Humans and monkeys show similar skill in estimating uncertain outcomes

When information is incomplete but a choice must be made, individuals sometimes can rely on past experiences to help them assess uncertain outcomes in terms of the probabilities of payoffs. Monkeys (Cebus apella) and humans (Homo sapiens) were presented with a test in which they first made quantity judgments between two clear options. Then they made choices in which only one option was visible, and they had to estimate the quantity for the other option. Both species were guided by the past outcomes, as they shifted from selecting the known option to selecting the unknown option at the point at which the known option went from being greater than the average rate of return to being less than the average rate of return. This comparability across species suggests that tallying ongoing average rates of return from repeated choices occurs spontaneously and likely serves an adaptive purpose when dealing with uncertainty in the environment.     

A Second Look at Debriefing Practices: Madness in Our Method?

This article is a reconsideration of Tesch's (1977) Tesch, F. E. 1977. Debriefing research participants: Though this be method there is madness to it.. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 35: 217–224. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar] ethical, educational, and methodological functions for debriefing through a literature review and an Internet survey of authors of articles published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and Journal of Traumatic Stress. We advocate for a larger ethical role for debriefing in nondeception research. The educational function of debriefing is examined in light of the continued popularity of undergraduate participant pools. A case is made for the methodological function of debriefing to clarify aspects of research participation. Recommendations are made to improve the conducting and reporting of debriefings.     

Representational momentum and the flash‐lag effect

Representational momentum (RM) is a distortion where the final orientation of a moving object is misremembered as further along its trajectory. Experiments reported here examine RM when an additional object was flashed just as the moving object disappeared. When the task was to judge the flashed object, participants reported that the flash appeared to lag behind (flash‐lag effect; FLE). When the task was to judge the moving object, larger forward distortions for the moving object were found when the flash was present, despite previous evidence that the FLE depends on the moving object's continued presence. The results suggest that some part of the FLE depends upon what precedes the flash. In addition, equivalent RM was observed for implied and smoothly animated events, a possible limit to the velocity effect for RM was found, and larger positive distortions were found for downward rotations.     

Intrinsic religiosity protects believers from the existential fear of a human Jesus

ABSTRACT

The present study examined the role of internalised religious beliefs in defending against existential concerns aroused from a creaturely Jesus. Prior work has found that biologically human traits (e.g., vomiting, sweating, etc.) can increase death concerns when applied to both humans and a god. Intrinsic beliefs, however, have been shown to reduce mortality awareness. In the current study, religious participants were primed with thoughts of either a human or neutral Jesus followed by a single item measure about fear of death. A moderated regression analysis found that whereas high intrinsic individuals were buffered from existential concerns, low intrinsic individuals experienced a greater fear of death when primed with a human Jesus. These results replicate prior work within terror management theory and the psychology of religion suggesting that internalised beliefs serve a protective function against existential anxieties.     

Breaking ground,hitting ground: A Sure Start rapid response service for parents and their under fours

This paper describes a project aimed at taking an under fours' counselling and parent support service into a neighbourhood characterized by particularly high levels of deprivation and ethnic diversity. Referrals to the local CAMHS showed a high level of disturbance in school aged children and adolescents in this area. However, children under 4 years were strikingly under-represented in referral statistics, suggesting the need to make our service more accessible to this group. The project took the form of a once-weekly clinic run in a community centre. Differences in ways of engaging and working with the families in order to make the service accessible and ‘user friendly’ are described. So, too, is a protocol developed in order to support the worker in thinking through the many anxiety raising situations to be responded to in dealing with severely deprived families living in extremely stressful situations. Three clinical examples illustrate that a major value of this initiative was in increasing the worker's understanding of ethnic and cultural differences and of how to work with them. The service also helped to promote good liaison between statutory and voluntary agencies. The project was established initially under the auspices of Sure Start, a government sponsored scheme for enriching developmental opportunities of under fours and their parents in deprived areas. After running for 18 months, it will be funded through mainstream resources, as an example of the kind of innovative work with hard to reach populations encouraged by the guidelines given in the new National Service Framework for Children in England.     

A Community’s Response to Suicide Through Public Art: Stakeholder Perspectives from the Finding the Light Within Project

Suicide is a preventable public health problem and a leading cause of death in the United States. Despite recognized need for community-based strategies for suicide prevention, most suicide prevention programs focus on individual-level change. This article presents seven first person accounts of Finding the Light Within, a community mobilization initiative to reduce the stigma associated with suicide through public arts participation that took place in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania from 2011 through 2012. The stigma associated with suicide is a major challenge to suicide prevention, erecting social barriers to effective prevention and treatment and enhancing risk factors for people struggling with suicidal ideation and recovery after losing a loved one to suicide. This project engaged a large and diverse audience and built a new community around suicide prevention through participatory public art, including community design and production of a large public mural about suicide, storytelling and art workshops, and a storytelling website. We present this project as a model for how arts participation can address suicide on multiple fronts—from raising awareness and reducing stigma, to promoting community recovery, to providing healing for people and communities in need.     

Direct and indirect measures of memory for modality in young and older adults.

In 2 experiments, young and older adults demonstrated modality effects of similar magnitude in perceptual identification tasks. That is, both young and older adults demonstrated more repetition priming when study and test modalities matched than when they were different, suggesting that contextual information was equally available across age. However, when asked explicitly to retrieve modality information, older adults were less accurate than young adults. These results constitute evidence for a dissociation between direct and indirect measures of memory for modality information. They call into question hypotheses that memory impairment in old age is due to deficient encoding of contextual information and challenge current accounts of modality effects in repetition priming.