Observing a client's grieving process: bringing logical positivism into qualitative grief counselling research

This positional paper originates from our need as researcher/practitioners to establish a meaningful epistemological framework for research into bereaved people's journey through loss and grief over time. We describe how the field of grief research has a long and established biological basis, in keeping with a positivist epistemology. However, there has been a diminution of the influence of logical positivism in twenty-first-century counselling research. We argue that in grief counselling research, naturalistic observation of the grieving process within a logical positivist paradigm, remains a valid and valuable construct. We posit an observational protocol for the grief counselling process which minimises the intrusion of research method into the therapeutic process. We offer this as a means of conducting qualitative research within a bereavement counselling service. Further, we suggest that the development of an observational protocol for a client's grieving process has potential implications for developing good practice in grief work.     

Qualitative job insecurity and in-role performance: a bidirectional longitudinal relationship?

This study adds to the understanding of the relationship between qualitative job insecurity and employee in-role performance, by analysing the association longitudinally. While social exchange theory predicts that the relationship should be negative and bidirectional, the job preservation motivation model indicates a self-correcting mechanism, where job insecurity leads to increased performance, which, in turn, could decrease job insecurity. We developed competing hypotheses and examined them using structural equation modelling in a heterogeneous sample of 337 employees. For employees with a higher professional level, results pointed towards a reciprocal causal relationship between qualitative job insecurity and in-role performance, indicating a loss cycle. For employees with a lower professional level, results showed a small positive direct causal relationship between qualitative job insecurity and in-role performance, while the negative direct path from in-role performance to qualitative job insecurity did not reach statistical significance. This is the first study to test the diverging theoretical predictions of social exchange theory and the job preservation motivation model, with regard to the relationship between qualitative job insecurity and in-role performance. Being longitudinal, our study only allows us to hint at possible causal relationships between the involved variables, the chronological order being necessary, but not sufficient to prove causality.     

Latino parents’ science beliefs and support of high school students’ motivational beliefs: Do the relations vary across gender and familism values?

Based on the Eccles’ expectancy-value theory, the objectives of this study were (1) to examine the longitudinal relations between Latino parents’ science beliefs, parents’ science support, and high school students’ science motivational beliefs, and (2) to test whether these relations varied by familism values and adolescent gender. Multi-informant longitudinal survey data were collected from 104 Latino parents and adolescents during 9th and 10th grade. Parents’ perceptions of their adolescents’ science ability and value of science in 9th grade predicted higher parent science support at home in 10th grade if they were parents of boys. In contrast, these relations were not statistically significant for parents of daughters. Parent support in 9th grade predicted higher adolescent motivational beliefs one year later. This work provides evidence that parent support is important for high school student success in this understudied population.     

How holistic processing of faces relates to cognitive control and intelligence

The Vanderbilt Holistic Processing Test for faces (VHPT-F) is the first standard test designed to measure individual differences in holistic processing. The test measures failures of selective attention to face parts through congruency effects, an operational definition of holistic processing. However, this conception of holistic processing has been challenged by the suggestion that it may tap into the same selective attention or cognitive control mechanisms that yield congruency effects in Stroop and Flanker paradigms. Here, we report data from 130 subjects on the VHPT-F, several versions of Stroop and Flanker tasks, as well as fluid IQ. Results suggested a small degree of shared variance in Stroop and Flanker congruency effects, which did not relate to congruency effects on the VHPT-F. Variability on the VHPT-F was also not correlated with Fluid IQ. In sum, we find no evidence that holistic face processing as measured by congruency in the VHPT-F is accounted for by domain-general control mechanisms.     

Helping others or helping oneself? An episodic examination of the behavioral consequences of helping at work

Scholars have paid an increasing amount of attention to organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs), with a particular emphasis on helping others at work. In addition, recent empirical work has focused on how OCB is an intraindividual phenomenon, such that employees vary daily in the extent to which they help others. However, one limitation of this research has been an overemphasis on well‐being consequences associated with daily helping (e.g., changes in affect and mental depletion) and far less attention on behavioral outcomes. In this study, we develop a self‐regulatory framework that articulates how helping others at work is a depleting experience that can lead to a reduction in subsequent acts of helping others, and an increase in behaviors aimed at helping oneself (i.e., engaging in political acts). We further theorize how two individual differences—prevention focus and political skill—serve as cross‐level moderators of these relations. In an experience sampling study of 91 full‐time employees across 10 consecutive workdays, our results illustrate that helping is a depleting act that makes individuals more likely to engage in self‐serving acts and less likely to help others. Moreover, the relation of helping acts with depletion is strengthened for employees who have higher levels of prevention focus.     

