Work Experiences of Foreign‐Born Asian Women Counseling and Psychology Faculty

Eleven foreign‐born and ‐raised Asian women faculty in counseling and psychology programs in the United States were interviewed about their work experiences. Analysis using consensual qualitative research revealed 7 sources of stressors, 6 emotional reactions associated with stressors, 5 coping strategies, and 4 types of intrinsic rewards gained from encountering challenges. The results of the study provide information about the unique experiences of this understudied group and have implications for the U.S. higher education system. Se entrevistó a once profesoras universitarias asiáticas de programas de consejería y psicología en Estados Unidos nacidas y criadas en el extranjero acerca de sus experiencias de trabajo. Un análisis basado en investigación cualitativa consensuada reveló 7 fuentes de estrés, 6 reacciones emocionales asociadas a los motivos del estrés, 5 estrategias de afrontamiento y 4 tipos de recompensa intrínseca ganada por afrontar los desafíos. Los resultados del estudio proporcionan información sobre las experiencias únicas de este grupo que no ha sido estudiado suficientemente, y tienen implicaciones para el sistema de educación superior en Estados Unidos.     

The Role of Subsidies in Coordination Games with Interconnected Risk

Can subsidies promote Pareto‐optimum coordination? We found that partially subsidizing the cooperative actions for two out of six players in a laboratory coordination game usually produced better coordination and higher total social welfare with both deterministic and stochastic payoffs. Not only were the subsidized players more likely to cooperate (choose the Pareto‐optimum action), but the unsubsidized players increased their expectations on how likely others would cooperate, and they cooperated more frequently themselves. After removal of the subsidy, high levels of coordination continued in most groups with stochastic payoffs but declined in deterministic ones. This carry‐over disparity between the deterministic and stochastic settings was consistent with the economic theories that agents were more likely to keep the status quo option under uncertainty than without uncertainty. Hence, players with stochastic payoffs were more likely to keep the high coordination level (status quo) brought by the subsidy in the previous subsidy session. A post‐game survey also indicated that with stochastic payoffs, players focused on risk reduction. Temporary subsidies promoted lasting coordination because even after subsidy was removed, players still assumed that others players would prefer reduced risks from cooperation. With deterministic payoffs, however, the subsidy might crowd out other rationales for coordination, with many players indicating that the subsidy was the only reason for anyone to cooperate. Hence, the coordination level dropped when the subsidy was removed. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Molding the Past: Biased Assimilation of Historical Information1

The present study examined whether individuals' current political worldviews would bias perceptions of historical information gathered over the course of their lifetime. Kent State University students from 1995 and 2000 reported their political ideologies (e.g., conservative, liberal) and responded to items assessing their culpability and global attributions about the shooting of demonstrators by the National Guard at Kent State in 1970. The 1995 data revealed consistent support for biased responding to culpability and global attribution items. The 2000 data replicated the political ideology differences of the 1995 data. However, by including knowledge of the incident as an independent variable, the 2000 data revealed that the political ideology bias was strongest among people reporting high knowledge about the event.     

Temporal self-appraisal and attributional focus

Temporal self-appraisal theory (Ross & Wilson, 2002; Wilson & Ross, 2001) states that individuals evaluate their past selves in a way that makes them feel good about their current self. The present studies tested the degree to which differences in attributional focus influence feelings of closeness to positive life events. In Study 1, participants recalled a recent positive life event before thinking about how either they personally or others were responsible for the event’s occurrence. As expected, participants felt temporally closer to the event when they had thought about internal attributions. In Study 2, after recalling a recent positive life event, participants recalled one (or six) reasons describing how they personally (or others) produced the event. The results revealed that participants used the content of retrieved attributions in deriving their temporal judgment. The implications of the findings for tenets of temporal self-appraisal theory are discussed.     

Multiple risk expert systems interventions: impact of simultaneous stage-matched expert system interventions for smoking, high-fat diet, and sun exposure in a population of parents.

Three stage-based expert system interventions for smoking, high-fat diet, and unsafe sun exposure were evaluated in a sample of 2,460 parents of teenagers. Eighty-four percent of the eligible parents were enrolled in a 2-arm randomized control trial, with the treatment group receiving individualized feedback reports for each of their relevant behaviors at 0, 6, and 12 months as well as a multiple behavior manual. At 24 months, the expert system outperformed the comparison condition across all 3 risk behaviors, resulting in 22% of the participants in action or maintenance for smoking (vs. 16% for the comparison condition), 34% for diet (vs. 26%), and 30% for sun exposure (vs. 22%). Proactive, home-based, and stage-matched expert systems can produce significant multiple behavior changes in at-risk populations where the majority of participants are not prepared to change.     

