How automatic are social judgments?

Do people infer personality dispositions automatically when they encode behavior? Tulving's encoding-specificity paradigm was adapted to test three operational indicants of automatism: absence of intention, of interference from other mental activity, and of awareness. Recruited for a digit-recall study, subjects read sentences describing actions during the retention interval of either an easy or a difficult digit recall task. Later, sentence recall was cued by (a) disposition cues, (b) strong semantic associates to the sentence actor, or (c) words representing the gist of the sentence, or (d) sentence recall was not cued. Awareness was measured immediately after the last sentence was read. Disposition-cued recall was higher than (b) or (d) and was unaffected by digit recall difficulty. Awareness of making dispositional inferences was only weakly correlated with disposition-cued recall. Results suggest that disposition inferences occurred at encoding, without intention, without interference by differential drain on processing capacity, and with little awareness. Thus, making dispositional inferences seems to be largely, but not entirely, automatic.     

Choice and source attractiveness in exposure to discrepant messages

The effects of choice, source attractiveness, and discrepancy size on the acceptance of a message about a tuition increase were investigated under high involvement conditions. In keeping with dissonance theory predictions, the results showed that when subjects chose to expose themselves to the discrepant message, the message from an unattractive source produced the most opinion change. Under no choice conditions, more change was produced by the message from the attractive source. However, this effect only occurred at the highest message disrepancy level. The results were interpreted in terms of the prevailing real-life conditions under which the study was run in line with an expectancydissonance approach.     

Socialization and themes in popular drama: An analysis of the content of child-rearing manuals and Don Juan plays in sixteenth to twentieth centuries

A content analysis is reported of child-rearing manuals published in sixteenth to nineteenth centuries and of the themes of the Don Juan plays in seventeenth to twentieth centuries. The relationship between the content of the manuals and the themes of the plays supports the thesis that child-rearing patterns advocated in one century are reflected in the next in the attitudes expressed in popular cultural activities towards aggression, achievement and sex roles.     

Bayesian PTSD-Trajectory Analysis with Informed Priors Based on a Systematic Literature Search and Expert Elicitation

There is a recent increase in interest of Bayesian analysis. However, little effort has been made thus far to directly incorporate background knowledge via the prior distribution into the analyses. This process might be especially useful in the context of latent growth mixture modeling when one or more of the latent groups are expected to be relatively small due to what we refer to as limited data. We argue that the use of Bayesian statistics has great advantages in limited data situations, but only if background knowledge can be incorporated into the analysis via prior distributions. We highlight these advantages through a data set including patients with burn injuries and analyze trajectories of posttraumatic stress symptoms using the Bayesian framework following the steps of the WAMBS-checklist. In the included example, we illustrate how to obtain background information using previous literature based on a systematic literature search and by using expert knowledge. Finally, we show how to translate this knowledge into prior distributions and we illustrate the importance of conducting a prior sensitivity analysis. Although our example is from the trauma field, the techniques we illustrate can be applied to any field.     

Behind the (Virtual) Mirror: Online Live Supervision in Couple and Family Therapy

Online therapy and supervision, a rapidly rising practice in couple and family therapy, has been the subject of a growing body of literature. From its early days, family therapy training has included live supervision, which has typically been conducted by a supervisor and a team of trainees situated on the other side of a one-way mirror. With the outbreak of the COVID-19 global pandemic, we—the staff of supervisors at the Barcai Institute in Tel Aviv, Israel—were compelled to find solutions to continue meeting with clients and to provide supervision for family therapy trainees. To this end, we have shifted our live supervision courses (“practicums”) to the virtual arena, adapting the popular application “Zoom” into what we call “PractiZoom.” Based on over 100 PractiZoom sessions conducted between March and May 2020, involving 14 supervisors and 28 therapists-in-training and their clients, the article reflects on this pioneering online practicum for the online live supervision of therapists with geographically distributed participants. In this article, we outline our operational methods and adaptations for conducting live behind-the-mirror supervision online. Following a short theoretical background, we outline the process of online live supervision, discuss our reflections and those of our trainees on the challenges and possibilities it poses, and offer a number of preliminary conclusions and recommendations.