The dark side of cognitive illusions: When an illusory belief interferes with the acquisition of evidence‐based knowledge

Cognitive illusions are often associated with mental health and well‐being. However, they are not without risk. This research shows they can interfere with the acquisition of evidence‐based knowledge. During the first phase of the experiment, one group of participants was induced to develop a strong illusion that a placebo medicine was effective to treat a fictitious disease, whereas another group was induced to develop a weak illusion. Then, in Phase 2, both groups observed fictitious patients who always took the bogus treatment simultaneously with a second treatment which was effective. Our results showed that the group who developed the strong illusion about the effectiveness of the bogus treatment during Phase 1 had more difficulties in learning during Phase 2 that the added treatment was effective.     

Students’ suggestions for eliminating bullying at a university

Students’ suggestions for how to eliminate bullying at universities were gathered as part of an e-questionnaire sent to each university student (N = 10,551) at a Finnish university. The suggestions (n = 2804) regarding how to address bullying at universities were divided into the following four classes: support (944), punishment (78), support and punishment (65), and no suggestions (1717). Further analysis concerning support revealed the following five categories according to Houses’ (1981) classification: instrumental/material support (n = 265), informational support (n = 263), emotional support (n = 139), and appraisal support (n = 69). In addition, there were 208 inexact suggestions regarding how to stop bullying. Analysis concerning resources for help revealed the following five categories: Finnish Students Health Service/student association/police/university priest (120), university teachers (49), other students/peer support (41) and administration (36). In this classification, there were 698 inexact suggestions. This is a sign of the difficulty in addressing bullying situations.     

Self-reference is a fast-acting automatic mechanism on emotional word processing: evidence from a masked priming affective categorisation task

This study examined the impact of self-referential information at early stages of emotional word processing using an affective masked-priming paradigm in which positive (e.g, espetacular[awesome]) and negative (e.g., horrível[awful]) trait-adjectives were preceded by briefly primes that could be self-related (Eu sou[I am]), other-related (Ela é[She is]), or a control (%%%%%). Trait-adjectives were selected from female norms and only females participants were used to control for sex differences. Results showed that positive words were categorised faster when preceded by self-related primes than by other-related primes, though not control primes. Negative trait-adjectives were not modulated by the type of prime, even though participants were slower when they were preceded by other-related than by control primes. These findings demonstrate that taking the other-perspective entails a cost, and that the amount of priming produced by self-related and control primes was virtually the same, thus suggesting that assuming the self-perspective is a cognitively effortless process.     

The Disability Paradox Revisited: Quality of Life and Family Caregiving in Pediatric Cerebral Palsy

Parents who have children with cerebral palsy (CP) have been reported to have a more impaired QL and higher levels of burden than parents of typically developing children; however, little is known about the positive dimensions of their caregiving experience. In this study, WHOQOL-Bref and The Revised Burden Measure were administered to a sample of 105 parents of children/adolescents with CP (clinical group) and 117 parents of children/adolescents with no disabilities (control group). Despite the fact that parents of children with CP reported more Subjective Burden and less caregiving Uplifts, there were more similarities than differences in the variables compared between clinical and control groups. For parents of children with CP, the associations between Burden dimensions and QL, and between caregiving Uplifts and QL, were respectively moderate and weak. Caregiving Uplifts were found to moderate the links between Objective Burden and Psychological QL, and between Relationship Burden and Social QL. In addition, differential main effects of Burden dimensions and caregiving Uplifts were verified for Physical, Psychological and Social QL domains. These results highlight the adaptation variability of parents who have children with CP, as well as the importance of acknowledging caregiving uplifts as a resource that may attenuate the impact of burden on their QL.     

Evidence for an illusion of causality when using the Implicit Association Test to measure learning

Our ability to detect causal relations and patterns of covariation is easily biased by a number of well-known factors. For example, people tend to overestimate the strength of the relation between a cue and an outcome if the outcome tends to occur very frequently. During the last years, several accounts have attempted to explain the outcome-density bias. On the one hand, dual-process performance accounts propose that biases are not due to the way associations are encoded, but to the higher-order cognitive processes involved in the retrieval and use of this information. In other words, the outcome-density bias is seen as a performance effect, not a learning effect. From this point of view, it is predicted that the outcome-density bias should be absent in any testing procedure that reduces the motivation or opportunity to engage in higher-order cognitive processes. Contrary to this prediction, but consistent with the most common single-process learning accounts, our results show that the outcome-density effect can be detected when the Implicit Association Test is used to measure the strength of cue–outcome associations.     

