Lasting false beliefs and their behavioral consequences

False beliefs and memories can affect people's attitudes, at least in the short term. But can they produce real changes in behavior? This study explored whether falsely suggesting to subjects that they had experienced a food-related event in their childhood would lead to a change in their behavior shortly after the suggestion and up to 4 months later. We falsely suggested to 180 subjects that, as children, they had gotten ill after eating egg salad. Results showed that, after this manipulation, a significant minority of subjects came to believe they had experienced this childhood event even though they had initially denied having experienced it. This newfound autobiographical belief was accompanied by the intent to avoid egg salad, and also by significantly reduced consumption of egg-salad sandwiches, both immediately and 4 months after the false suggestion. The false suggestion of a childhood event can lead to persistent false beliefs that have lasting behavioral consequences.     

The reality of recovered memories: corroborating continuous and discontinuous memories of childhood sexual abuse

Although controversy surrounds the relative authenticity of discontinuous versus continuous memories of childhood sexual abuse (CSA), little is known about whether such memories differ in their likelihood of corroborative evidence. Individuals reporting CSA memories were interviewed, and two independent raters attempted to find corroborative information for the allegations. Continuous CSA memories and discontinuous memories that were unexpectedly recalled outside therapy were more likely to be corroborated than anticipated discontinuous memories recovered in therapy. Evidence that suggestion during therapy possibly mediates these differences comes from the additional finding that individuals who recalled the memories outside therapy were markedly more surprised at the existence of their memories than were individuals who initially recalled the memories in therapy. These results indicate that discontinuous CSA memories spontaneously retrieved outside of therapy may be accurate, while implicating expectations arising from suggestions during therapy in producing false CSA memories.     

It's the thought that counts: on perceiving how helpers decide to lend a hand

How do people react to those who have helped them? The authors propose that a recipient's evaluation of a helper's intentions and the recipient's own attitudes about future interactions with the helper depend partly on the recipient's perceptions of how the helper decided to assist: on the basis of affect, of role, or of cost-benefit calculation. When a recipient perceives that the decision was based on affect (i.e., positive feelings about him or her), he or she will be more inclined toward future interaction and reciprocation than if he or she perceives the decision as based on role or cost-benefit calculation. It is proposed that these "decision modes" signal the helper's underlying attitudes about the recipient, which in turn, clarify their relationship. A boundary is also identified: The negative impact of apparent cost-benefit thinking is greatest when the amount of help provided is small. Predictions are confirmed in four studies of actual and experimentally manipulated helping episodes.     

Temporal order relations in language comprehension

The role of temporal orientation (chronological or reverse) and chronological distance (close, intermediate, or distant) in general event knowledge on language comprehension was examined. Experiment 1 used a relation-recognition paradigm in which the comprehension of a target event could be facilitated or disrupted by the temporal orientation implied by the prior information. Experiments 2 and 3 used a sentence-probe-recognition paradigm in which the temporal orientation, the stimulus onset asynchrony, and the chronological distance between the sentence event and the probe event were manipulated. The results demonstrated that readers used temporal information conveyed by their knowledge to construct situation models while comprehending sentences. The internal temporal dimension appeared to be directional and reflected the chronological distance between everyday events.     

Revisiting the dimensional structure of the emotion domain

Recent research has claimed that a novelty dimension is needed to represent the cognitive emotion structure over and above valence, power and arousal. Novelty emerged when student samples evaluated the meaning of 24 emotion terms on 142 emotion features. This claim is debatable, however, because to date novelty has never been found in similarity sorting studies. It is possible that novelty emerged because sophisticated student samples evaluated emotion terms on emotion features. The current research identified a large, representative set of emotion terms using a free-listing task in a middle childhood up to early adulthood sample (N = 5071). Children, adolescents, students and adults (N = 1184) then evaluated the similarity between these emotion terms using a similarity rating task without priming any emotion feature. Novelty robustly emerged as the fourth dimension. The existence of novelty is thus confirmed with a different method across a wide variety of participants.     