Affine representations in psychophysics and the near-miss to Weber’s law

A theoretical account for the near-miss to Weber’s law in the form of a power function, with a special emphasis on the interpretation of the exponent, was proposed by Falmagne [Falmagne, J.-C. (1985). Elements of psychophysical theory. New York: Oxford University Press] within the framework of a subtractive representation, P(x,y)=F(u(x)−g(y)). In this paper, we examine a more general affine representation, P(x,y)=F(u(x)h(y)+g(y)). We first obtain a uniqueness theorem for the affine representation. We then study the conditions that force an affine representation to degenerate to a subtractive one. Part of that study involves the case for which two different affine representations co-exist for the same data. We also show that the balance condition P(x,y)+P(y,x)=1 constrains an affine representation to be a special kind of subtractive representation, a Fechnerian one. We further show that Falmagne’s power law takes on a special form for a so-called weakly balanced system of probabilities, in which case the affine representation is Fechnerian. Finally, following Iverson [Iverson, G.J. (2006a). Analytical methods in the theory of psychophysical discrimination I: Inequalities, convexity and integration of just noticeable differences. Journal of Mathematical Psychology, 50, 271-282], we generalize the Fechner method to construct the sensory scales in a weakly balanced affine representation by integrating (derivatives of) just noticeable differences.     

Psychophysics of remembering: to bias or not to bias

Delayed matching to sample is typically a two-alternative forced-choice procedure with two sample stimuli. In this task the effects of varying the probability of reinforcers for correct choices and the resulting receiver operating characteristic are symmetrical. A version of the task where a sample is present on some trials and absent on others is analogous to a yes/no recognition task. We describe data from two experiments where an asymmetry in performance in the yes/no task could be attributed to a change in response bias with increasing retention-interval duration from a matching-law perspective, but not from a signal-detection perspective. Both approaches make explicit assumptions about response bias. The apparent inconsistency between the two approaches to the treatment of response bias is resolved in terms of a model proposed by K. G. White and J. T. Wixted (1999) which predicts asymmetrical matching-law functions and receiver operating characteristics without making any assumptions about response bias.     

Modes of action of family interventions in depression and schizophrenia: the same or different?

The role of relatives' expressed emotion (EE) in mediating the efficacy of family interventions has been studied in randomized controlled trials (RCTs) involving people with schizophrenia and depression. Reanalysis of two RCTs (n=48) by Leff (1989) indicated that lowering relatives' EE and/or reducing social contact between the patient and family members accounted for the efficacy of the intervention for schizophrenia. However, this relationship has not been investigated previously with regard to depression, and this paper presents the results of a recent RCT which included measurement of EE and other possible mediating variables. In this study, amelioration of the critical attitude of the partner did not account for the superiority of couples therapy over antidepressant medication, since the same change occurred in the drug group. However, reducing the patient's exposure to the partner's hostility partially explained the efficacy of couples therapy. Further research on the process of change in families undergoing therapy is indicated to identify the variables that account for the efficacy of therapy.     

Making a Party Leader Less of a Party Member: The Impact of Ambivalence on Assimilation and Contrast Effects in Political Party Attitudes

The present study tested the degree to which attitudes about a political party would be influenced by the context in which the party leader was rendered cognitively accessible. A sample of British undergraduates evaluated Prime Minister Tony Blair before expressing their opinion about the Labour party. In one condition, the two items were structured such that Blair was expected to be included in participants' representation of the party. In a second condition, the same items were structured such that Blair was expected to be excluded from participants' representation of the party. The results supported the hypothesis that manipulating the context in which Blair was made salient would produce different effects on a subsequent judgment of the Labour party, but only among politically ambivalent respondents.     

Is Smoking Queer? Implications of California Tobacco Denormalization Strategies for Queer Current and Former Smokers

ABSTRACT

This article is concerned with normative conceptions of health structuring tobacco control strategies designed to “denormalize” tobacco use. Analysis of 201 interviews with non-heterosexual and/or non-cisgender adults in California revealed that participants implicated tobacco use in exacerbating health inequities and perpetuating harmful narratives of queer suffering, but also regarded smoking as a critical tool for self-care and symbol of resistance. Participant narratives suggest that using stigma in health promotion efforts which reinforce normative conceptions of health may be harmful to queer people whose social identities exist within ongoing legacies of pathology, health stigma, and deviance from hegemonic structural norms.