The Religious and Spiritual Needs of Patients in the Hospital Setting Do Not Depend on Patient Level of Religious/Spiritual Observance and Should be Initiated by Healthcare Providers

Journal of Religion and Health - According to many studies, addressing the religious and spiritual (R/S) needs of patient's increase patient satisfaction. One area of interest is how patient...     

Leader Humor Extends beyond Work: how and when Followers Have Better Family Lives

Although the consequences of leader humor on subordinates have been well documented, the important issues of how and when leader humor affects employees’ attitudes or behaviors beyond the workplace have received limited attention. We integrate the humor literature with spillover-crossover theory to address the gap regarding the implications of leader humor in the nonwork domain. By performing an experiment and two field studies involving employee-spouse dyads, we consistently find 1) a positive association between leader humor and followers’ job satisfaction, 2) a spillover effect of followers’ job satisfaction on subordinates’ work-to-family enrichment (WFE) and a crossover effect of subordinates’ WFE on their spouses’ marital satisfaction, 3) serial mediating effects of followers’ job satisfaction and WFE on the leader humor-spouses’ marital satisfaction link, and 4) a stronger positive indirect effect of leader humor on spouse’ marital satisfaction via followers’ job satisfaction and WFE when followers’ perceived organizational interpersonal harmony is low. We discuss the theoretical implications of these findings and suggest practical implications for developing leader humor to enhance employee well-being.

     

A time-varying effect model for intensive longitudinal data

Understanding temporal change in human behavior and psychological processes is a central issue in the behavioral sciences. With technological advances, intensive longitudinal data (ILD) are increasingly generated by studies of human behavior that repeatedly administer assessments over time. ILD offer unique opportunities to describe temporal behavioral changes in detail and identify related environmental and psychosocial antecedents and consequences. Traditional analytical approaches impose strong parametric assumptions about the nature of change in the relationship between time-varying covariates and outcomes of interest. This article introduces time-varying effect models (TVEMs) that explicitly model changes in the association between ILD covariates and ILD outcomes over time in a flexible manner. In this article, we describe unique research questions that the TVEM addresses, outline the model-estimation procedure, share a SAS macro for implementing the model, demonstrate model utility with a simulated example, and illustrate model applications in ILD collected as part of a smoking-cessation study to explore the relationship between smoking urges and self-efficacy during the course of the pre- and postcessation period.     

Emotional appraisal is influenced by cardiac afferent information

Influential models highlight the central integration of bodily arousal with emotion. Some emotions, notably disgust, are more closely coupled to visceral state than others. Cardiac baroreceptors, activated at systole within each cardiac cycle, provide short-term visceral feedback. Here we explored how phasic baroreceptor activation may alter the appraisal of brief emotional stimuli and consequent cardiovascular reactions. We used functional MRI (fMRI) to measure brain responses to emotional face stimuli presented before and during cardiac systole. We observed that the processing of emotional stimuli was altered by concurrent natural baroreceptor activation. Specifically, facial expressions of disgust were judged as more intense when presented at systole, and rebound heart rate increases were attenuated after expressions of disgust and happiness. Neural activity within prefrontal cortex correlated with emotionality ratings. Activity within periaqueductal gray matter reflected both emotional ratings and their interaction with cardiac timing. Activity within regions including prefrontal and visual cortices correlated with increases in heart rate evoked by the face stimuli, while orbitofrontal activity reflected both evoked heart rate change and its interaction with cardiac timing. Our findings demonstrate that momentary physiological fluctuations in cardiovascular afferent information (1) influence specific emotional judgments, mediated through regions including the periaqueductal gray matter, and (2) shape evoked autonomic responses through engagement of orbitofrontal cortex. Together these findings highlight the close coupling of visceral and emotional processes and identify neural regions mediating bodily state influences on affective judgment.     

Social and medical influences on attributions and evaluations of chronic pain

Abstract

Previous research suggests that judgments of pain are subject to social influences, including characteristics of the person in pain, the judge, and the social context in which the judgment occurs. In this experiment, eight vignettes describing a person with chronic low back pain were varied as a function of patient ethnicity (Caucasian vs African-American), litigation status (litigant vs non-litigant), and medical evidence (strong vs weak). Participants (N= 116) read vignettes, made attributions of causality for the person's pain and disability, and evaluated the severity of the pain syndrome. Pain and disability were perceived as more legitimate when the person in pain was a non-litigant and when medical evidence was strong. Evaluations of syndrome severity were more extreme when evidence was strong. A three-way interaction indicated that judgments may have been influenced by ethnic stereotypes. These findings substantiate the influence of social variables in judgments of persons with pain.     

Implicit Attitudes Toward Arab-Muslims and the Moderating Effects of Social Information

Three studies examined the relative valence and strength of implicit attitudes toward Arab-Muslims using the Implicit Association Test (IAT) while exploring the moderation of such implicit effects. Studies have suggested that repeated exposure to information associating members of a social group (e.g., Arab-Muslims) with evaluative attributes (e.g., terrorism) might create automatic attitudes toward them. Consistent with this notion, the IAT results indicated strong implicit preference for White over Arab-Muslim, whereas the magnitude of such a bias was substantially diminished when assessed by explicit measures (Study 1). It is also interesting to note that participants exhibited implicit preference for Black over Arab-Muslim when measured by the IAT, whereas no difference was found between the 2 groups in stimulus familiarity and in explicit attitudes (Studies 2 and 3). However, such implicit effects were moderated when participants were exposed to positive information about Arab-Muslims (Study 3). Theoretical and practical implications of these findings are further discussed.     

Evaluations,Attitude Similarity,and Interpersonal Attraction: Testing the Hypothesis of Weighting Interference Across Responses

The greater effect of negative than positive stimuli on judgments—the positive-negative asymmetry (PNA)—is rather pervasive. However, the effects of the valence of evaluations of the participant by the partner and attitude similarity between them on attraction have been inconsistent with PNA. The hypothesis that the weighting rule instigated by the first response interferes with the weighting rule normally expected for the second response was tested. As hypothesized, evaluations and attitude similarity interacted when attraction response was assessed prior to competence response but not when competence response was assessed first. The effects in the first measured response fully mediated the effects in the second measured response but not vice versa. Implications of the finding for attraction and PNA are discussed.     

Book Reviews

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to identify what I take to be the main conceptual problem in Lewis’ semantics for counterfactuals when the Limit Assumption (LA) is not satisfied, what I call the Discrimination Problem (DP), and to present and discuss a modification of Lewis’ semantics that aims at solving DP. First, I outline Lewis’ semantics, highlighting the aspects that will be relevant for our discussion. Second, I present DP and discuss it with a heuristic example. Third, I present the new proposal and comment some formal consequences and the objections they give rise to. Fourth, I present an allegedly equivalent version of the proposal and discuss the difference between counterfactuals and strict conditionals. Finally, I defend that the two proposals are different and argue for the first one as the best way of capturing two intuitions that seem in conflict when the LA is not satisfied. I conclude with a dilemma: either the proposal here defended works or LA is inescapable. Thus, if the proposal doesn’t work, the paper must then be considered as an indirect defense of the Limit Assumption.