On the (dis-)confirmability of stereotypic attributes

Two experiments investigated the linguistic abstractness and confirmability of elements contained in ingroup and outgroup stereotypes. The first experiment shows that positive elements of the ingroup stereotype (Italians) and negative elements of the outgroup stereotype (Jews, Germans) tended to be particularly abstract. Also, negative elements contained in the outgroup stereotypes required relatively little evidence to be considered ‘true’ but much disconfirming evidence to be rejected as ‘false’. No such bias emerged for ingroup stereotypes. The second experiment compared the abstraction of four outgroup stereotypes (Jews, Blacks, homosexuals, career women) finding the greatest abstraction for the oldest stereotype (Jews), and least abstraction for the most recent stereotype (career women) with the remaining two groups (Blacks, homosexuals) occupying an intermediate position. Results are interpreted as suggesting that stereotypes may become more abstract over time as they lose the concrete elements that are easier to disconfirm while maintaining the abstract elements that are more resistant to change. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Psychological health in long-term cancer survivorship: an Italian survey on depression and anxiety

Since long-term survivorship is now a reality for an increasingly number of people with a history of cancer, understanding their psychological health can inform health care policy as well as help supporting individual patients. This study was aimed to describe depression and anxiety (i.e. two of the most common psychological symptoms reported in oncology) in a sample of Italian long-term cancer survivors (LTCSs) defined as people who have been free from cancer and cancer treatments for at least five years. Four hundred and four Italian adult LTCSs completed a battery of questionnaires including the Zung Self-rating Depression Scale and the State Anxiety sub-scale of the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory respectively for depression and anxiety assessment. 16.5% of the sample displayed mild depression, 11.1% moderate depression, and 7.1% severe depression. depression was negatively associated with education (p = .017), perceived social support as provided by the family (p = .028), and perceived social support provided by friends (p = .008), and it was positively associated with occupational status (p = .023), presence of health issues (p = .010), and anxiety (p < .001). 8.7 and 15.8% of the sample were respectively possible and probable cases of anxiety. Anxiety was negatively associated with occupational status (p = .038) and it was positively associated with depression (p < .001). These data support ongoing assessment and monitoring of depression and anxiety in LTCSs, and stimulate the development and testing of psychological interventions for such individuals. In addition, they encourage further study on the psychological health of this specific population.     

Distancing the present self from the past and the future: Psychological distance in anxiety and depression

Humans show a systematic tendency to perceive the future as psychologically closer than the past. Based on the clinical hypothesis that anxiety would be associated more with future threat life events, whereas depression with past loss events, here we explored whether people with anxiety- and depression-related personality traits perceive differently the psychological distance of temporal events. Results showed that the common tendency to perceive the future as psychologically closer than the past is exaggerated in individuals with anxiety-related personality traits, whereas this asymmetry drastically shrinks in individuals with depression-related personality traits. Beyond substantiating the hypothesis that the past and the future are differently faced by people with depression- and anxiety-related personality traits, the present findings suggest that temporal orientation of one’s self may be greatly altered in anxiety and depression.     

Neural substrates of the ‘low‐level’ system for speech articulation: Evidence from primary opercular syndrome

We describe a patient with progressive disorder of speech, without language impairment (opercular syndrome). Morphometric analysis confirmed asymmetric volume reduction of the precentral areas (>left). Diffusion imaging showed significant white matter changes in the left frontal lobe, with specific involvement of the left corticobulbar tract and connections between supplementary/pre‐supplementary motor areas and the frontal operculum (frontal aslant tract). We suggest that the organization of expressive language includes a ‘low level’ motor system principally distributed in the left hemisphere that shows specific susceptibility to neurodegeneration, distinct from neural systems subtending praxic, and cognitive aspects of language.     

The illusion of replacement in research into the development of thinking biases: the case of the conjunction fallacy

The conjunction fallacy is a violation of a very basic rule of probability. Interestingly, although committing the fallacy seems irrational, adults are no less susceptible to the fallacy than young children. In Experiment 1, by employing tasks where the conjunctive response option involved two non-representative items, we found a large reduction in fallacy rates as compared to traditional conjunction fallacy problems. Nevertheless, fallacy rates remained relatively high in both adolescents and adults, although adults showed more consistency in their normative responses. In Experiment 2, we demonstrated that children’s relatively good performance on the task was not the consequence of their missing knowledge of social stereotypes. Additionally, children were more strongly affected by explicitly presented frequency information than adults. Indeed, adults only took frequency information into account when frequencies were made relevant by a training in probabilistic reasoning. Overall, the results suggest that whereas the potential for normative reasoning increases with development, this potential is often overshadowed by a pervasive tendency in adolescence and adulthood to rely on contextual information, knowledge, and beliefs, even when conflicting information is available. By contrast, children are more strongly influenced by explicitly presented information than relevant knowledge cued by the tasks.     

