Rationale and development of a general population well-being measure: Psychometric status of the GP-CORE in a student sample

This paper presents the rationale, development, and psychometric status of a non-clinical self-report measure for the general population (GP) - including students - derived from the Clinical Outcomes in Routine Evaluation-Outcome Measure (CORE-OM) and hence termed the GP-CORE. In contrast to the CORE-OM, the GP-CORE does not comprise items denoting high-intensity of presenting problems or risk and thereby increases its acceptability in a non-clinical population. Uniquely, over half the items in the GP-CORE are positively keyed. Analyses showed the GP-CORE to have good reliability, to distinguish between clinical and non-clinical populations, and have convergent validity against the full version. Norms for student populations are presented. It is suggested that the GP-CORE has considerable utility as a means of tapping the psychological well being of students and can then interface with counselling and mental health services using the CORE-OM.     

Sexual Ethics Training in Seminary: Preparing Students to Manage Feelings of Sexual Attraction

Pastoral Psychology - Sexual boundary violations by clergy have received heightened media attention in recent years with far reaching implications for the long-term well-being of the Church as an...     

Negotiation, Persuasion and Argument

Argument is often taken to deal with conflicting opinion or belief, while negotiation deals with conflicting goals or interests. It is widely accepted that argument ought to comply with some principles or norms. On the other hand, negotiation and bargaining involve concession exchange and tactical use of power, which may be contrasted with attempts to convince others through argument. However, there are cases where it is difficult to draw a clear distinction between bargaining and argument: notably cases where negotiators persuade others through `framing' and cases where the aims of negotiation have to do with public assertion and acceptance. Those cases suggest that the distinction between negotiation and argument is not absolute, and this raises the question whether rules about what is acceptable in argument and rules about what is acceptable in negotiation can all be viewed as instances of more general common norms about human interaction.     

Reform of statistical inference in psychology: the case of memory & cognition.

Geoffrey Loftus, Editor of Memory & Cognition from 1994 to 1997, strongly encouraged presentation of figures with error bars and avoidance of null hypothesis significance testing (NHST). The authors examined 696 Memory & Cognition articles published before, during, and after the Loftus editorship. Use of figures with bars increased to 47% under Loftus's editorship and then declined. Bars were rarely used for interpretation, and NHST remained almost universal. Analysis of 309 articles in other psychology journals confirmed that Loftus's influence was most evident in the articles he accepted for publication, but was otherwise limited. An e-mail survey of authors of papers accepted by Loftus revealed some support for his policy, but allegiance to traditional practices as well. Reform of psychologists' statistical practices would require more than editorial encouragement.     

Subjective Well-Being among Adolescent Consumers: The Effects of Materialism, Compulsive Buying, and Time Affluence

The burgeoning world-wide consumer culture brings with it certain baggage. Materialistic attitudes and compulsive buying have both been linked to lower levels of subjective well-being in consumers. Additionally, time is becoming an increasingly precious commodity as denizens of the consumer culture increase their work load and activities in an attempt to fully achieve the happiness promised by a lifestyle of consumption. The purpose of the present research is to investigate whether the negative impact of materialism and compulsive buying on well-being is moderated by a person’s perceived time affluence (the time one perceives he/she has available for life’s many activities). Using a large sample of adolescents (n = 1,329), the present study finds that (1) materialism and compulsive buying negatively impact subjective well-being, and that (2) time affluence moderates the relationship between materialism and compulsive buying and well-being. Specifically, perceptions of time affluence were found to negate the negative relationship between both materialism and SWB and compulsive buying and SWB. And (3), the present research appears to have uncovered a “sweet spot” when it comes to the influence of time affluence on the above relationships. Too little or too much time affluence was found to be associated with lower well-being. A simple slope analysis suggests that moderate levels of time affluence are most conducive to our well-being as consumers. In addition to discussing these findings, the authors also note certain limitations and offer directions for future research.     

