Thanks, but I'm used to better: a relative rank model of gratitude

We argue that more help does not necessarily lead to more gratitude. Rather, gratitude depends on how a given instance of help compares with the help that a person is used to receiving. Participants read vignettes detailing an event in which 11 different friends either lent them varying amounts of money or spent varying amounts of time providing help. The amount of gratitude elicited by a given amount of help (e.g., a loan of ￡36 [about $56] or 49 min help) differed substantially depending on how this amount ranked among the help they were getting from their other friends. Comparison across four experimental conditions suggested that these judgments operated via the same general cognitive mechanisms used to judge other social events and psychophysical stimuli (as outlined by range frequency theory). Although more help does lead to more gratitude, people appear to be sensitive to how that help compares with what others are providing, and experienced gratitude depends on these relative judgments.     

Social resilience: the value of social fitness with an application to the military

Resilience has been regarded narrowly as a quintessential individual property by most investigators. Social resilience, however, is inherently a multilevel construct, revealed by capacities of individuals, but also groups, to foster, engage in, and sustain positive social relationships and to endure and recover from stressors and social isolation. Emergent levels of organization, ranging from dyads, families, and groups to cities, civilizations, and international alliances have long been apparent in human existence, but identifying the features of individuals, relationships, and group structures and norms that promote social resilience-and determining effective interventions to build social resilience-represent some of the most important challenges facing the military as well as contemporary behavioral science. We identify nine personal resources that foster social resilience, and we describe an educational, computer-based program that builds on these resources in an effort to improve the social resilience among troops in the U.S. Army. Data from this program should provide valuable evidence regarding the challenge of building social resilience.     

Chance operations in training: a participatory format for introducing dialogical family therapy

Presenting dialogical approaches to therapy calls for training approaches that are themselves participatory and dialogical. The use of chance operations is one way of enhancing an interactive and co‐constructive learning process.     

‘Tell us what we need to know to do this!’ Preparing a path to safe uncertainty in assignment writing on a family therapy foundation course

This article describes a single session aimed at helping participants on a family therapy foundation course to move from a position of anxiety and discomfort about completing a written assignment to a position of safe uncertainty. Evaluation from the perspectives of course participants, course facilitators and assignment markers has shown participants engaging more enthusiastically with the writing of the assignment and expressing less anxiety about the process.     

Behaving as expected: Public information and fairness norms

What is considered to be fair depends on context‐dependent expectations. Using a modified version of the Ultimatum Game, we demonstrate that both fair behavior and perceptions of fairness depend upon beliefs about what one ought to do in a situation—that is, upon normative expectations. We manipulate such expectations by creating informational asymmetries about the offer choices available to the Proposer, and find that behavior varies accordingly. Proposers and Responders show a remarkable degree of agreement in their beliefs about which choices are considered fair. We discuss how these results fit into a theory of social norms. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Bioterrorism Threat and Dual-use Biotechnological Research: An Israeli Perspective

Israel has a long history of concern with chemical and biological threats, since several hostile states in the Middle East are likely to possess such weapons. The Twin-Tower terrorist attacks and Anthrax envelope scares of 2001 were a watershed for public perceptions of the threat of unconventional terror in general and of biological terror in particular. New advances in biotechnology will only increase the ability of terrorists to exploit the burgeoning availability of related information to develop ever-more destructive bioweapons. Many areas of modern biological research are unavoidably dual-use by nature. They thus have a great potential for both help and harm; and facilitating the former while preventing the latter remains a serious challenge to researchers and governments alike. This article addresses how Israel might best (1) prevent hostile elements from obtaining, from Israel’s biological research system, materials, information and technologies that might facilitate their carrying out a biological attack, while (2) continuing to promote academic openness, excellence and other hallmarks of that system. This important and sensitive issue was assessed by a special national committee, and their recommendations are presented and discussed. One particularly innovative element is the restructuring and use of Israel’s extensive biosafety system to also address biosecurity goals, with minimal disruption or delay.     

Positive mood effects on delay discounting

Delay discounting is the process by which the value of an expected reward decreases as the delay to obtaining that reward increases. Individuals with higher discounting rates tend to prefer smaller immediate rewards over larger delayed rewards. Previous research has indicated that personality can influence an individual's discounting rates, with higher levels of Extraversion predicting a preference for immediate gratification. The current study examined how this relationship would be influenced by situational mood inductions. While main effects were observed for both Extraversion and cognitive ability in the prediction of discounting rates, a significant interaction was also observed between Extraversion and positive affect. Extraverted individuals were more likely to prefer an immediate reward when first put in a positive mood. Extraverts thus appear particularly sensitive to impulsive, incentive-reward-driven behavior by temperament and by situational factors heightening positive affect.     

Unexpected changes in direction of motion attract attention

Under some circumstances, moving objects capture attention. Whether a change in the direction of a moving object attracts attention is still unexplored. We investigated this using a continuous tracking task. In Experiment 1, four grating patches changed smoothly and semirandomly in their positions and orientations, and observers attempted to track the orientations of two of them. After the stimuli disappeared, one of the two target gratings was queried and observers reported its orientation; hence direction of the gratings' motion across the screen was an irrelevant feature. Despite the irrelevance of its motion, when the nonqueried grating had collided with an invisible boundary within the last 200 msec of the trial, accuracy reporting the queried grating was worse than when it had not. Attention was likely drawn by the unexpected nature of these changes in direction of motion, since the effect was eliminated when the boundaries were visible (Experiment 2). This tendency for unexpected motion changes to attract attention has important consequences for the monitoring of objects in everyday environments.