Appraisals of self and situation as determinants of upward influencing tactics

This study considers subordinate upward influencing as a proactive behavior and applies this lens to an investigation into the contributions of appraisals of self and situation in predicting tactic choice. One hundred seventy‐eight employees assessed the frequency with which they used influencing tactics in interactions with their direct line manager. The results indicated that favorable appraisals of self were associated with increased use of rationality and unfavorable appraisal of situation were associated with increased the use of ingratiation, assertiveness, and upward appeal. While the use of rationality could be explained within approaches to positive proactive work behaviors, the use of the remaining five tactics could not. The results are interpreted within a wider perspective of proactive discretionary behaviors.     

From geometry to phenomenology

Richard Tieszen [Tieszen, R. (2005). Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, LXX(1), 153–173.] has argued that the group-theoretical approach to modern geometry can be seen as a realization of Edmund Husserl’s view of eidetic intuition. In support of Tieszen’s claim, the present article discusses Husserl’s approach to geometry in 1886–1902. Husserl’s first detailed discussion of the concept of group and invariants under transformations takes place in his notes on Hilbert’s Memoir Ueber die Grundlagen der Geometrie that Hilbert wrote during the winter 1901–1902. Husserl’s interest in the Memoir is a continuation of his long-standing concern about analytic geometry and in particular Riemann and Helmholtz’s approach to geometry. Husserl favored a non-metrical approach to geometry; thus the topological nature of Hilbert’s Memoir must have been intriguing to him. The task of phenomenology is to describe the givenness of this logos, hence Husserl needed to develop the notion of eidetic intuition. The author wishes to thank Academy of Finland for financial assistance that enabled her to work on this article.     

Overshadowed cues have reduced ability to retroactively interfere with other cues

The present series of experiments explores the interaction between retroactive interference and cue competition in human contingency learning. The results of two experiments show that a cue that has been exposed to a cue competition treatment (overshadowing) loses part of its ability to retroactively interfere with responding to a different cue that was paired with the same outcome. These results pose problems for associative models of contingency learning and are also difficult to explain in terms of current theories of causal reasoning. Additionally, it is proposed that in light of the interaction between interference and cue competition, interference could be used as an indirect measure for the study of cue competition effects.     

Quality of Life and General Health Perception in Women with Obesity

The purpose of this study was to determine the differences in general health status and quality of life between patients who present “non-normative eating behaviours” (namely, binge eating disorder, night eating syndrome, sweet /fat food cravings and continuous nibbling) and patients without these eating behaviour characteristics. A cohort of 168 women with obesity, all candidates to bariatric surgery, aged between 15 and 65 (M = 39.04; SD = 10.86), with a body mass index ranging between 30.37 and 80.65 (M = 48.79; SD = 8.37), was studied. Participants answered to a clinical interview, to SF-36 and to ORWELL-97, after their informed consent. Results suggest that women with obesity reporting binge eating disorder, night eating syndrome and continuous nibbling show poorer general health status and worst quality of life than those who do not present these “non-normative eating behaviours”. Moreover, the general health status and the quality of life of patients with sweet/fat food cravings do not differ from those who do not report this eating behaviour. Nevertheless, patients reporting the eating behaviours studied do not differ from the others regarding their body mass index.     

Assessing Attachment to Parents and Peers in Middle Childhood: Psychometric Studies of the Portuguese Version of the People in My Life Questionnaire

The People in My Life questionnaire (PIML) is one of the few available self-report measures for assessing children’s representations of the relationship with attachment figures (parents and peers) in middle childhood. The current study presents validation studies of the PIML in a sample of Portuguese children aged between 8 and 12 years (N?=?314) and adolescents aged between 13 and 18 years (N?=?281). The original factor structure, composed of a second-order factor of attachment and three first-order factors (Trust, Communication, and Alienation), was confirmed for both scales (Parents Attachment and Peers Attachment) in the sample of children and replicated in the sample of adolescents using confirmatory factor analyses. The Portuguese version of the PIML showed adequate internal consistency and correlated as expected with measures of intrapersonal and interpersonal functioning (internalizing and externalizing problems, prosocial behavior, quality of life, self-compassion, and emotion regulation strategies). The PIML proved to be a psychometrically robust measure of children’s representations of their relationships with parents and peers, representing an important advance in the measurement of attachment in middle childhood.