Higher Education in Light of the Cross

What is the summum bonum of a university education? The much lauded “liberal” approach of Aristotle, Newman, and Roche proposes that education is for contemplating the truth—an intrinsic, joyous end in itself. This approach offers the benefits of pursuing truth, virtues, and intellectual habits, but it also carries with it the temptations of idealatry and homo incurvatus in se. Christian universities can reform this approach to education, though, with Luther's theology of the cross, reorienting it through the crucified Christ toward the highest ends of life revealed in God's word: faith in God and love for the neighbor.     

Clinical Validity of Prototype Personality Disorder Ratings in Adolescents

A growing body of research shows that personality pathology in adolescents is clinically distinctive and frequently stable into adulthood. A reliable and useful method for rating personality pathology in adolescent patients has the potential to enhance conceptualization, dissemination, and treatment effectiveness. The aim of this study is to examine the clinical validity of a prototype matching approach (derived from the Shedler Westen Assessment Procedure–Adolescent Version) for quantifying personality pathology in an adolescent inpatient sample. Sixty-six adolescent inpatients and their parents or legal guardians completed forms of the Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL) assessing emotional and behavioral problems. Clinical criterion variables including suicide history, substance use, and fights with peers were also assessed. Patients’ individual and group therapists on the inpatient unit completed personality prototype ratings. Prototype diagnoses demonstrated substantial reliability (median intraclass correlation coefficient =.75) across independent ratings from individual and group therapists. Personality prototype ratings correlated with the CBCL scales and clinical criterion variables in anticipated and meaningful ways. As seen in prior research with adult samples, prototype personality ratings show clinical validity across independent clinician raters previously unfamiliar with the approach, and they are meaningfully related to clinical symptoms, behavioral problems, and adaptive functioning.     

Social and Cognitive Aspects of the Vulnerability to Political Misinformation

In the last few years, especially after the Brexit referendum and the 2016 U.S. elections, there has been a surge in academic interest for misinformation and disinformation. Social, cognitive, and political scientists' work on these phenomena has focused on two main aspects:

• Individuals' (and by extension societies') vulnerability to misinformation;
• Factors and interventions that can increase individuals' (and societies') resistance to misinformation.

In this article, we offer a critical review of the psychological research pertaining to these two aspects. Drawing on this review, we highlight an emerging tension in the relevant literature. Indeed, the current state of the art of the political misinformation literature reflects the combined operation of two opposing psychological constructs: excess gullibility on the one hand and excess vigilance on the other. We argue that this conceptualization is important in both advancing theories of individuals' and societies' vulnerability to misinformation and in designing prospective research programs. We conclude with proposing what, in our view, are the most promising avenues for future research in the field.     

Developing Multicultural Counseling Competencies in Undergraduate Students

The authors assessed the impact of training undergraduates in multicultural counseling competencies. When compared with a control group of students in a psychology of personality course (n = 20), repeated measures analyses of variance confirmed that multicultural counseling trainees (n = 21) significantly increased levels of multicultural counseling awareness and knowledge. As expected, there were no significant changes in either multicultural counseling skills or empathic responding. Los autores evaluaron el impacto de educar a estudiantes universitarios sobre las competencias de consejería multicultural. Comparados con un grupo de control matriculado en un curso de psicología de la personalidad (n = 20), un análisis de variaeión de medidas repetidas confirmó que los niveles de consciencia y conocimiento de los estudiantes de consejería multicultural (n = 21) fueron significativamente aumentados. Como esperado, no se observaron cambios significativos en las habilidades de consejería multicultural ni en las reacciones empáticas.     

Turning a deaf ear to fear: impaired recognition of vocal affect in psychopathic individuals

The processing of emotional expressions is fundamental for normal socialization and interaction. Reduced responsiveness to the expressions of sadness and fear has been implicated in the development of psychopathy (R. J. R. Blair, 1995). The current study investigates the ability of adult psychopathic individuals to process vocal affect. Psychopathic and nonpsychopathic adults, defined by the Hare Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R; R. D. Hare, 1991), were presented with neutral words spoken with intonations conveying happiness, disgust, anger, sadness, and fear and were asked to identify the emotion of the speaker on the basis of prosody. The results indicated that psychopathic inmates were particularly impaired in the recognition of fearful vocal affect. These results are interpreted with reference to the low-fear and violence inhibition mechanism models of psychopathy.     

