Mentoring Global Dual-Career Couples: A Social Learning Perspective

This paper explores the dimensions and means to implement a global dual-career expatriate couple mentoring program. The rationale is that learning from an experienced mentor mitigates the complexity of global assignments, leading to more successful completion of overseas assignments. We explored the impact of such mentoring programs on "nontraditional" global managers, along with their trailing spouses. Social learning theory was used as the foundation for the development of such a mentoring program. To add to the contextual understanding of global assignments imposed on global dual-career couples, we explored the effectiveness of mentoring by investigating temporal (before, during, after expatriation) and gender-related dimensions. Further, we analyzed the level of mentor involvement (personal, organizational, and professional) regarding psychosocial and career development.     

Systems Training for Emotional Predictability and Problem Solving (STEPPS) in the United Kingdom: A Preliminary Report

The authors report the results of a pilot project to introduce the STEPPS (systems training for emotional predictability and problem solving) treatment program for persons with borderline personality disorder (BPD) to the United Kingdom. STEPPS combines cognitive-behavioral principles and skills training with a systems component that includes family members and significant others. STEPPS was developed to supplement the patient’s ongoing treatment program (e.g. medication, individual therapy, case management) and boost its effectiveness, but not replace it. Thirty-eight subjects agreed to participate at six sites in West Sussex, England. A pre- and post-intervention comparison design was used, and over the 20 week program were found to have significant improvement in their mood, BPD-related symptoms (including affective, cognitive, and impulsive domains), and both negative and positive affectivity. Subjects reported high levels of satisfaction with the program. This study provides further evidence that STEPPS, a relatively brief fully manualized group treatment program, may be used in other countries and achieves high levels of acceptance from patients and therapists.     

Testing the factor structure of the beliefs about language learning inventory

This preliminary study examined the factor structure of the Beliefs About Language Learning Inventory in two samples of about 750 college students of English as a foreign language in Taiwan. Results of confirmatory factor analysis lend partial support to Horwitz's theoretical five-factor belief model. Subsequent exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses of data show that a four-factor model represented by only 12 items performed better than other models both theoretically and empirically. This model consists of two dimensions already theorized in the inventory: Difficulty of Language Learning and Foreign Language Aptitude, and two newly interpreted dimensions, Importance of Spoken Language and Analytical Approaches to Language Learning. Although this four-factor model could be replicated in an independent sample, the factors are not reliable, suggesting the need to search for a more representative set of beliefs to tap specific aspects of language learning.     

A systematic analysis of distressing near-death experience accounts

ABSTRACT

Near-death experiences (NDEs) are usually associated with positive affect, however, a small proportion are considered distressing. We aimed to look into the proportion of distressing NDEs in a sample of NDE narratives, categorise distressing narratives according to Greyson and Bush’s classification (inverse, void or hellish), and compare distressing and “classical” NDEs. Participants wrote down their experience, completed the Memory Characteristics Questionnaire (assessing the phenomenology of memories) and the Greyson scale (characterising content of NDEs). The proportion of suicidal attempts, content and intensity of distressing and classical NDEs were compared using frequentist and Bayesian statistics. Distressing NDEs represent 14% of our sample (n?=?123). We identified 8 inverse, 8 hellish and 1 void accounts. The proportion of suicide survivors is higher in distressing NDEs as compared to classical ones. Finally, memories of distressing NDEs appear as phenomenologically detailed as classical ones. Distressing NDEs deserve careful consideration to ensure their integration into experiencers’ identity.     

Experience Influences Affordance Perception for Low Crawling Under Barriers With Altered Body Dimensions

Abstract

We examined the role of experience in affordance perception for low crawling with altered body dimensions under barriers of different heights. Adults decided which of five backpacks (10–30?cm thick) they would be able to wear while low crawling under barriers. Participants were assigned to one of three experience conditions. Participants in the Pre/Post-choice experience condition crawled under the barrier before and after picking a backpack, participants in the Feedback condition crawled under the barrier after picking a backpack, but participants in the No Experience condition received no low-crawling experience. Past research suggests that pre-choice experience with low crawling under the barrier would lead to more accurate responses. Overall, participants in all three conditions scaled the height of the backpack to the barrier height. Pre-choice low-crawling experience strongly influenced backpack choices such that participants in the Pre/Post condition picked significantly smaller backpacks and produced fewer failures than participants in the other conditions. The results provide evidence that brief practice, in an unfamiliar posture, can lead to improvements in affordance perception.     

The Failure of Imagined Contact in Reducing Explicit and Implicit Out-Group Prejudice Toward Male Homosexuals

A considerable amount of research has demonstrated the value of imagined contact in reducing social prejudice. The current study investigated the efficacy of imagined intergroup contact in improving attitudes towards male homosexuals on both explicit and implicit measures. Eighty-five heterosexual undergraduate students were randomly allocated to one of three conditions: imagined interaction, prime control or unrelated imagery control. Overall, no significant differences were found between the imagery conditions for either the explicit or implicit attitude measures, even when controlling for prior contact. Accordingly, the present findings, unlike those of Turner et al. (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 93: 369–388, 2007b) and (Group Processes & Intergroup Relations 10: 427–441, 2007a), do not offer support for the effectiveness of indirect contact in reducing prejudice toward male homosexuals. Some explanations for the inconsistency of findings are discussed.     

Some Costs of American Corporate Capitalism: A Psychological Exploration of Value and Goal Conflicts

Evolutionary psychology has been proposed as a metatheoretical framework for psychology. We argue that evolutionary psychology should be expanded if it is to offer new insights regarding the major issues in psychology. Evolutionary developmental biology can provide valuable new insights into issues such as the domain-specificity of the human mind, the nature–nurture debate, stages in development, and the origin of individual differences. Evolutionary developmental biology provides evidence for the hypotheses that domain-general and domain-specific abilities co-occur, that nature and nurture interact in a dynamic and nonadditive way, that stages occur in development, and that individual differences are the result of pleiotropic effects during development.     

Short-term memory for serial order supports vocabulary development: New evidence from a novel word learning paradigm

Although recent studies suggest a strong association between short-term memory (STM) for serial order and lexical development, the precise mechanisms linking the two domains remain to be determined. This study explored the nature of these mechanisms via a microanalysis of performance on serial order STM and novel word learning tasks. In the experiment, 6- and 7-year-old children were administered tasks maximizing STM for either item or serial order information as well as paired-associate learning tasks involving the learning of novel words, visual symbols, or familiar word pair associations. Learning abilities for novel words were specifically predicted by serial order STM abilities. A measure estimating the precision of serial order coding predicted the rate of correct repetitions and the rate of phoneme migration errors during the novel word learning process. In line with recent theoretical accounts, these results suggest that serial order STM supports vocabulary development via ordered and detailed reactivation of the novel phonological sequences that characterize new words.