Establishing versus preserving impressions: Predicting success in the multiple audience problem

People sometimes seek to convey discrepant impressions of themselves to different audiences simultaneously. Research suggests people are generally successful in this “multiple audience problem.” Adding to previous research, the current research sought to examine factors that may limit this success by measuring social anxiety and placing participants into situations requiring them to either establish or preserve multiple impressions simultaneously. In general, participants were more successful when preserving previously conveyed impressions than when establishing impressions for the first time. In contrast, social anxiety did not affect multiple audience success. In all, this research offers valuable insight into potential challenges that people face in many social situations.     

“THE MAN WHO COMMITTED A HUNDRED BURGLARIES”: MARK BENNEY'S STRANGE AND EVENTFUL SOCIOLOGICAL CAREER

This article examines the life and career of the sociologist Mark Benney. It describes the processes, not all of them edifying, by which he made the transition from life as a career criminal, via literature, to become a sociologist first at the London School of Economics and then at the University of Chicago. Benney's career is then used to illuminate particular episodes in the history of sociology, including the attempt to introduce into British sociology in the period after the Second World War quantitative survey techniques of the kind that were then becoming more widely used in the United States, and his work with David Riesman on the Interview Project, Riesman's attempt to develop a empirically based sociology of the interview.     

THE IMPACT OF DEPRESSION ON MATERNAL RESPONSES TO INFANT FACES IN PREGNANCY

Research has suggested that prenatal depression may be associated with disrupted maternal responses to infant stimuli, with depressed pregnant women not showing the bias toward distressed infants as that observed in nondepressed pregnant women. The current study examined the effects of depression on self‐ reported responses to infant stimuli, in early pregnancy. Women with clinical depression (n = 38), and nondepressed women (n = 67) were recruited from a wider cognitive behavioral therapy trial. They completed Maternal Response Scales in which they were presented with images of distressed, neutral, and happy infant faces, with no time limit. The women rated their responses to these images along three dimensions—wanting to comfort, wanting to turn away, and feelings of anxiety—using Likert scales via a computerized task. There was evidence that women with depression in pregnancy showed different responses than did women without depression. Women with depression were substantially more likely to be in the highest quartile for ratings of wanting to turn away, odds (OR) ratio = 4.15, 95% confidence intervals (CIs) = 1.63–10.5, p = .003, and also were substantially less likely to be in the highest quartile for wanting to comfort a distressed infant face, OR = 0.22, 95% CIs = 0.09–0.54, p < .001. Findings are consistent with there being both a heightened avoidant and a reduced comforting response toward distressed infants in depressed pregnant women, providing some support that depression disrupts maternal preparations at a conscious level.     

Information theory and artificial grammar learning: inferring grammaticality from redundancy

In artificial grammar learning experiments, participants study strings of letters constructed using a grammar and then sort novel grammatical test exemplars from novel ungrammatical ones. The ability to distinguish grammatical from ungrammatical strings is often taken as evidence that the participants have induced the rules of the grammar. We show that judgements of grammaticality are predicted by the local redundancy of the test strings, not by grammaticality itself. The prediction holds in a transfer test in which test strings involve different letters than the training strings. Local redundancy is usually confounded with grammaticality in stimuli widely used in the literature. The confounding explains why the ability to distinguish grammatical from ungrammatical strings has popularized the idea that participants have induced the rules of the grammar, when they have not. We discuss the judgement of grammaticality task in terms of attribute substitution and pattern goodness. When asked to judge grammaticality (an inaccessible attribute), participants answer an easier question about pattern goodness (an accessible attribute).     

Familial,Social, and Cultural Factors Influencing Panic Disorder: Family Therapy Case of Korean Wife and American Husband

This study examined the progress and causes of panic disorder symptoms in a client by focusing on family culture, events, and sociocultural background. The study results revealed that the underlying cause of the client's anxiety was originated from family characteristics. The present study suggested a new perspective on panic disorder by delving into family relations and sociocultural background in Korea, such as son preference, academic background-oriented culture, and collectivism. This study intended to provide a new perspective on how the experiences within family could affect panic disorder and to propose family therapeutic method for dealing with panic disorder.     

Religion and pet loss: afterlife beliefs,religious coping,prayer and their associations with sorrow

This study examined the relationship between religion and sorrow among a sample of 219 owners of deceased pets (the sample was predominantly comprised of white, female, educated Christians). The results indicated that the vast majority of the participants believed that their pets’ souls reside in a better place and that they will reunite with them in the afterlife. A sizeable percentage also engaged in positive religious coping and afterlife prayers to deal with their loss. A smaller, but significant percentage engaged in negative forms of religious coping. The results also showed that sorrow was correlated with education, gender, attachment, afterlife prayers and negative religious coping. However, gender and prayer did not predict sorrow when the other variables were taken into account. Implications for counsellors are discussed.