Women–Focused Treatment Agencies and Process Improvement: Strategies to Increase Client Engagement

Behavioral health treatment agencies often struggle to keep clients engaged in treatment. Women clients often have additional factors such as family responsibilities, financial difficulties, or abuse histories that provide extra challenges to remaining in care. As part of a national initiative, four women-focused drug treatment agencies used process improvement to address treatment engagement. Interviews and focus groups with staff assessed the nature and extent of interventions. Women-focused drug treatment agencies selected relational-based interventions to engage clients in treatment and improved four-week treatment retention from 66% to 76%. Process improvement interventions in women-focused treatment may be useful to improve engagement.     

Social Judgement Theory

This paper first explores a number of themes in the psychological system developed by the Austrian-American psychologist, Egon Brunswik, focusing on those that had a formative influence on Social Judgement Theory. We show that while perception was a recurring ground for Brunswik's empirical and theoretical work, his psychology was a psychology of cognition in the broadest sense. Next, two major themes in Social Judgement Theory— functionalism and probabilism— are described, and the elegant formulation known as Brunswik's Lens Model is introduced. Some methodological and theoretical implications of these themes are presented. The paper concludes with Hammond's Cognitive Continuum Theory (CCT), which is a theory describing modes of cognition and how those modes are influenced by task characteristics.     

Antecedents and consequences of adolescents' motivations to join the family business

This study investigates the career development of adolescents with a family business background through a motivational lens. Drawing on self-determination theory, antecedents and consequences of three succession motivations (autonomous, e.g., career interest; introjected, e.g., family obligation; external, e.g., job opportunities) were analyzed in a sample of 152 adolescents in family firms. Structural equation modeling revealed that parental relational support and adolescent's perceived entrepreneurial competence predicted autonomous motivation, whereas parental control related to introjected motivation. Moreover, autonomous motivation related positively to offspring's succession likelihood. Findings point to the relevance of parental career-specific behaviors in the early process of career and succession planning in family firms.     

Comparing the neural correlates of affective and cognitive theory of mind using fMRI: Involvement of the basal ganglia in affective theory of mind

Theory of Mind (ToM) is the ability to infer other people’s mental states like intentions or desires. ToM can be differentiated into affective (i.e., recognizing the feelings of another person) and cognitive (i.e., inferring the mental state of the counterpart) subcomponents. Recently, subcortical structures such as the basal ganglia (BG) have also been ascribed to the multifaceted concept ToM and most BG disorders have been reported to elicit ToM deficits. In order to assess both the correlates of affective and cognitive ToM as well as involvement of the basal ganglia, 30 healthy participants underwent event-related fMRI scanning, neuropsychological testing, and filled in questionnaires concerning different aspects of ToM and empathy. Directly contrasting affective (aff) as well as cognitive (cog) ToM to the control (phy) condition, activation was found in classical ToM regions, namely parts of the temporal lobe including the superior temporal sulcus, the supplementary motor area, and parietal structures in the right hemisphere. The contrast aff > phy yielded additional activation in the orbitofrontal cortex on the right and the cingulate cortex, the precentral and inferior frontal gyrus and the cerebellum on the left. The right BG were recruited in this contrast as well. The direct contrast aff > cog showed activation in the temporoparietal junction and the cingulate cortex on the right as well as in the left supplementary motor area. The reverse contrast cog > aff however did not yield any significant clusters. In summary, affective and cognitive ToM partly share neural correlates but can also be differentiated anatomically. Furthermore, the BG are involved in affective ToM and thus their contribution is discussed as possibly providing a motor component of simulation processes, particularly in affective ToM.     

The regulation of subjective well-being in cancer patients: An analysis of coping effectiveness

Abstract

The hypothesis that individual coping efforts affect subjective well-being in the face of severe chronic disease is examined with questionnaire data from N=332 cancer patients in a one-year longitudinal study. After depicting conceptual and methodological requirements for the analysis of coping effectiveness, the following five coping modes were investigated in the sample: Rumination, search for affiliation, threat minimization, search for information and search for meaning in religion. Results from a series of hierarchical regression analyses yielded findings that questioned the underlying assumption of a general uniform causal direction within coping-adjustment relationships. Threat minimization proved to be the only coping mode that obviously was “effective” in well-being regulation, that is, was revealed to be predictive of well-being changes over time and to be unaffected by prior levels of well-being. It is argued that the problem of causal directionality has to be carefully examined in future studies on coping effectiveness since interindividual differences in coping behaviors might be a consequence rather than the cause of differences in adjustment status.