Curious eyes: individual differences in personality predict eye movement behavior in scene-viewing

Visual exploration is driven by two main factors - the stimuli in our environment, and our own individual interests and intentions. Research investigating these two aspects of attentional guidance has focused almost exclusively on factors common across individuals. The present study took a different tack, and examined the role played by individual differences in personality. Our findings reveal that trait curiosity is a robust and reliable predictor of an individual's eye movement behavior in scene-viewing. These findings demonstrate that who a person is relates to how they move their eyes.     

Walking in Beauty: An American Indian Perspective on Social Justice

The purpose of this article is to introduce “walking in beauty,” an American Indian spiritual perspective related to social justice that emphasizes beauty, harmony, connectedness/unity of experience, and imagination. Walking in beauty includes 3 processes: embodiment, creativity, and appreciation of the sublime. Recommendations are offered for counselors to walk in beauty with their clients. This way of being is viewed as a path to social justice.     

Commitment to a developing preference and predecisional distortion of information

People tend to distort their evaluation of decision-relevant information in favor of the currently preferred alternative. We test whether this predecisional distortion of information is amplified by increased commitment to that current preference. We manipulated commitment, without changing the preferred option’s content, by requiring participants to indicate their preference either by circling or by darkening a sizable box (cf. feature-positive effect). Experiment 1 revealed that the effort to darken substantially increased predecisional distortion. Experiment 2 ruled out elaboration as an explanation for the effect of darkening. Experiment 3 showed that, among participants who attributed the darkening effort to an external source, predecisional distortion decreased when the source was believed to summon effort. These findings suggest that the developing commitment to a tentatively preferred alternative is one driver of predecisional distortion.     

Training for a New Generation

Teachers … can never tell where their influence stops.
Henry Brooks Adams (1907)