Hearing speech in noise: seeing a loud talker is better

Seeing the talker improves the intelligibility of speech degraded by noise (a visual speech benefit). Given that talkers exaggerate spoken articulation in noise, this set of two experiments examined whether the visual speech benefit was greater for speech produced in noise than in quiet. We first examined the extent to which spoken articulation was exaggerated in noise by measuring the motion of face markers as four people uttered 10 sentences either in quiet or in babble-speech noise (these renditions were also filmed). The tracking results showed that articulated motion in speech produced in noise was greater than that produced in quiet and was more highly correlated with speech acoustics. Speech intelligibility was tested in a second experiment using a speech-perception-in-noise task under auditory-visual and auditory-only conditions. The results showed that the visual speech benefit was greater for speech recorded in noise than for speech recorded in quiet. Furthermore, the amount of articulatory movement was related to performance on the perception task, indicating that the enhanced gestures made when speaking in noise function to make speech more intelligible.     

HR Interventions that Go Viral

What causes one Human Resource (HR) intervention to thrive while another dies? The purpose of this paper is to explore the characteristics of HR interventions that are not only self-sustaining, but adapt and gain momentum over time. Based on a review of the literature, a case study, and 16 critical incident interviews with senior Industrial-Organizational (I–O) and HR professionals, several characteristics of the organization, the intervention, and the leader consistently emerged as important in creating sustainable HR programs, suggesting several new directions for future research.     

Differentiating Bipolar Disorder from Major Depressive Disorder Using the MMPI-2-RF: A Receiver Operating Characteristics (ROC) Analysis

We examined the utility of the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-2-Restructured Form (MMPI-2-RF) to differentiate patients with lifetime bipolar disorder (BD) from patients with lifetime major depressive disorder (MDD), and to differentiate patients with BD who are currently depressed from patients with current MDD. Sixty-one patients with BD (BD-I n = 51, BD-II n = 10) and 381 patients with MDD were administered the MMPI-2; MMPI-2-RF scale scores were derived from these MMPI-2 protocols. Receiver operating characteristics analysis revealed that the MMPI-2-RF Activation (ACT) scale had the largest Area Under the Curve (AUC), which was 0.74. Using a cut-off score of 4 on the ACT scale resulted in 71% of patients being correctly classified as having BD or MDD (sensitivity = 0.67, specificity = 0.71). An examination of currently depressed patients with BD (n = 29) and a randomly selected sample of MDD patients (n = 29) revealed that the ACT scale correctly classified 72% of patients (AUC = 0.75, sensitivity = 0.69, specificity = 0.76). Implications and limitations of these findings were discussed.     

On the role of attention in generating explicit awareness of contingent relations: evidence from spatial priming

In a series of four experiments, we examine the hypothesis that selective attention is crucial for the generation of conscious knowledge of contingency information. We investigated this question using a spatial priming task in which participants were required to localize a target letter in a probe display. In Experiment 1, participants kept track of the frequency with which the predictive letter in the prime appeared in various locations. This manipulation had a negligible impact on contingency awareness. Subsequent experiments requiring participants to attend to features (color, location) of the predictive letter increased contingency awareness somewhat, but there remained a large proportion of individuals who remained unaware of the strong contingency. Together the results of our experiments suggest that the construct of attention does not fully capture the processes that lead to contingency awareness, and suggest a critical role for bottom-up feature integration in explicit contingency learning.     

Effects of pre-experimental knowledge on recognition memory

The influence of pre-experimental autobiographical knowledge on recognition memory was investigated using as memoranda faces that were either personally known or unknown to the participant. Under a dual process theory, such knowledge boosted both recollection- and familiarity-based recognition judgements. Under an unequal variance signal detection model, pre-experimental knowledge increased both the variance and the separation of the target and foil memory strength distributions, boosting hits and correct rejections. Thus, pre-experimental knowledge has profound effects on the multiple, interacting processes that subserve recognition memory, and likely in the neural systems that underpin them.