Extrinsic rewards undermine altruistic tendencies in 20-month-olds

The current study investigated the influence of rewards on very young children's helping behavior. After 20-month-old infants received a material reward during a treatment phase, they subsequently were less likely to engage in further helping during a test phase as compared with infants who had previously received social praise or no reward at all. This so-called overjustification effect suggests that even the earliest helping behaviors of young children are intrinsically motivated and that socialization practices involving extrinsic rewards can undermine this tendency.     

Social Support and Neighborhood Stressors Among African American Youth: Networks and Relations to Self-Worth

Although neighborhood stressors have a negative impact on youth, and social support can play a protective role, it is unclear what types and sources of social support may contribute to positive outcomes among at-risk youth. We examined the influences of neighborhood disadvantage and social support on global self-worth among low-income, urban African American youth, both concurrently and longitudinally. We examined social support from both a structural and functional perspective, and tested the main-effects and the stress-buffering models of social support. Participants included 82–130 youth, in 6th–8th grade, who completed self-report measures. Network support results suggest participants received emotional, tangible, and informational support most often from mothers and other female relatives, with friends, fathers, and teachers also playing important roles. Model testing accounted for neighborhood stressors and support from various sources, revealing support from close friends was associated with concurrent self-worth; whereas, parent support predicted self-worth longitudinally, above and beyond initial levels of self-worth. The findings provide evidence for the main-effects model of social support and not the stress-buffering model. Our findings illustrate the importance of extended family networks and the types of support that youth rely upon in African American impoverished communities, as well as how support contributes to global self-worth. Implications and suggestions for future research and intervention are discussed.     

Why individuals want money is what matters: Using self-determination theory to explain the differential relationship between motives for making money and employee psychological health

Researchers have debated for years whether money can lead to happiness. Indeed, the findings to date are contradictory in regard to the impact of individuals’ motives for making money on their psychological well-being. This study aimed to reconcile these findings and show that certain motives for making money can be beneficial to individuals’ psychological health, while others can be detrimental, not only by reducing well-being, but also by increasing ill-being. Based on self-determination theory, basic psychological needs (autonomy, competence, and relatedness) were hypothesized to be the psychological mechanism explaining these differential effects. More precisely, need satisfaction and need frustration were hypothesized to mediate the relationship between employees’ money motives and psychological health (well-being and ill-being). Our findings suggest that self-integrated motives for making money lead to greater well-being and lesser ill-being by positively predicting need satisfaction and negatively predicting need frustration. On the other hand, non-integrated motives for making money appear to result in lesser well-being and greater ill-being by being negatively associated with need satisfaction and positively associated with need frustration. Together, these findings suggest that money motives can have differential effects on employees’ psychological health depending on whether these underlying reasons are need-satisfying or need-frustrating life goals.     

Does it always feel good to get what you want? Young children differentiate between material and wicked desires

One line of research on children's attributions of guilt suggests that 3‐year‐olds attribute negative emotion to self‐serving victimizers, slightly older children attribute happiness, and with increasing age, attributions become negative again (i.e., a three‐step model; Yuill et al., 1996, Br. J. Dev. Psychol., 14, 457). Another line of research provides reason to expect that 3‐year‐olds may be predisposed to view self‐serving moral transgression as leading to positive emotion; this is a linear developmental model in which emotion attributions to transgressors become increasingly negative over the course of childhood (e.g., Nunner‐Winkler & Sodian, 1988, Child Dev., 59, 1323). However, key differences in methodology make it difficult to compare across these findings. The present study was designed to address this problem. We asked how 3‐ to 9‐year‐old children (n = 111) reason about transgression scenarios that involve satisfying wicked desires (wanting to cause harm and doing so successfully) versus material desires (wanting an object and getting it successfully via harmful behaviour). Three‐year‐old children reasoned differently about desire and emotion across these two types of transgressions, attributing negative emotion in the case of wicked desires and positive emotion in the case of material desires. This pattern of emotion attribution by young children provides new information about how young children process information about desires and emotions in the moral domain, and it bridges a gap in the existing literature on this topic.     

The scene and the unseen: Manipulating photographs for experiments on change blindness and scene memory

The change blindness paradigm, in which participants often fail to notice substantial changes in a scene, is a popular tool for studying scene perception, visual memory, and the link between awareness and attention. Some of the most striking and popular examples of change blindness have been demonstrated with digital photographs of natural scenes; in most studies, however, much simpler displays, such as abstract stimuli or “free-floating” objects, are typically used. Although simple displays have undeniable advantages, natural scenes remain a very useful and attractive stimulus for change blindness research. To assist researchers interested in using natural-scene stimuli in change blindness experiments, we provide here a step-by-step tutorial on how to produce changes in natural-scene images with a freely available image-processing tool (GIMP). We explain how changes in a scene can be made by deleting objects or relocating them within the scene or by changing the color of an object, in just a few simple steps. We also explain how the physical properties of such changes can be analyzed using GIMP and MATLAB (a high-level scientific programming tool). Finally, we present an experiment confirming that scenes manipulated according to our guidelines are effective in inducing change blindness and demonstrating the relationship between change blindness and the physical properties of the change and inter-individual differences in performance measures. We expect that this tutorial will be useful for researchers interested in studying the mechanisms of change blindness, attention, or visual memory using natural scenes.