Adolescent Egocentrism and the Illusion of Transparency: Are Adolescents as Egocentric as we Might Think?

The illusion of transparency, or people’s tendency to believe their thoughts and feelings as more apparent to others than they actually are, was used to investigate adolescent egocentrism. Contrary to previous research demonstrating heightened adolescent egocentrism, adolescents exhibited similar levels of egocentrism to adults. In experiment 1, 13-14 year-olds and adult participants both truthfully described and lied about a series of pictures. Both adolescent and adult liars indicated that they were more confident that other participants would know when they were lying, than other participants actually indicated. In experiment 2, 13-14 year-olds, 15-16 year-olds and adult participants read to an audience. The illusion of transparency effect manifested itself differently according to gender: Female participants indicating that they looked more nervous than audiences thought, whilst male participants indicating that they were more entertaining than audiences thought. Results were interpreted using simulation theory, and suggested that adolescents might not be as egocentric as previously thought.     

Psychometric Properties of the Power of Food Scale in a Community Sample of Preadolescents and Adolescents

The Power of Food Scale (PFS) was developed to assess hedonic hunger, or how individuals think and feel about food and eating in the absence of metabolic need. The measure was originally developed and validated in two adult samples, and recent preliminary support has been provided for the validity in a sample of preadolescents. The aim of the current study was to conduct a confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) on the PFS in a community sample of preadolescents and adolescents to examine the psychometric properties in youth. Participants were 148 youth ages 11–18 (M = 12.85) from two Midwestern communities in the United States. Participants completed the PFS to assess for hedonic hunger. Structural equation modeling was used to conduct multiple CFAs to test varying factor structures of the PFS in preadolescents and adolescents. Results suggested that the scale was best represented by the previously established 15-item version of the measure with an aggregate domain and three subscales based on food proximity (i.e., food available, food present, and food tasted). Results from the CFA revealed that the measurement model had a close fit (RMSEA = 0.033, CFI = 0.985). Cronbach’s α for the total scale and the three subscales ranged from 0.86 to 0.95. Findings suggest that the previously established factor structure of the 15-item PFS best represents the factor structure of the measure in a community sample of preadolescents and adolescents.     

Someone is pulling the strings: hypersensitive agency detection and belief in conspiracy theories

We hypothesised that belief in conspiracy theories would be predicted by the general tendency to attribute agency and intentionality where it is unlikely to exist. We further hypothesised that this tendency would explain the relationship between education level and belief in conspiracy theories, where lower levels of education have been found to be associated with higher conspiracy belief. In Study 1 (N = 202) participants were more likely to agree with a range of conspiracy theories if they also tended to attribute intentionality and agency to inanimate objects. As predicted, this relationship accounted for the link between education level and belief in conspiracy theories. We replicated this finding in Study 2 (N = 330), whilst taking into account beliefs in paranormal phenomena. These results suggest that education may undermine the reasoning processes and assumptions that are reflected in conspiracy belief.     

The Place of Purpose in Life in Women’s Positive Aging

Purpose in life is an orientation associated with energy, effectiveness, and optimism. A general trend is for purpose to decline in the later years, with unclear implications for positive aging. This article, however, takes a new approach to exploring the role of purpose. Using data from the Mills Study, a 55-year study of women’s adult development, we examine four sharp patterns of change in purpose on Ryff’s scale (1995 Ryff, C. D. (1995). Psychological well-being in adult life. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 4, 99–104. doi:10.1111/1467-8721.ep10772395[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) between ages 61 and 70: high at both times, low at both times, and changes from high to low or low to high. Guiding ideas are advanced about each kind of change and findings examined for each group. Looking at individual women's lives since childhood provides illustrative examples of each pattern. These lives show the impact of depression, inner resources, personality traits (especially Conscientiousness), attachment (secure and avoidant/dismissive styles), life situations (e.g., retirement), and events (e.g., early parental loss or widowhood), and of a motivation in one's 60s to grow or to transform regrets. Women differed in how traditional their lives were and in how much they associated purposiveness and goal attainment with life satisfaction. Implications for therapists include both helping women find the energy and commitment associated with purpose in life, and helping them value more process-oriented experiences such as appreciation, wonder, connection, and relationship. Emphasis on appreciation may become more common as women age. Positive aging is manifested in these ways, but also in acceptance and the courageous and steadfast coping with painful situations.     

The propositional basis of cue-controlled reward seeking

Two experiments examined the role of propositional and automatic (ideomotor) processes in cue-elicited responding for rewarding outcomes (beer and chocolate). In a training phase, participants earned either chocolate or beer points by making one of two button-press responses. Rewards were indicated by the presentation of chocolate and beer pictures. On test, each trial began with a picture of beer or chocolate, or a blank screen, and choice of the beer versus chocolate response was assessed in the presence of these three pictures. Participants tended to choose the beer and chocolate response in the presence of the beer and chocolate pictures, respectively. In Experiment 1, instructions signalling that the pictures did not indicate which response would be rewarded significantly reduced the priming effect. In Experiment 2, instructions indicating that the pictures signified which response would not be rewarded resulted in a reversed priming effect. Finally, in both experiments, the priming effect correlated with self-reported beliefs that the cues signalled which response was more likely to be reinforced. These results suggest that cue-elicited response selection is mediated by a propositional belief regarding the efficacy of the response–outcome relationship, rather than an automatic ideomotor mechanism.     

Multiple context mere exposure: Examining the limits of liking

Recent evidence suggests that increased liking of exposed stimuli—a phenomenon known as the mere exposure effect—is dependent on experiencing the stimuli in the same context at exposure and test. Three experiments extended this work by examining the effect of presenting target stimuli in single and multiple exposure contexts. Target face stimuli were repeatedly paired with nonsense words, which took the role of contexts, across exposure. On test, the mere exposure effect was found only when the target face stimuli were presented with nonsense word cues (contexts) with which they had been repeatedly paired. The mere exposure effect was eliminated when exposure to target face stimuli with the nonsense word cues (contexts) was minimal, despite the overall number of exposures to the target face being equated across single- and multiple-context exposure conditions. The results suggest that familiarity of the relationship between stimuli and their context, not simply familiarity of the stimuli themselves, leads to liking. The finding supports a broader framework, which suggests that liking is partly a function of the consistency between past and present experiences with a target stimulus.     

Sex,Education, Age,and Cautiousness: Implications for Counselors

A cross‐sectional study of educated men and women showed that cautiousness, as measured by perceived problem‐solving ability, does not increase with age. Sex differences were nonsignificant. The results are discussed in terms of R. Schultz and J. Heckhausen's (1996) Life Span Model of Successful Aging.     

The Failure to Use Gender Information in Parsing: A Comment on van Berkum, Brown, and Hagoort (1999)

We critically review the empirical evidence published by van Berkum, Brown, and Hagoort (1999a, b) against syntax-first models of sentence parsing. According to van Berkum et al., discourse factors and word gender information are used instantaneously to guide the parser. First, we note that the density of the experimental trials (relative to fillers) and the slow presentation rate of the van Berkum et al. design seem likely to have elicited the use of tactics involving rapid reanalysis of the material. Second, we present new data from a questionnaire study showing that the grammatical gender information of a relative pronoun in Dutch is often completely ignored, even during the wrap-up phase at the end of the sentence.