The Power of Language and Labels: “The Mentally Ill” Versus “People With Mental Illnesses”

Undergraduate students (N = 221), adults in a community sample (N = 211), and professional counselors and counselors‐in‐training (N = 269) were given a measure of tolerance. Within each sample, half of the participants were given a version that used the term “the mentally ill” and half were given a version that used the term “people with mental illnesses.” Individuals receiving the version with the term “the mentally ill” had lower levels of tolerance. Professional counselors had the largest differences in tolerance on the basis of language.     

Testing the Bivalent Fear of Evaluation Model of Social Anxiety: The Relationship between Fear of Positive Evaluation,Social Anxiety,and Perfectionism

The Bivalent Fear of Evaluation (BFOE) model of social anxiety proposes that fear of negative evaluation (FNE) and fear of positive evaluation (FPE) play distinct roles in social anxiety. Research is however lacking in terms of how FPE is related to perfectionism and how these constructs interact to predict social anxiety. Participants were 382 individuals from the general community and included an oversampling of individuals with social anxiety. Measures of FPE, FNE, perfectionism, and social anxiety were administered. Results were mostly consistent with the predictions made by the BFOE model and showed that accounting for confounding variables, FPE correlated negatively with high standards but positively with maladaptive perfectionism. FNE was also positively correlated with maladaptive perfectionism, but there was no significant relationship between FNE and high standards. Also consistent with BFOE model, both FNE and FPE significantly moderated the relationship between maladaptive perfectionism and social anxiety with the relationship strengthened at high levels of FPE and FNE. These findings provide additional support for the BFOE model and implications are discussed.     

Flexible use of spatial cues in the southern flying squirrel (<Emphasis Type="Italic">Glaucomys volans</Emphasis>)

Insects, birds, and mammals have been shown capable of encoding spatial information in memory using multiple strategies or frames of reference simultaneously. These strategies include orientation to a goal-specific cue or beacon, to the position of the goal in an array of local landmarks, or to its position in the array of distant landmarks, also known as the global frame of reference. From previous experiments, it appears that birds and mammals that scatter hoard rely primarily on a global frame of reference, but this generalization depends on evidence from only a few species. Here we examined spatial memory in a previously unstudied scatter hoarder, the southern flying squirrel. We dissociated the relative weighting of three potential spatial strategies (beacon, global, or relative array strategy) with three probe tests: transposition of beacon and the rotation or the expansion of the array. The squirrels’ choices were consistent with a spatial averaging strategy, where they chose the location dictated by at least two of the three strategies, rather than using a single preferred frame of reference. This adaptive and flexible heuristic has not been previously described in animal orientation studies, yet it may be a common solution to the universal problem of encoding and recalling spatial locations in an ephemeral physical landscape.     

Cross-examination of the expert witness: Do hostile tactics affect impressions of a simulated jury?

Ninety-one introductory psychology students viewed a videotape of a simulated personal damage trial in which a psychologist expert witness testified about a plaintiff's psychological problems resulting from trauma. The defense attorney's cross-examination tactics, employed against the expert witness, were varied in the videotape. A 2 × 2 factorial design was used, with leading versus nonleading questions and a hostile versus nonhostile attorney. An interaction effect was obtained, in which a hostile attorney using leading questions and a nonhostile attorney using nonleading questions were perceived as least effective.     

PHYSICAL AND PSYCHIATRIC CORRELATES OF GENDER DISCRIMINATION

We tested the model that sexist discrimination, measured by the Schedule of Sexist Events (SSE), would account for additional variance in women's physical and psychiatric symptoms, above and beyond that accounted for by generic stressors. A series of hierarchical regression analyses, predicting symptoms on 10 different symptom outcome measures from generic stress and sexist stress (discrimination) were conducted, with the generic stressors entered on the first step and sexist discrimination on the second. Results revealed that sexist discrimination contributed significantly to the variance in women's symptoms, accounting for additional variance in those symptoms. Furthermore, sexist discrimination accounted for more of the variance than did generic stressors in premenstrual, depressive, obsessive-compulsive, somatic, and total psychiatric and physical symptoms. These findings varied with the age and ethnicity of the women and with the symptom measure used, but nonetheless suggest that sexist discrimination plays a significant role in women's most prevalent symptoms.     

Conceptual knowledge in the interpretation of idioms

The authors examined how people determine the contextual appropriateness of idioms. In Experiment 1, idioms referring to the same temporal stage of a conceptual prototype were judged to be more similar in meaning than idioms referring to different temporal stages. In Experiment 2, idioms in a prototypical temporal sequence were more meaningful than idioms in sentences that violated the temporal sequence. In Experiment 3, idioms referring to the same stage of a conceptual prototype were differentiable on the basis of conceptual information. The conceptual coherence between idioms and contexts facilitated the processing speed of idioms in Experiment 4. Experiment 5 showed that speakers can recover the underlying conceptual metaphors that link an idiom to its figurative meaning. Experiment 6 showed that the metaphoric information reflected in the lexical makeup of idioms also determined the metaphoric appropriateness of idioms in certain contexts.