Sanctity of the Body and the Relational Paradigm

The individual is in constant interaction with others from birth onwards. The primary experience evolves from the innate need for bodily touch and connection, which form the foundation for the psychobiological structure of the individual. The body’s anatomy is made to yearn for another, for building a home with the body of another. This makes the body the focal instrument, which is discernible already in the mother–child relationship, as well as later in male–female or husband–wife relationships. The body thus provides the most sacred space, and deep within it carries a natural yearning for another, for having a relationship with another. Relationships are the means through which the body can come to full realization.     

Best Practice Recommendations Still Fail to Result in Action: A National 10‐Year Follow‐up Study of Investigative Interviews in CSA Cases

The present study examined a national sample of Norwegian investigative interviews in alleged child sexual abuse cases (N = 224) across a 10‐year period (2002–2012), in order to decide whether practice had improved over the decade in terms of the types of questions asked. The results indicate that the frequency of open‐ended, directive, option‐posing, and suggestive questions asked was unchanged during the 10‐year period, but that the frequency of repeated questions had increased significantly. When analyzed together with the results from a previous study of interview practice covering the period of 1990–2002, long‐term trends were found to be similarly stable, with no change in the frequency of open‐ended and suggestive questions asked over a 22‐year perspective. However, a decreasing frequency of option‐posing questions observed accompanied by an increasing frequency of directive questions may be considered a positive trend. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Evidence for Implicit Risk: Delay Facilitates the Processing of Uncertainty

Humans and other animals discount the value of rewards over time. One explanation for this is that delayed rewards may be less certain than immediate rewards, what has been referred to as the implicit risk hypothesis. Although this explanation is widely accepted, little research has directly assessed the validity of the implicit risk hypothesis. In the current study, we present two experiments in which participants made decisions about rewards involving both delay and uncertainty. By manipulating the order in which information was presented, we were able to investigate whether delay information facilitates beliefs about uncertainty and vice versa. It was found that participants were more likely to prefer larger, delayed rewards when information about delay was presented before information about uncertainty than when the information was presented in the opposite order. Additionally, we describe a process model that implements the implicit risk hypothesis and show that it is consistent with the observed patterns of data. These results support the implicit risk hypothesis and suggest that information about delay facilitates the processing of information about uncertainty. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Global precedence effects account for individual differences in both face and object recognition performance

There has been an increase in studies adopting an individual difference approach to examine visual cognition and in particular in studies trying to relate face recognition performance with measures of holistic processing (the face composite effect and the part-whole effect). In the present study we examine whether global precedence effects, measured by means of non-face stimuli in Navon’s paradigm, can also account for individual differences in face recognition and, if so, whether the effect is of similar magnitude for faces and objects. We find evidence that global precedence effects facilitate both face and object recognition, and to a similar extent. Our results suggest that both face and object recognition are characterized by a coarse-to-fine temporal dynamic, where global shape information is derived prior to local shape information, and that the efficiency of face and object recognition is related to the magnitude of the global precedence effect.     

The being a patient effect: negative expectations based on group labeling and corresponding treatment affect patient performance

Patient studies provide insights into mechanisms underlying diseases and thus represent a cornerstone of clinical research. In this study, we report evidence that differences between patients and controls might partly be based on expectations generated by the patients’ knowledge of being invited and treated as a patient: the Being a Patient effect (BP effect). This finding extends previous neuropsychological reports on diagnosis threat. Participants with mild allergies were addressed either as patients or control subjects in a clinical study. We measured the impact of this group labeling and corresponding instructions on pain perception and cognitive performance. Our results provide evidence that the BP effect can indeed affect physiological and cognitive measures in clinical settings. Importantly, these effects can lead to systematic overestimation of genuine disease effects and should be taken into account when disease effects are investigated. Finally, we propose strategies to avoid or minimize this critical confound.     

Do Equal Rights for a Minority Affect General Life Satisfaction?

While previous research examines how institutions matter for general life satisfaction and how specific institutions embodying equal rights for gay people matter for the life satisfaction of gays, we combine these two issues to analyze how the latter type of institutions relates to general life satisfaction. The question is how people in general are affected by laws treating everyone equally irrespective of sexual orientation. We find that legal recognition of partnership, marriage and adoption rights, as well as an equal age of consent, relate positively to general life satisfaction. Consequently, same-sex marriage and similar reforms come at no “welfare” cost to society at large—if anything, the opposite appears to hold. We further build on previous research showing positive effects of economic freedom on happiness and on tolerance towards gay people and interact our rights measure with economic freedom. This reveals that the positive effect on general happiness of equal rights mainly appears in countries with low economic freedom. This likely follows because minority rights are perceived to indicate openness to much-desired reforms in other areas.