I don't get you. Action observation effects inverted by kinematic variation

Recent studies have reported an intricate interplay between affordance and mirror effects (the imitation of another agent) when participants attend to the concurrent presentation of an object and another agent interacting with it. In the present paper, we compare two experimental settings in which an observed action was presented as a prime for a task involving the categorization of a graspable object. In experiment 1a, the action depicted a reach and grasp gesture whereas in experiment 1b, only the reach phase was presented. This modification led to very different outcomes. Experiment 1a reflected the traditional imitation effect elicited by human motion. Conversely, experiment 1b showed the facilitation of contralateral responses. Affordance effects were found in experiment 1a only for the RVF. Our results support the view that motor simulation processes underlying imitation or joint actions are extremely sensitive to specific phase kinematics.     

Outreach and Exclusion: Jewish Denominational Marketing in the Early 20th Century

How do religious denominations select potential adherents? Previous literature indicates that market niches direct this decision, yet few studies examine how religious groups determine their niche. Analyzing annual reports and periodicals of Reform and Conservative Jewish organizations from 1910 to 1955, I find that the two denominations responded differently to the mass influx of Jewish immigrants at the turn of the 20th century. Compared to the Conservative organization, which openly welcomed new immigrants, the Reform organization actively chose not to recruit them. Reform statements make it clear that this decision was a result of how working‐class, Eastern European immigrants threatened their American‐centered organizational identity. This finding suggests that religious institutions carefully consider their organizational identity based on nativity, ethnicity, and social class when determining whom to include in their market niche.     

Hypertension reduction through forgiveness training

The objective of this study was to determine if patients with diagnosed stage-1 hypertension could benefit by a forgiveness training program to achieve measurable reductions in anger expression and blood pressure. Twenty-five participants were randomly divided into wait-listed control and intervention groups. The control group monitored blood pressure while the intervention group participated in an 8-week forgiveness training program. At the end of eight weeks, the wait listed group became an intervention group. Those who received forgiveness training achieved significant reductions in anger expression when compared to the control group. While reductions in blood pressure were not achieved by all the participants, those participants who entered the program with elevated anger expression scores did achieve significant reductions in blood pressure. It is suggested that forgiveness training may be an effective clinical intervention for some hypertensive patients with elevated levels of anger.     

What Are the Confidentiality Rights of Collaterals in Family Therapy?

The privacy rights of collateral family members constitute one of the most complex ethical issues in the field of family therapy. The author opens with four case studies which illustrate some of the dilemmas. The opening section reviews the APA Ethics Code on this topic, followed by an in depth analysis of confidentiality issues in marital therapy and the special ethical dilemmas of high conflict, child custody cases. The author reviews the scant case law on this topic and closes with a set of best practices guidelines for the clinician.     

Criteria for basic emotions: Seeking DISGUST?

In response to our proposal that DISGUST be considered an emotional system comparable to the SEEKING system, Panksepp has argued that the inclusion of disgust would necessitate the addition of hunger, thirst, fatigue, and other affective states. Although the English word disgust may carry primarily gustatory connotations, we are not suggesting a distaste system but a broad multipurpose system comparable to SEEKING. Our proposal is that nutritionally-, sexually-, and socially-related stimuli plus ideational components are all able to activate either the SEEKING or DISGUST systems in analogous ways. Our intent is to point out this evolutionary trajectory from illness-related reactions, which include distaste reflexes, through more complex learned aversions and avoidance responses, to human core disgust, which eventually gives rise to a secondary emotion encompassing socio-moral attributes.     

The role of controlled attention on recall in major depression

Information processing biases are hallmark features of major depressive disorder (MDD). Depressed individuals display biased memory and attention for negative material. Given that memory is highly dependent on attention for initial encoding, understanding the interplay of these processes may provide important insight into mechanisms that produce memory biases in depression. In particular, attentional control—the ability to selectively attend to task-relevant information by both inhibiting the processing of irrelevant information and disengaging attention from irrelevant material—may be one area of impairment in MDD. In the current study, clinically depressed (MDD: n = 15) and never depressed (non-MDD: n = 22) participants' line of visual gaze was assessed while participants viewed positive and negative word pairs. For each word pair, participants were instructed to attend to one word (target) and ignore one word (distracter). Free recall of study stimuli was then assessed. Depressed individuals displayed greater recall of negatively valenced target words following the task. Although there were no group differences in attentional control in the context of negative words, attention to negative targets mediated the relationship between depression status and recall of negative words. Results suggest a stronger link between attention and memory for negative material in MDD.