Ruminations and Flow: Why Do People with a More Harmonious Passion Experience Higher Well-Being?

Research shows that harmonious and obsessive passion are positively and negatively linked to well-being respectively (e.g., Vallerand et al. in J Personal 75:505?C534, 2007; Psychol Sport Exerc 9:373?C392, 2008). The present study investigated the psychological mechanisms underlying the different impact of the two types of passion on well-being. A theoretical model involving passion, ruminations, flow experiences, and well-being was tested. Results showed that the more people have a harmonious passion, the more they tend to experience flow in their favorite activity, which in turn predicts higher well-being. Obsessive passion did not seem to be systematically linked to flow in the favorite activity. In contrast, the more people have an obsessive passion, the more they tend to ruminate about their passionate activity while engaging in another activity, which did not seem to be systematically the case for people with a harmonious passion. These ruminations are negatively related to flow experiences in the other activity, which are positively associated with well-being. Flow and ruminations thus seem to contribute to the understanding of the link between passion and well-being.     

Acquired equivalence of cues by presentation in a common context in rats

It is well established that humans and other animals may treat two perceptually different cues alike, if the cues have been individually paired with a common antecedent or a common consequence. Recently, Molet et al. (Psychon Bull Rev 18:618–623, 2011) reported evidence for a new form of acquired equivalence in human conditional discrimination, namely context-mediated equivalence. In the present research, using a flavor conditioning procedure, we asked whether rats would show similar context-mediated equivalence to demonstrate that this new form of acquired equivalence is a general phenomenon. Rats experienced two flavor cues A and B each presented either in the same context, X, or each in its own distinctive context, X or Y. Subsequently, the rats experienced B with sucrose in a third context, Z, and then the generalization of conditioning to A was assessed. When tested in Context Z, consumption of A was more marked when A and B had both been presented in the same context than when they had been presented in two different contexts. Thus, importantly, in the absence of the training context, cues that shared a common context at different times came to be treated as equivalent. This represents the first evidence of context-mediated equivalence in a nonhuman species.     

Toward an understanding of meaning creation via the collective co‐production process

Co‐production has been traditionally studied in the context of industrial and service markets. This study investigates the consumer's search for meaning and fulfillment via one type of co‐production, collective co‐production. The case study method was utilized to examine knife making from kits. The findings unpack a three‐part co‐production process (design, production, and consumption) that results in significant identity ramifications for consumers. During the design stage of knife making, the informants shaped their self‐concept through social inspiration, creative self‐expression, and identification with the primal sense of self. The production stage provided internal validation of the self‐concept through a pseudochallenge that was achieved through learning activities. The consumption stage provided external validation of the self‐concept as the informants shared their co‐production experience with others. Theoretical implications are discussed. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Being Employed by a Co-national: A Cul-de-sac or a Short Cut to the Main Road of the Labour Market?

This paper analyses the impact of working in an ethnic economy on subsequent labour market performance for newly arrived immigrants. Is it a short cut to the labour market or does it lock immigrants into low income jobs? Working in an ethnic economy is defined as being employed by a self-employed co-national. The comparison group is a matched sample of newly arrived immigrants who were without employment during the same period. Swedish panel data for the period 1998?C2005 are used, and the sample is restricted to male immigrants, 20?C55?years of age. Using propensity score matching, we find that immigrants who were employed by self-employed co-nationals are more likely to be employed in the near future, but that the types of employment they have are associated with lower incomes. Many continue to be employed by self-employed co-nationals or become self-employed themselves.     

Electrodermal responses to sources of dual-task interference

There is a response selection bottleneck that is responsible for dual-task interference. How the response selection bottleneck operates was addressed in three dual-task experiments. The overlap between two tasks (as indexed by the stimulus onset asynchrony [SOA]) was systematically manipulated, and both reaction time and electrodermal activity were measured. In addition, each experiment also manipulated some aspect of the difficulty of either task. Both increasing task overlap by reducing SOA and increasing the difficulty of either task lengthened reaction times. Electrodermal response was strongly affected by task difficulty but was only weakly affected by SOA, and in a different manner from reaction time. A fourth experiment found that the subjectively perceived difficulty of a dual-task trial was affected both by task difficulty and by SOA, but in different ways than electrodermal activity. Overall, the results were not consistent with a response selection bottleneck that involves processes of voluntary, executive attention. Instead, the results converge with findings from neural network modeling to suggest that the delay of one task while another is being processed reflects the operation of a routing mechanism that can process only one stream of information for action at a time and of a passive, structural store that temporarily holds information for the delayed task. The results suggest that conventional blocked or event-related neuroimaging designs may be inadequate to identify the mechanism of operation of the response selection bottleneck.     