Belief,trust, and relationality: a Simmelian approach for the study of faith

Religion has been conceptualised as personal belief in the transcendent. Anthropologists of religion have critiqued such a construct for decades for being based on a Christian Protestant model and one that reflected subsequently modern rationalist Western culture. This construct has increasingly been shown to fail to account for the religiosity of contemporary Christians. Drawing on the sociology of Georg Simmel and based on ethnographic research in a Christian evangelical church, the article proposes a reconceptualisation of religious belief that is experiential and relational. Evangelicals in this case study show that propositional belief plays increasingly a secondary role to belief intended as trust in God and forming a relationship with God and others. Relationships mediate personal religious experience and are shown to be essential to the conversion process, the life of faith, and Christian identity. The study thus bridges the separation between theoretical and empirical works by operationalising Simmel’s sociology.     

Age-related trends in Stroop and conflicting motor response task findings.

Inhibition problems are reportedly at the heart of several childhood pathologies and learning disorders, but few instruments are available for their in-depth investigation. The main aim of the present study was to investigate the development of a capacity to inhibit automatic responses in young and middle childhood. For this purpose, 100 children between 6 and 11 years old were administered two tests that measure executive inhibition: an animal Stroop task (in a paper-and-pencil version of the computerized original proposed by Wright and colleagues in 2003) and a conflicting motor response task. Our results indicate that performance clearly improves in both tests during the course of a child's development and the data obtained with the paper-and-pencil animal Stroop task overlap with those obtained with the computerized version. When the task calls for a stronger inhibitory control (the incongruent situation in the Stroop task and in the opposite condition in the conflicting motor response test) the trend of the response times is less homogeneous, peaking in the youngest and oldest age brackets considered. The positivity and significance of the correlation coefficients between the two tests also suggest that the two measures are tapping cognitive abilities that are developing in a parallel fashion.     

The Determinants of Subjective Economic Well-being: An Analysis on Italian-Silc Data

Using Italian data on Income and living conditions for the year 2005, the paper investigates the main determinants of households’ subjective economic well-being by means of a Partial Proportional Ordered Logit Model. According to a joint subjective and objective perspective of analysis, we use as dependent variable the perceived ability of households to make ends meet. Whereas, we use as explanatory variables some objective aspects of living conditions relating to housing, financial equilibrium, possession of durables and quality of residence place and some socio-demographic characteristics. The empirical results show that the financial strain is the most relevant dimension of living conditions influencing the subjective economic well-being, but its effect is attenuated depending on the level of education and the tenure status of accommodation. Actually, when the highest levels of education are coupled with the status of self-employee and house-owner households have more chances to reach a higher probability to be economically satisfied. The insights coming out from the results may call for different policy measures depending on the degree of well-being and the characteristics of households. In particular, more efficient policies would be oriented to sustain the households’ income, to encourage to buy a house and to allow young people to get the highest levels of education.     

The neuropsychological correlates of cognitive insight in healthy participants

Cognitive insight is the ability to monitor and correct one's own erroneous convictions. The Beck Cognitive Insight Scale (BCIS) assesses two sub‐dimensions of cognitive insight: self‐reflectiveness (SR), which is the attitude of questioning one's own judgments; and self‐certainty (SC), which is the unwillingness to modify and correct one's own convictions. There is little information about cognitive insight in healthy participants (HP). Here we investigated the socio‐demographic and neuropsychological correlates of cognitive insight in 50 HP who were administered the BCIS and a comprehensive neuropsychological battery. The global BCIS R‐C index correlated positively with age and WCST perseverative errors. SR correlated positively with age. These data support the hypothesis that a less self‐reflective and more self‐confident style is cognitively functional in HP. Thus, what has been found malfunctioning in mental illnesses is adaptive in HP. Future studies should consider a wider range of factors that might affect this complex construct. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Affect, unconscious and sensemaking. A psychodynamic, semiotic and dialogic model

The work presents a psychodynamic, semiotic and dialogical model of affect and of the role it plays in sensemaking. The model is based on the following three general assumptions.A) Affective semiosis works in accordance to the dynamic unconscious which Freud conceptualized in terms of primary process. According to this interpretation, the unconscious is the mind’s homogenising way of functioning, which transforms every categorical relation into a relation of identity. B) Affect is the generalized, homogenising and absolutizing embodied basic intersubjective meanings according to which experience is interpreted. C) Affective semiosis performs both the grounding and regulative functions in sensemaking, orienting the way people interpret experience.