressor score. Trait anxiety increased and the sense of coherence decreased over time for both sexes. The gender difference in anxiety was significant in the first two stages, but disappeared in the third stage, indicating that although men had lower scores at all stages, their scores increased relatively more than women's over time. The findings suggest that the stressors of medical education have a negative effect on two personality resources needed to deal with life's demands.     

Correction to: Age-related differences in the attentional white bear

Psychonomic Bulletin & Review - This article was originally published with errors in the graphs. It has been republished with corrections.     

Relating to knowledge: challenges in generating and using theory for practice in family therapy*

This paper explores knowledge and how family therapy relates to its own knowledge. It begins with the identification of particular puzzles that have emerged through the author's involvement in family therapy, and ends with a reflection on these same puzzles following the main theoretical exploration. The exploration first considers the issue of the generation of knowledge in the context of practice disciplines, and then discusses disciplinarity and the dynamics of competitiveness and oppositionality that go alongside this social structuring of knowledge. This discussion paves the way for an exploration of these dynamics in family therapy, including the competitiveness in relation to different models within family therapy, and the tendency for theory development to be represented in terms of discontinuity rather than continuity. The relationship between theory and practice is recast through this investigation, and an argument is made for using a layered epistemology to inform our relationship to knowledge.     

Distinguishing novelty and familiarity effects in infant preference procedures

This paper considers possible problems researchers might face when interpreting the results of studies that employ variants of the preference procedure. Infants show a tendency to shift their preference from familiar to novel stimuli with increasing exposure to the familiar stimulus, a behaviour that is exploited by the habituation paradigm. This change in attentional preference with exposure leads us to suggest that researchers interested in infants' pre‐experimental or spontaneous preferences should beware of the potentially confounding effects of exposing infants to familiarization trials prior to employing the preference procedure. The notion that infant attentional preference is dynamic also calls into question the use of the direction of post‐familiarization preference per se when interpreting the knowledge or strategies available to infants. We look into the results of a cross‐modal word learning study to show how the interpretation of results may be difficult when infants exhibit a significant preference in an unexpected direction. As a possible solution to this problem we propose that significant preferences in both directions should be sought at multiple intervals over time. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A family of Gödel hybrid logics

In this paper, we define a family of fuzzy hybrid logics that are based on Gödel logic. It is composed of two infinite-valued versions called ${\mathsf{GH}}_{\infty }$ and ${\mathsf{WGH}}_{\infty }$, and a sequence of finitary valued versions ${({\mathsf{GH}}_n)}_{0<n<\infty }$. We define decision procedures for both ${\mathsf{WGH}}_{\infty }$ and ${({\mathsf{GH}}_n)}_{0<n<\infty }$ that are based on particular sequents and on a set of proof rules dealing with such sequents. As these rules are strongly invertible the procedures naturally allow one to generate countermodels. Therefore we prove the decidability and the finite model property for these logics. Finally, from the decision procedure of ${\mathsf{WGH}}_{\infty }$, we design a sound and complete sequent calculus for this logic.     

Network structure reveals clusters of associations between childhood adversities and development outcomes

Exposure to childhood adversity is common and associated with a host of negative developmental outcomes. The most common approach used to examine the consequences of adversity exposure is a cumulative risk model. Recently, we have proposed a novel approach, the dimensional model of adversity and psychopathology (DMAP), where different dimensions of adversity are hypothesized to impact health and well‐being through different pathways. We expect deprivation to primarily disrupt cognitive processing, whereas we expect threat to primarily alter emotional reactivity and automatic regulation. Recent hypothesis‐driven approaches provide support for these differential associations of deprivation and threat on developmental outcomes. However, it is not clear whether these patterns would emerge using data‐driven approaches. Here we use a network analytic approach to identify clusters of related adversity exposures and outcomes in an initial study (Study 1: N = 277 adolescents aged 16–17 years; 55.1% female) and a replication (Study 2: N = 262 children aged 8–16 years; 45.4% female). We statistically compare our observed clusters with our hypothesized DMAP model and a clustering we hypothesize would be the result of a cumulative stress model. In both samples we observed a network structure consistent with the DMAP model and statistically different than the hypothesized cumulative stress model. Future work seeking to identify in the pathways through which adversity impacts development should consider multiple dimensions of adversity.     

Domain specificity versus expertise: factors influencing distinct processing of faces

To explore face specificity in visual processing, we compared the role of task-associated strategies and expertise on the N170 event-related potential (ERP) component elicited by human faces with the ERPs elicited by cars, birds, items of furniture, and ape faces. In Experiment 1, participants performed a car monitoring task and an animacy decision task. In Experiment 2, participants monitored human faces while faces of apes were the distracters. Faces elicited an equally conspicuous N170, significantly larger than the ERPs elicited by non-face categories regardless of whether they were ignored or had an equal status with other categories (Experiment 1), or were the targets (in Experiment 2). In contrast, the negative component elicited by cars during the same time range was larger if they were targets than if they were not. Furthermore, unlike the posterior-temporal distribution of the N170, the negative component elicited by cars and its modulation by task were more conspicuous at occipital sites. Faces of apes elicited an N170 that was similar in amplitude to that elicited by the human face targets, albeit peaking 10 ms later. As our participants were not ape experts, this pattern indicates that the N170 is face-specific, but not specie-specific, i.e. it is elicited by particular face features regardless of expertise. Overall, these results demonstrate the domain specificity of the visual mechanism implicated in processing faces, a mechanism which is not influenced by either task or expertise. The processing of other objects is probably accomplished by a more general visual processor, which is sensitive to strategic manipulations and attention.     

Effects of top-down guidance and singleton priming on visual search

Recent literature suggests that observers can use advance knowledge of the target feature to guide their search but fail to do so whenever the target is reliably a singleton. Instead, they engage in singletondetection mode—that is, they search for the most salient object. In the present study, we aimed to test the notion of a default salience-based search mode. Using several measures, we compared search for a known target when it is always a singleton (fixed-singleton search) relative to when it is incidentally a singleton (multiple-target search). We examined the relative contributions of strategic factors (knowledge that the target is a singleton) and intertrial repetition effects (singleton priming, or the advantage of responding to a singleton target if the target on the previous trial had also been a singleton). In two experiments, singleton priming eliminated all the differences in performance between fixed-singleton and multiple-target search, suggesting that search for a known singleton may be feature based rather than salience based.