Exploring the positive and negative implications of facial feedback

The facial feedback effect (e.g., Strack et al., 1988) is explored in three experiments. It was found that when someone lowers their eyebrows, following instructions, their mood becomes more negative. If, however, they are instructed to raise their eyebrows they become more surprised by facts. Finally, if people are instructed to wrinkle their noses, then odors are evaluated as more unpleasant. While providing further diverse evidence for facial feedback, the experiments are also considered in the context of facial muscular paralysis induced as part of cosmetic treatments using botulinum toxin. The research presented here supports the previously suggested idea that such treatments could reduce depression, but other possible psychological impacts of such treatments are considered. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved).     

Pathways to vocational services: factors affecting entry by veterans enrolled in Veterans Health Administration mental health services

The current study provides naturalistic data documenting the pathways-to-care to vocational services for 155 veterans who were receiving some form of mental health care from the Veterans Health Administration and had a vocational need but were not currently enrolled in vocational services. Of the participants, 94.2% had recognized their vocational need, 80.6% reported that they or someone else had sought help to alleviate the need, and 77.4% had previously received some form of vocational services. The median length of the participants' vocational need was more than 4.2 years. Delays associated with recognition, help-seeking, and treatment entry all contributed to the overall delay in entering appropriate care. Filtering factors associated with quicker recognition, seeking help, and receiving services included diagnosis, level of disability, type of vocational need, and support from primary providers, family, and friends. The results provide information for designing interventions to improve service entry by adults with mental health problems and vocational needs.     

It depends on how you look at it: Scanpath comparison in multiple dimensions with MultiMatch, a vector-based approach

Eye movement sequences??or scanpaths??vary depending on the stimulus characteristics and the task (Foulsham & Underwood Journal of Vision, 8(2), 6:1?C17, 2008; Land, Mennie, & Rusted, Perception, 28, 1311?C1328, 1999). Common methods for comparing scanpaths, however, are limited in their ability to capture both the spatial and temporal properties of which a scanpath consists. Here, we validated a new method for scanpath comparison based on geometric vectors, which compares scanpaths over multiple dimensions while retaining positional and sequential information (Jarodzka, Holmqvist, & Nystr?m, Symposium on Eye-Tracking Research and Applications (pp. 211?C218), 2010). ??MultiMatch?? was tested in two experiments and pitted against ScanMatch (Cristino, Math?t, Theeuwes, & Gilchrist, Behavior Research Methods, 42, 692?C700, 2010), the most comprehensive adaptation of the popular Levenshtein method. In Experiment 1, we used synthetic data, demonstrating the greater sensitivity of MultiMatch to variations in spatial position. In Experiment 2, real eye movement recordings were taken from participants viewing sequences of dots, designed to elicit scanpath pairs with commonalities known to be problematic for algorithms (e.g., when one scanpath is shifted in locus or when fixations fall on either side of an AOI boundary). The results illustrate the advantages of a multidimensional approach, revealing how two scanpaths differ. For instance, if one scanpath is the reverse copy of another, the difference is in the direction but not the positions of fixations; or if a scanpath is scaled down, the difference is in the length of the saccadic vectors but not in the overall shape. As well as having enormous potential for any task in which consistency in eye movements is important (e.g., learning), MultiMatch is particularly relevant for ??eye movements to nothing?? in mental imagery and embodiment-of-cognition research, where satisfactory scanpath comparison algorithms are lacking.     

Introducing LexTALE: A quick and valid Lexical Test for Advanced Learners of English

The increasing number of experimental studies on second language (L2) processing, frequently with English as the L2, calls for a practical and valid measure of English vocabulary knowledge and proficiency. In a large-scale study with Dutch and Korean speakers of L2 English, we tested whether LexTALE, a 5-min vocabulary test, is a valid predictor of English vocabulary knowledge and, possibly, even of general English proficiency. Furthermore, the validity of LexTALE was compared with that of self-ratings of proficiency, a measure frequently used by L2 researchers. The results showed the following in both speaker groups: (1) LexTALE was a good predictor of English vocabulary knowledge; 2) it also correlated substantially with a measure of general English proficiency; and 3) LexTALE was generally superior to self-ratings in its predictions. LexTALE, but not self-ratings, also correlated highly with previous experimental data on two word recognition paradigms. The test can be carried out on or downloaded from www.lextale.com .