A Comparison of Applicants' and Incumbents' Mean Scores on Health Constructs and Personality Constructs. A Follow‐up Study of Military Recruits in a Selection Setting

This study investigated the change in means on both personality constructs and the more infrequently studied, health constructs, as a possible effect of self‐enhancement in a real selection setting. The participants (N = 202) were assessed first as applicants, and later as incumbents. The result revealed that, while all the means for personality constructs changed across situations, the effect sizes on the health constructs were stronger. The analysis also revealed that it was twice as likely for the incumbents to confirm having experienced previous traumatic/stressful events compared with applicants. Implications for the observed changes on both personality and health constructs in military selection setting are discussed.     

Efficacy of neurostimulation to treat symptoms of Mal de Debarquement Syndrome. A preliminary study using repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation

Mal de debarquement syndrome (MdDS) is a rare and poorly understood condition of perceived continual motion. Using a multiple‐case design (n = 13; 8 f; 63.5 ± 12.6 years), this study investigated the efficacy of eight 20‐min sessions, over 4 weeks, of repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) of the dorsolateral pre‐frontal cortex. Compared to sham, rTMS demonstrated improvement in balance and confidence in daily living activities. rTMS shows promise for the treatment of MdDS. However, larger trials with longer intervention periods are required.     

Beliefs and Perceptions About Cancer Diagnosis and Treatment-Seeking and Decision-Making Behaviors Among Omani Patients with Cancer: A Single-Center Study

Journal of Religion and Health - A cancer diagnosis is associated with anxiety and psychological distress. Cultural and societal factors greatly affect the complex process of coping mechanisms and...     

Earthquake Aftershock Anxiety: An Examination of Psychosocial Contributing Factors and Symptomatic Outcomes

This study examined the direct and indirect effects of cognitions and anxiety associated with aftershocks on psychological symptoms (anxiety, depression, acute stress) and daily functioning (general and relationship). Participants were 600 adults from Christchurch, New Zealand. Data collection was approximately four months after the fatal 2011 earthquake. Path analysis was used for modelling. Socioeconomic status was directly associated with appraisals of uncontrollability of response to aftershocks. These cognitions were directly related to aftershock anxiety, which heightened general anxiety, depression, and acute stress symptoms. These symptoms were directly associated with relationship and general life dysfunction. Aftershock anxiety plays a significant role in ongoing psychological distress associated with earthquakes.     

Facilitation of attitude formation through communication: how perceived source expertise enhances the ability to achieve cognitive closure about complex environmental topics

Attitudes on which people have achieved cognitive closure are better predictors of future attitudes and behavior than open attitudes. In two experiments, we found that factors in communication (source identity, source consensus) can enhance people's ability to achieve cognitive closure on complex environmental topics through an increase in perceived source expertise. Results showed that participants perceived higher levels of source expertise and felt better able to achieve cognitive closure on the environmental technology of carbon dioxide capture and storage (CCS) when the information source had an expert identity compared to a non‐expert identity. The communication of consensus by the information source increased the level of expertise ascribed to the non‐expert source, resulting in an enhanced ability to achieve closure.     

Fairness as “Appropriate Impartiality” and the Problem of the Self-Serving Bias

Garrett Cullity contends that fairness is appropriate impartiality (See Cullity (2004) Chapters 8 and 10 and Cullity (2008)). Cullity deploys his account of fairness as a means of limiting the extreme moral demand to make sacrifices in order to aid others that was posed by Peter Singer in his seminal article ‘Famine, Affluence and Morality’. My paper is founded upon the combination of (1) the observation that the idea that fairness consists in appropriate impartiality is very vague and (2) the fact that psychological studies show the self-serving bias is especially likely to infect one’s judgements when the ideas involved are vague. I argue that Cullity’s solution to extreme moral demandingness is threatened by these findings. I then comment on whether some other theories of fairness are vulnerable to the same objection.     

Practicing Possibilities: Parents’ Explanations of Unusual Events and Children’s Possibility Thinking

Young children tend to judge improbable events to be impossible, yet there is variability across age and across individuals. Our study examined parent–child conversations about impossible and improbable events and links between parents’ explanations about those events and children’s possibility judgments in a reasoning task. Regression analyses revealed that parents’ speculation about potential mechanisms for improbable events during a parent–child book-sharing activity predicted children’s possibility judgments for similar events in an individual task and accounted for more of the variance than children’s age. Also, parents’ skepticism regarding mechanisms for impossible events was negatively correlated with children’s judgments about the possibility of improbable events. Additionally, children’s overall causal justifications for their judgments were correlated with parents’ talk about speculative mechanisms. Results suggest the importance of conversation with parents for young children’s developing understanding of the distinction between impossible and improbable.     

The concurrent use of three implicit measures (eye movements,pupillometry, and event-related potentials) to assess receptive vocabulary knowledge in normal adults

Recent years have seen the advent and proliferation of the use of implicit techniques to study learning and cognition. One such application is the use of event-related potentials (ERPs) to assess receptive vocabulary knowledge. Other implicit assessment techniques that may be well-suited to other testing situations or to use with varied participant groups have not been used as widely to study receptive vocabulary knowledge. We sought to develop additional implicit techniques to study receptive vocabulary knowledge that could augment the knowledge gained from the use of the ERP technique. Specifically, we used a simple forced-choice paradigm to assess receptive vocabulary knowledge in normal adult participants using eye movement monitoring (EM) and pupillometry. In the same group of participants, we also used an N400 semantic incongruity ERP paradigm to assess their knowledge of two groups of words: those expected to be known to the participants (high-frequency, familiar words) and those expected to be unknown (low-frequency, unfamiliar words). All three measures showed reliable differences between the known and unknown words. EM and pupillometry thus may provide insight into receptive vocabulary knowledge similar to that from ERPs. The development of additional implicit assessment techniques may increase the feasibility of receptive vocabulary testing across a wider range of participant groups and testing situations, and may make the conduct of such testing more accessible to a wider range of researchers, clinicians, and educators.