Motion and edge sensitivity in perception of object unity

Although much evidence indicates that young infants perceive unitary objects by analyzing patterns of motion, infants' abilities to perceive object unity by analyzing Gestalt properties and by integrating distinct views of an object over time are in dispute. To address these controversies, four experiments investigated adults' and infants' perception of the unity of a center-occluded, moving rod with misaligned visible edges. Both alignment information and depth information affected adults' and infants' perception of object unity in similar ways, and infants perceived object unity by integrating information about object features over time. However, infants perceived a moving, misaligned, three-dimensional object as indeterminate in its connectedness, whereas adults perceived it as connected behind the occluder. These findings indicate that the effectiveness of common motion in specifying unified surfaces across an occluder is reduced by misalignment of edges. Alignment information enhances perception of object unity either by serving directly as information for unity or by optimizing the detectability of motion-carried information for unity. In addition, young infants are able to retain information about edge orientation over short intervals in determining connectedness via a process of spatiotemporal integration.     

Model fitting in (<Emphasis Type="Italic">n</Emphasis>+1) dimensions

Conventionally, fitting a mathematical model to empirically derived data is achieved by varying model parameters to minimize the deviations between expected and observed values in the dependent dimension. However, when functions to be fit are multivalued (e.g., an ellipse), conventional model fitting procedures fail. A novel (n+1)-dimensional [(n+1)-D] model fitting procedure is presented which can solve such problems by transforming then-D model and data into (n+1)-D space and then minimizing deviations in the constructed dimension. While the (n+1)-D procedure provides model fits identical to those obtained with conventional methods for single-valued functions, it also extends parameter estimation to multivalued functions.     

A Preliminary Investigation of the Relationship Between Emotion Dysregulation and Partner Violence Perpetration Among Individuals with PTSD and Alcohol Dependence

This study examines the link between emotion dysregulation and intimate partner violence (IPV) among 77 individuals with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and alcohol dependence. Participants were recruited from a residential substance abuse treatment program as part of the eligibility screening for an institutional review board approved clinical trial examining the efficacy of an exposure-based intervention in individuals dually diagnosed with alcohol dependence and PTSD. Participants reported on PTSD symptoms, alcohol use disorder symptoms, emotion dysregulation, and physical and verbal aggression in their intimate relationships during the past year. Findings demonstrated that difficulties with emotion regulation are associated with physical and verbal IPV perpetration in a clinical sample. Although facets of emotion regulation emerged as significant predictors of IPV in the models, alcohol and PTSD symptom severity did not emerge as predictors of IPV. These findings suggest targeted emotion regulation skills training could benefit substance abusers who engage in IPV and that emotion dysregulation might be an important target for future research aimed at understanding elevated rates of IPV perpetration in mental health samples.     

Ignorance May Be Bliss, But Thought Suppression Promotes Superficial Cognitive Processing

This study examined the impact of thought suppression on the quality of cognitive processing and self-reported mood. While completing a stream-of-consciousness task about two topics sequentially, participants were either instructed to suppress negative thoughts or were given no suppression instructions. Computer-based content analyses indicated that thought suppression led to significantly less causal reasoning and discrepancy seeking. However, the suppression of negative thoughts also resulted in a more positive mood. Results suggest that thought suppression can improve mood but it comes with the cognitive cost of superficial processing.     

Foundations of infants' social group evaluations

Previous research has suggested that infants exhibit a preference for familiar over unfamiliar social groups (e.g., preferring individuals from their own language group over individuals from a foreign language group). However, because past studies often employ forced‐choice procedures, it is not clear whether infants' intergroup preferences are driven by positivity toward members of familiar groups, negativity toward members of unfamiliar groups, or both. Across six experiments, we implemented a habituation procedure to independently measure infants' positive and negative evaluations of speakers of familiar and unfamiliar languages. We report that by 1 year of age, infants positively evaluate individuals who speak a familiar language, but do not negatively evaluate individuals who speak an unfamiliar language (Experiments 1 and 2). Several experiments rule out lower‐level explanations (Experiments 3–6). Together these data suggest that children's early social group preferences may be shaped by positive evaluations of familiar group(s), rather than negative evaluations of unfamiliar groups.