Psychology's contributions to understanding and addressing global climate change

Global climate change poses one of the greatest challenges facing humanity in this century. This article, which introduces the American Psychologist special issue on global climate change, follows from the report of the American Psychological Association Task Force on the Interface Between Psychology and Global Climate Change. In this article, we place psychological dimensions of climate change within the broader context of human dimensions of climate change by addressing (a) human causes of, consequences of, and responses (adaptation and mitigation) to climate change and (b) the links between these aspects of climate change and cognitive, affective, motivational, interpersonal, and organizational responses and processes. Characteristics of psychology that cross content domains and that make the field well suited for providing an understanding of climate change and addressing its challenges are highlighted. We also consider ethical imperatives for psychologists' involvement and provide suggestions for ways to increase psychologists' contribution to the science of climate change.     

Single mothers raising children with "male-positive" attitudes

Among the challenges facing single mothers, a particularly difficult one is how to help children develop "male-positive" attitudes in situations when the parents have broken up and children have no active relationship with the father. Despite a large academic literature on single mothering, there is strikingly little discussion on this topic. Using symbolic interactionism and family systems theory, we offer psychoeducational messages for single mothers who want to raise their children with male-positive attitudes. We also call for a new cultural conversation on an issue ignored for too long.     

Mental health and mediumship: an interpretative phenomenological analysis

There is a lack of research examining the mental health of practicing mediums, yet the nature of mediumship work inherently presents a number of challenges to the mental health of practitioners. In this study, we aimed to gain an understanding of how mediums experience their mental health in relation to their mediumistic practice and how they recognise and respond to psychological difficulties experienced by their clients. Fourteen mediums from the North West of England took part in one-to-one interviews, which were transcribed and subject to interpretative phenomenological analysis. Four themes were identified: from past traumas to mediumistic identity; spirit makes sense, mental illness is chaos; being resilient but vulnerable; and ethical mediumistic practice. The research highlights the value of not dismissing or attempting to change appraisals of valued aspects of mediums’ anomalous experiences. However, the findings do indicate that support for exposure to clients’ difficulties might be helpful.     

Immoral,Incompetent, and Lacking Warmth: How Stereotypes of Teenage Fathers Compare to Those of Other Parents

Sex Roles - Constructions of teenage fathers largely portray them as absent, criminal, and violent (Johansson and Hammarén 2014; Kiselica and Kiselica 2014), with their identity tied to the...     

Risky Communication: Pitfalls in Counseling About Risk,and How to Avoid Them

A genetic counselor is often faced with the difficult task of conveying a set of complex and highly abstract factors associated with the client's risk of developing a familial disorder. The client is faced with the even more difficult task of making significant health-related decisions about an event which may or may not eventuate. Although there is a large corpus of research on this topic, much of the knowledge on risk communication is difficult to apply in a practical context. In this paper we draw together some insights on risk communication and decision-making under conditions of uncertainty, and apply them directly to the problem of communicating familial cancer risk. In particular, we focus on the distinction between individual risk and observed frequencies of adverse events, various framing effects, and contextualizing risk communication. We draw attention to some of the potential pitfalls in counseling about risk and offer avenues for circumventing them.     

The pseudodiagnosticity trap: Should participants consider alternative hypotheses?

The pseudodiagnosticity task has been used as an example of the tendency on the part of participants to incorrectly assess Bayesian constraints in assessing data, and as a failure to consider alternative hypotheses in a probabilistic inference task. In the task, participants are given one value, the anchor value, corresponding to P(D1|H) and may choose one other value, either P(D1|¬!H), P(D2|H), or P(D2|not;!H). Most participants select P(D2|H), or P(D2|¬!H) which have been considered inappropriate (and called pseudodiagnostic) because only P(D1|¬!H) allows use of Bayes' theorem. We present a new analysis based on probability intervals and show that selection of either P(D2|H), or P(D2|¬!H) is in fact pseudodiagnostic, whereas choice of P(D1|¬!H) is diagnostic. Our analysis shows that choice of the pseudodiagnostic values actually increases uncertainty regarding the posterior probability of H, supporting the original interpretation of the experimental findings on the pseudodiagnosticity task. The argument illuminates the general proposition that evolutionarily adaptive heuristics for Bayesian inference can be misled in some task situations.