Self-esteem, self-serving cognitions, and health risk behavior

The current article reviews prospective and experimental research on the relation between self-esteem and perceptions of vulnerability. These studies demonstrate that individuals with high self-esteem who engage in risk behavior often utilize a variety of self-serving cognitive strategies that protect them from fully acknowledging their vulnerability to the potential negative consequences of their behavior; e.g., they minimize their estimates of personal risk and overestimate the prevalence of the risk behavior among their peers. The article also provides data on an additional self-serving cognitive strategy employed by adolescents with high self-esteem--alteration of perceptions of others' reactions to their own risk behavior. Finally, the article reviews the emerging literature on the relation between these cognitive strategies and maladaptive health behavior, and proposes that whether these strategies are maladaptive depends on the nature of the threat and the availability of opportunities to engage in compensatory self-enhancement.     

Clinical pastoral education and post privacy legislation: an Australian perspective

Recently introduced privacy legislation in Australia has required that professional associations approaching education from the perspective of human cases review their standards and develop new policies and procedures to protect the privacy of individuals. In this article, the author explores the disruption created for Clinical Pastoral Education by the introduction of these privacy laws, demonstrates that it is possible to be loyal to both a commitment to privacy and learning from "living human documents," develop strategies for changing the educational culture, and establish new procedures, strategies, and policy.     

Self-directed attention, awareness of bodily states, and suggestibility.

Two studies tested the hypothesis that self-directed attention would cause increased awareness of internal states and would thus reduce suggestibility effects. Experiment 1 applied this reasoning to the experience of an emotion. Males viewed moderately arousing slides of female nudes after being led to expect the slides to be either highly arousing or nonarousing. As predicted, ratings of the slides corresponded less with these experimentally-manipulated anticipations when self-focus was heightened by the presence of a mirror than when it was not. Experiment 2 examined a different internal experience: the perception of taste. Some subjects were led to expect a strong flavor as part of a test series, and other subjects were led to expect a weak flavor. Subjects high in private self-consciousness were less affected by this expectancy manipulation and more accurate in reporting their actual internal state than were subjects low in private self-consciousness. Discussion centers on the theoretical implications of the findings.     

A dual-process approach to health risk decision making: The prototype willingness model

Although dual-process models in cognitive, personality, and social psychology have stimulated a large body of research about analytic and heuristic modes of decision making, these models have seldom been applied to the study of adolescent risk behaviors. In addition, the developmental course of these two kinds of information processing, and their relation to the development of self-regulation are not well understood at this time. The current paper reviews what leading dual-process models have to say about the development of analytic and heuristic decision making, and their implications for adolescent risk behavior. In addition, it reviews research on the prototype willingness model of adolescent decision making—a dual-process model designed specifically to address non-intentional, but volitional adolescent risk behavior. It also discusses the implications of dual-process models for intervention research.