An Affordance-Based Approach to Visually Guided Overtaking

When an automobile driver overtakes a lead vehicle while avoiding oncoming traffic, does he or she do so with reference to the limits of his or her car? We investigated overtaking from the perspective of the theory of affordances. We define the overtake-ability affordance as a ratio of the minimum satisfying velocity required for safe overtaking (MSV) to the maximum velocity of the driver's car (V_max). Two groups of participants performed overtaking maneuvers, if deemed possible, by driving either a slow (V_max = 25 m/s) or a fast (V_max = 32.5 m/s) virtual car in overtaking situations constrained by 14 values of MSV. For any given MSV condition, participants in the fast car group were more likely to attempt an overtaking maneuver. However, when MSV was expressed in intrinsic units as a ratio of V_max for both groups, the frequency of overtaking was not significantly different across groups. Furthermore, overtaking frequency dropped to near 0% for both groups when MSV exceeded V_max. In accordance with the affordance-based framework (Fajen, 2007), our results suggest that participants select their overtaking maneuvers by perceiving an overtake-ability affordance.     

Religion,Cultural Clash,and Muslim American Attitudes About Politically Motivated Violence

Does adherence to Islam predict attitudes about “suicide bombing” among American Muslims? This study examines the effects of religious and political factors on views of politically motivated violence (PMV). We draw from diverse scholarship, emphasizing arguments that are inspired by Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilizations perspective, as well as recent work in the sociology of Islam. Using a measure that gauges support for “suicide bombing” from the 2007 Pew Survey of American Muslims, results from logistic regression models suggest that political views and religious factors have a minimal effect on Muslim American attitudes toward suicide bombing. Furthermore, we find that Qur’ānic authoritativeness (i.e., the view that the Qur’ān is the word of God and not written by men) is associated with lower odds of supporting this form of PMV. We discuss the implications of our findings for the often anecdotal and alarmist accounts that link Muslim religiosity to support for “radical” extremism. We close with study limitations and avenues of future research.     

Dissociating viewpoint costs in mental rotation and object recognition

In a mental rotation task, participants must determine whether two stimuli match when one undergoes a rotation in 3-D space relative to the other. The key evidence for mental rotation is the finding of a linear increase in response times as objects are rotated farther apart. This signature increase in response times is also found in recognition of rotated objects, which has led many theorists to postulate mental rotation as a key transformational procedure in object recognition. We compared mental rotation and object recognition in tasks that used the same stimuli and presentation conditions and found that, whereas mental rotation costs increased relatively linearly with rotation, object recognition costs increased only over small rotations. Taken in conjunction with a recent brain imaging study, this dissociation in behavioral performance suggests that object recognition is based on matching of image features rather than on 3-D mental transformations.     

Concreteness and item-to-list context associations in the free recall of items differing in context variability

Context variability can be defined as the number of preexperimental contexts in which a given concept appears. Following M. Steyvers and K. J. Malmberg's (2003) work, the authors have shown that concepts that are experienced in fewer preexperimental contexts generally are better remembered in episodic memory tasks than concepts that are experienced in a greater number of preexperimental contexts. The purpose of this article is to demonstrate that low context variability confers its memorial advantage because of stronger item-to-list context associations as compared with high context variability. Three experiments that use environmental context changes from study to test demonstrate that the low context variability advantage is eliminated when item-to-list context associations are not available because of environmental changes at test. In addition, the low context variability advantage is eliminated when inward processing at study prevents the formation of item-to-list context associations.     

Font tuning associated with expertise in letter perception

Font tuning (FT) occurs when observers recognize a sequence of letters presented in the same font faster than in different fonts (Sanocki 1987, 1988 Journal of Experimental Psychology. Human Perception and Performance 13 267-278; 14 472-480). Here, we test the hypothesis that FT is associated with expertise with a specific writing system. We developed a systematic search task allowing the measurement of FT over a large number of letters and generalized the finding of FT from English readers viewing Roman letters to Chinese readers viewing Chinese characters. Non-Chinese readers did not show evidence of FT for Chinese characters in this search task. We also used a simpler 3-letter identification task to directly compare novice and expert readers, and to explore FT for different aspects of font such as fill, slant, and aspect ratio. We found that experts tune to aspect ratio but not to the other font changes. These findings reveal that letters are not processed visually in the same manner as shapes, and suggest an explanation for the cortical specialization obtained in the visual system for letters.