The assessment of present-moment awareness and acceptance: the Philadelphia Mindfulness Scale

The purpose of this project was to develop a bidimensional measure of mindfulness to assess its two key components: present-moment awareness and acceptance. The development and psychometric validation of the Philadelphia Mindfulness Scale is described, and data are reported from expert raters, two nonclinical samples (n = 204 and 559), and three clinical samples including mixed psychiatric outpatients (n = 52), eating disorder inpatients (n = 30), and student counseling center outpatients (n = 78). Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses support a two-factor solution, corresponding to the two constituent components of the construct. Good internal consistency was demonstrated, and relationships with other constructs were largely as expected. As predicted, significant differences were found between the nonclinical and clinical samples in levels of awareness and acceptance. The awareness and acceptance subscales were not correlated, suggesting that these two constructs can be examined independently. Potential theoretical and applied uses of the measure are discussed.     

Judging Words at Face Value: Interference in a Word Processing Task Reveals Automatic Processing of Affective Facial Expressions

Earlier research has indicated that some characteristics of facial expressions may be automatically processed. This study investigated automaticity as evidenced by involuntary interference in a word evaluation task. Compound stimuli, consisting of words superimposed on pictures of affective faces, were presented to subjects who were given the task of evaluating the affective valence of the words while disregarding the faces. Results of three experiments showed that word evaluation was influenced by the concurrently shown affective faces. Overall, negative words were found to require longer latencies, indicating that more processing resources are invested in negative than in positive stimuli. This speed advantage for positive words was modified by the faces. Negative words were facilitated, relative to positive ones, when shown with a negative expression (e.g. a sad face). Correspondingly, negative words were inhibited, relative to positive ones, when shown with a positive expression (e.g. a happy face). The results are consistent with automatic, involuntary semantic processing of affective facial expressions.     

Traditional Masculinity Ideology and Diagnostic Aversion Predict Symptom Expression in a Community Sample of Distressed Men

Sex Roles - Adherence to traditional masculinity ideology (TMI) is associated with a host of negative outcomes, including higher rates of internalizing and externalizing psychopathology. However,...     

Accuracy of Social Perception: An Integration and Review of Meta‐Analyses

This review examines the overall accuracy of social perception across several research topics and identifies factors that influence the accuracy of social perception. Findings from 14 meta‐analyses examining topics such as social/personality judgments, health judgments, legal judgments, and academic/vocational judgments were obtained. Social perception accuracy was generally moderate, yielding an average effect size (r) of .32. However, individual meta‐analytic effects varied widely, with some topics yielding small effects (e.g., lie detection, eyewitness identification) and other topics yielding large effects (e.g., educational judgments, health judgments). Several moderators of social perception accuracy were identified, including the nature of the information source, familiarity of the target, type of personality trait, and severity of the outcome being judged. These findings provide a comprehensive summary and novel integration of disparate findings on the accuracy of social perception. Concluding remarks highlight avenues for future research and call for cross‐disciplinary collaborations that would enhance our understanding of social perception.     

Creativity and Ethics: The Relationship of Creative and Ethical Problem-Solving

Students of creativity have long been interested in the relationship between creativity and deviant behaviors such as criminality, mental disease, and unethical behavior. In the present study we wished to examine the relationship between creative thinking skills and ethical decision-making among scientists. Accordingly, 258 doctoral students in the health, biological, and social sciences were asked to complete a measure of creative processing skills (e.g., problem definition, conceptual combination, idea generation) and a measure of ethical decision-making examining four domains, data management, study conduct, professional practices, and business practices. It was found that ethical decision-making in all four of these areas was related to creative problem-solving processes with late cycle processes (e.g., idea generation and solution monitoring) proving particularly important. The implications of these findings for understanding the relationship between creative and deviant thought are discussed.     

Counterlogicals as Counterconventionals

Journal of Philosophical Logic - We develop and defend a new approach to counterlogicals. Non-vacuous counterlogicals, we argue, fall within a broader class of counterfactuals known as...     

A Meta-Analysis of Ethics Instruction Effectiveness in the Sciences

Scholars have proposed a number of courses and programs intended to improve the ethical behavior of scientists in an attempt to maintain the integrity of the scientific enterprise. In the present study, we conducted a quantitative meta-analysis based on 26 previous ethics program evaluation efforts, and the results showed that the overall effectiveness of ethics instruction was modest. The effects of ethics instruction, however, were related to a number of instructional program factors, such as course content and delivery methods, in addition to factors of the evaluation study itself, such as the field of investigator and criterion measure utilized. An examination of the characteristics contributing to the relative effectiveness of instructional programs revealed that more successful programs were conducted as seminars separate from the standard curricula rather than being embedded in existing courses. Furthermore, more successful programs were case based and interactive, and they allowed participants to learn and practice the application of real-world ethical decision-making skills. The implications of these findings for future course development and evaluation are discussed.     

An Initial Examination of Religious Coping in Children With Asthma

This study evaluated the relations between positive religious coping (PRC) and negative religious coping (NRC) strategies and adjustment in 87 children and adolescents (described as “children”) hospitalized for asthma. Children's adjustment during hospitalization and at follow-up was correlated with and regressed onto measures of PRC and NRC. After controlling for relevant variables, religious coping predicted up to 50% of the variance in adjustment measures. Religious coping also significantly predicted adjustment after controlling for established measures of secular coping. PRC did not predict adjustment as hypothesized, other than predicting spiritual growth. NRC predicted poorer adjustment during hospitalization and at follow-up, and an increase in anxiety over time suggesting potential risk to children's adjustment. Although methodological limitations are noted, these initial findings provide a foundation on which to further examine the palliative and potentially harmful effects of children's religious coping.     

An Evaluation of the Effects of Graphic Aids in Improving Decision Accuracy in a Continuous Treatment Design

Educators, school psychologists, and other professionals must evaluate student progress and decide to continue, modify, or terminate instructional programs to ensure student success. For this purpose, progress-monitoring data are often collected, plotted graphically, and visually analyzed. The current study evaluated the impact of three common formats for visual analysis (scatter plots, scatter plots with trend lines, and scatter plots with trend and aim lines) on the decision accuracy of 52 novice analysts. All participants viewed 18 time-series graphs that depicted student growth on a continuous metric (e.g., oral reading fluency). Participants rated each graph as depicting substantial progress, minimal progress, or no progress. The magnitude of the true slope for each graph was fixed to 3.00 (substantial progress), 0.75 (minimal progress), or 0 (no progress). Inferential analyses were used to determine the probability of a participant correctly identifying different magnitudes of trend in the presence of different visual aids (no visual aid, trend line, and trend line with aim line). The odds of correctly identifying trend were influenced by visual aid (p < .01) and trend magnitude (p < .01). The addition of a trend line resulted in a sharp increase in the probability of making a correct decision. Graphs depicting minimal progress reduced the probability of a correct decision.