Reconsidering Empathy: An Interpersonal Approach and Participatory Arts in the Medical Humanities

Journal of Medical Humanities - The decline of empathy among health professional students, highlighted in the literature on health education, is a concern for medical educators. The evidence...     

Together We Rise: How Social Movements Succeed

Social movements, such as Black Lives Matter, surge when support grows for their social justice goals. At their core, social movements advance when people act collectively by rising in solidarity with a shared purpose to address injustice and inequality. Drawing on insights from consumer psychology, this review investigates how social movements succeed in creating social change. We build on an established 21^st‐century framework for how social movements succeed to outline the promising practices of successful social movements. For each of these practices, we identify the consumer psychology mechanisms that motivate collective action and encourage people to transform from bystanders to upstanders, those who provide the grassroots momentum for successful social movements. We illustrate this framework with examples from the growth of the Black Lives Matter movement. Finally, we highlight insights from consumer psychology that promote an understanding of social movements, and we raise research questions to encourage more consumer psychologists to investigate how social movements succeed.     

Women's attraction to benevolent sexism: Needing relationship security predicts greater attraction to men who endorse benevolent sexism

Benevolent sexism prescribes that men should cherish and protect women in intimate relationships. Despite the romantic tone of these attitudes, prior research indicates that benevolent sexism undermines women's competence, ambition, and independence. Ambivalent sexism theory proposes that benevolent sexism is able to incur these costs because the promise of a chivalrous and protective partner offers women security in their intimate relationships. We tested this key proposition by examining whether women who intensely need relationship security—women higher in attachment anxiety—are more attracted to men who endorse benevolent sexism. Highly anxious women (N = 632) rated men described as endorsing benevolent sexism as relatively more attractive, and reported greater preferences for partners to hold benevolently sexist attitudes. These results advance understanding regarding the underlying reasons women find benevolent sexism appealing and identify who will be most vulnerable to the potential costs of benevolent sexism.     

Do children with autism recognise surprise? A research note

Abstract

We take a fresh look at emotion recognition in autistic children, by testing their recognition of three different emotions (happy, sad, and surprise). The interest in selecting these is that whereas the first two are typical “simple” emotions (caused by situations), the third is typically a “cognitive” emotion (caused by beliefs). Because subjects with autism have clear difficulties in understanding beliefs, we predicted they would show more difficulty in recognising surprise. In contrast, as they have no difficulty in understanding situations as causes of emotion, we predicted they would not show deficits in recognising happy and sad. These predictions were borne out, in a comparison with a group of normal children and in a group of subjects with mental handicap. This result shows the importance of fine-grain analysis in emotion-recognition tasks, and is discussed in relation to affective and theory of mind models of autism.     

A Developmental Investigation of Prospective Memory: Effects of Interruption

The effects of interrupting an event-based prospective memory (PM) task and its associated ongoing task were compared for two groups of children: 8- to 9-year-olds (n?=?35) and 12- to 13-year-olds (n?=?28). Additionally, PM performance was examined as a function of attainment on a battery of tests of executive functioning (viz., Controlled Oral Word Association Test, Letter Number Sequencing Test, Stroop Color and Word Test, and Trail Making Test). A significant main effect of age indicated that the older children correctly carried out intended actions more often than the younger children. Consistent with the prefrontal model of PM, interruption had no impact on PM accuracy in the older group but produced reliable decrements to the accuracy of the younger group. Whereas IQ showed no association with PM performance, reliable relations between PM skills and aspects of their executive functioning were found.     

The assessment and management of suicide risk: state of workshop education

A systematic search of popular and scholarly databases identified workshops that addressed general clinical competence in the assessment or management of suicide risk, targeted mental health professionals, and had at least one peer-reviewed publication. We surveyed workshop developers and examined empirical articles associated with each workshop. The state of workshop education is characterized by presenting the learning objectives, educational formats, instructor factors, and evaluation studies. Workshops are efficacious for transferring knowledge and shifting attitudes; however, their role in improving clinical care and outcomes of suicidal patients has yet to be determined.