Prospective memory in young and older adults: The effects of task importance and ongoing task load

Remembering to perform an action in the future, called prospective memory, often shows age-related differences in favor of young adults when tested in the laboratory. Recently Smith, Horn, and Bayen (2012; Aging, Neuropsychology, and Cognition, 19, 495) embedded a PM task in an ongoing color-matching task and manipulated the difficulty of the ongoing task by varying the number of colors on each trial of the task. Smith et al. found that age-related differences in PM performance (lower PM performance for older adults relative to young adults) persisted even when older adults could perform the ongoing task as well or better than the young adults. The current study investigates a possible explanation for the pattern of results reported by Smith et al. by including a manipulation of task emphasis: for half of the participants the prospective memory task was emphasize, while for the other half the ongoing color-matching task was emphasized. Older adults performed a 4-color version of the ongoing color-matching task, while young adults completed either the 4-color or a more difficult 6-color version of the ongoing task. Older adults failed to perform as well as the young adults on the prospective memory task regardless of task emphasis, even when older adults were performing as well or better than the young adults on the ongoing color-matching task. The current results indicate that the lack of an effect of ongoing task load on prospective memory task performance is not due to a perception that one or the other task is more important than the other.     

Entrepreneurship in young adults: Initial findings from the young entrepreneurs study

The scientific study of youth entrepreneurship is truly in its infancy, with research on the development of entrepreneurship constrained by theoretical foundations that rely on static, trait-like approaches that equate entrepreneurship with stable personality characteristics. In this article, we define entrepreneurship as a fluid process that relies on the bidirectional interplay between a developing individual and his or her context. We report initial findings from the Young Entrepreneurs Study that clarify how entrepreneurial intentions and actions manifest in youth. We present quantitative analyses that examined the relations between entrepreneurial strengths and entrepreneurial activities in a sample of 3461 college students, and we describe the results of semi-structured interviews from a 48-person subset of our larger sample that explored how entrepreneurial intentions and actions manifested in our sample. We describe a mixed-method triangulation that integrates these two sets of findings, then discuss implications for future research.     

Publishing Qualitative Research in Counseling Journals

This article focuses on the essential elements to be included when developing a qualitative study and preparing the findings for publication. Using the sections typically found in a qualitative article, the author describes content relevant to each section, with additional suggestions for publishing qualitative research.     

Using PPT to correct for inconsistency in a speeded task

Two experiments employed Potential Performance Theory (PPT) to correct for inconsistency in a speeded task. In Experiment 1, a search task was employed whereby participants searched for a target letter among distracters. In Experiment 2, the search task was more complex and naturalistic-participants searched for enemy weapons in aerial photographs. Not surprisingly, the results revealed that longer search times led to greater accuracy. However, this improvement was due only in part to improved search strategies. Much, if not most, of the improvement was due to increased consistency. The authors demonstrate and discuss some of the advantages to be gained by considering a speeded task within the context of a clear and mathematically precise theory (PPT).     

Divine intimacy and the problem of horrendous evil

The problem of horrendous evil is the problem of reconciling the existence of horrendous evils with the existence of a God that is nevertheless good to individuals. A solution to the problem along the lines of that proposed by Morilyn McCord Adams resolves the problem by appeal to various sorts of intimacy with God on the part of the participants in horrendous evils. One half of the problem concerns the victims of horrendous evils. A second half of the problem of horrendous evil is the same problem for those perpetrators of horrendous evils who also potentially have their lives defeated. The present paper argues not only that the intimacy such an overall strategy appeals to fails to solve the first half of the problem, but also that it makes no progress at all on the second half.     

A collective unconscious reconsidered: Jung's archetypal imagination in the light of contemporary psychology and social science

A needed rapprochement between Jung and the contemporary human sciences may rest less on the much debated relevance of a biologistic collective unconscious than on a re-inscribing of an archetypal imagination, as the phenomenological and empirical core of Jungian psychology. The most promising approaches in this regard in terms of theory and research in psychology come from combining the cognitive psychology of metaphor and synaesthesia, individual differences in imaginative absorption and openness to numinous experience and spirituality as a form of symbolic intelligence. On the socio-cultural side, this cognitive psychology of archetypal imagination is also congruent with Lévi-Strauss on the metaphoric roots of mythological thinking, and Durkheim on a sociology of collective consciousness. This conjoined perspective, while validating the cross cultural commonality of physical metaphor intuited by Jung and Hillman on alchemy, also shows Jung's Red Book, considered as the expressive source for his more formal psychology, to be far closer in spirit to a socio-cultural collective consciousness, based on metaphoric imagination, than to a phylogenetic or evolutionary unconscious. A mutual re-inscribing of Jung into congruent areas of contemporary psychology, anthropology, sociology, and vice versa, can help to further validate Jung's key observations and is fully consistent with Jung's own early efforts at synthesis within the human sciences.     

Psychological and Social Characteristics Associated with Religiosity in Women’s Health Initiative Participants

Measures of religiosity are linked to health outcomes, possibly indicating mediating effects of associated psychological and social factors. We examined cross-sectional data from 92,539 postmenopausal participants of the Women’s Health Initiative Observational Study who responded to questions on religious service attendance, psychological characteristics, and social support domains. We present odds ratios from multiple logistic regressions controlling for covariates. Women attending services weekly during the past month, compared with those not attending at all in the past month, were less likely to be depressed [OR = 0.78; CI = 0.74–0.83] or characterized by cynical hostility [OR = 0.94; CI = 0.90–0.98], and more likely to be optimistic [OR = 1.22; CI = 1.17–1.26]. They were also more likely to report overall positive social support [OR = 1.28; CI = 1.24–1.33], as well as social support of four subtypes (emotional/informational support, affection support, tangible support, and positive social interaction), and were less likely to report social strain [OR = 0.91; CI = 0.88–0.94]. However, those attending more or less than weekly were not less likely to be characterized by cynical hostility, nor were they less likely to report social strain, compared to those not attending during the past month.     

It is irrelevant,but it matters: Using confluence theory to predict the influence of beliefs on evaluations,attitudes, and intentions

The present research is based on the notion of confluence—that associated mental elements have a tendency to become more consistent with each other over time, even if some of them are logically irrelevant to the issue at hand. This idea was applied to a voting paradigm where participants were exposed to varying numbers of valenced beliefs about a candidate. Two experiments tested the idea that although valenced beliefs influence attributions and voting intentions, there is an additional process whereby evaluations of irrelevant beliefs also are influenced. Not surprisingly, as more positive or negative beliefs were presented, voting intentions became more positive or more negative, respectively. More dramatically, however, positive or negative evaluations of irrelevant beliefs became more extreme in the direction of the presented items as more of them were presented. An additional experiment tested alternative mechanisms. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.