Gender, Internet identification, and Internet anxiety: correlates of Internet use.

This paper reports a study that investigated the effects of gender, Internet anxiety, and Internet identification on use of the Internet. The study involved 608 undergraduate students (490 females and 118 males). We surveyed the students' experience with the Internet, as well as their levels of Internet anxiety and Internet identification. We found a number of gender differences in participants' use of the Internet. Males were proportionally more likely to have their own web page than were females. They used the Internet more than females; in particular, they were more likely to use game websites, to use other specialist websites, and to download material from the Internet. However, females did not use the Internet for communication more than males. There was a significant positive relationship between Internet identification and total use of the Internet, and a significant negative relationship between Internet anxiety and total use of the Internet. Controlling for Internet identification and Internet anxiety, we found a significant and negative correlation between gender and use of the Internet. In total, all three of our predictors accounted for 40% of the variance in general Internet use: with Internet identification accounting for 26%, Internet anxiety accounting for 11%, and gender accounting for 3%.     

Reducing contingent self-worth: A defensive response to self-threats

Previous research shows that people with high self-esteem cope with threats to the self by reducing the extent to which their self-worth is contingent on the threatened domain (Buckingham, Weber, & Sypher, 2012). The present studies tested the hypothesis that this is a defensive process. In support of this hypothesis, Study 1 (N = 160), showed that self-affirmation attenuates the tendency for people with high self-esteem to reduce their contingencies of self-worth following self-threat. Furthermore, Study 2 (N = 286), showed that this tendency was more prevalent among people with defensive self-esteem than among those with secure self-esteem. The present studies imply that reducing contingent self-worth after self-threat is a defensive process. We discuss implications for theories of contingent self-worth.     

The consistency of superior face recognition skills in police officers

In recent years, there has been increasing interest in people with superior face recognition skills. Yet identification of these individuals has mostly relied on criterion performance on a single attempt at a single measure of face memory. The current investigation aimed to examine the consistency of superior face recognition skills in 30 police officers, both across tests that tap into the same process and between tests that tap into different components of face processing. Overall indices of performance across related measures were found to identify different superior performers to isolated test scores. Further, different top performers emerged for target‐present versus target‐absent indices, suggesting that signal detection measures are the most useful indicators of performance. Finally, a dissociation was observed between superior memory and matching performance. Super‐recognizer screening programmes hould therefore include overall indices summarizing multiple attempts at related tests, allowing for individuals to rank highly on different (and sometimes very specific) tasks.     

Upper- and lower-limb amputees show reduced levels of eeriness for images of prosthetic hands

Psychonomic Bulletin & Review - The “uncanny phenomenon” describes the feeling of unease associated with seeing an image that is close to appearing human. Prosthetic hands in...     

The political sacred and the holiness of life itself

ABSTRACT

This article reflects on Agamben’s formulation of the sacred within the political order of the West, contrasting this with the Durkheim/Bellah view of the sacred/profane opposition, and then presenting two arguments that reduction of the sacred to the political is insufficient, one a form of biological reductionism that seeks to locate the sacred within the common, biological nature of human life itself, the other an abductive argument for human transformation in terms of what Sloterdjik has called ‘vertical tension.’ This argument turns out to be one for locating holiness in the very notion of life itself that I wish to ground in the idea of social cognition.     

Scottish psychoanalysis: a rational religion

The ambition to rationally preserve a Christian religious inheritance distinctively informs Scottish psychoanalytic ideas. Scottish psychoanalysis presents the human personality as born into communion with others. The aim of therapy is to restore, preserve, and promote genuinely interpersonal relations. The Scottish psychoanalysis apparent in the work of W. R. D. Fairbairn, Ian Suttie, Hugh Crichton-Miller, and in the philosophy of John Macmurray, is exported to New Zealand, where it is promoted by the New Zealand Association of Psychotherapists. Scottish psychoanalytic ideas also remain effective in post-war Britain: the idea of communion appears in dialogue with other theories in the work of Harry Guntrip, John Macquarrie, R. D. Laing, and Aaron Esterson.     

Competing Contingencies Over Derived Relational Responding: A Behavioral Model of the Implicit Association Test

The Psychological Record - Subjects were exposed to a word-picture association training phase in which each of 2 arbitrary nonsense syllables printed in blue and red font, respectively, were paired...