On becoming neutral: effects of experimental neutralizing reconsidered

Behaviour Research and Therapy 34 (1996) 889–898 found that writing out a negative thought produced anxiety and an urge to neutralize the thought, that instructing participants to neutralize the thought reduced anxiety/neutralization urge in the short run (i.e. within 2 min), but that in the control group 20 min without instruction was attended by the same reduction in anxiety/urge to neutralize (“natural decay”). The observations were made with pariticipants who scored high on “thought action fusion” and the experiment was set up as exerimental model of obsessions. We repeated the study with participants that were not selected on thought action fusion. All the findings reported by Behaviour Research and Therapy 34 (1996) 889–898 were replicated. Correlational analysis indicated that the strength of the effect was not related to scores on scales measuring “thought action fusion”. Behaviour Research and Therapy 34 (1996) 889–898 did not assess whether non-neutralizing was followed by immediate reductions in distress. We did assess this and found that the larger part of the immediate reduction of distress after neutralization also occurs when no neutralization instruction is given. The effects of neutralization instructions in the present type of experiment are considerably less powerful than suggested earlier.     

Religion, Denomination, and Education in The Netherlands: Cognitive and Noncognitive Outcomes After an Era of Secularization

After 1850, The Netherlands developed into a strongly pillarized or denominational society. Starting in 1965, however, a process of secularization and depillarization emerged and the influence of the institutionalized denominations declined greatly. Today, there are indications that the process of secularization has reached its peak. Remarkably enough, such secularization and depillarization has had little influence on the educational system in The Netherlands. In this article, the relations between the religious affiliations of parents, the denominations of the schools attended by their children, and both the cognitive and noncognitive educational achievement of their children are examined. A representative sample of nearly 8,400 kindergarten students from 432 elementary schools is studied. The results show that the denomination of the school does not appear to affect educational results. Effects of the religious affiliation of the parents on the cognitive achievement but not the self-confidence or well-being of their children were found. When the socioethnic background of the students was taken into consideration, however, the observed effects disappeared.     

Can job seekers achieve more through networking? The role of networking intensity,self-efficacy,and proximal benefits

The authors develop and evaluate an online networking intervention, Building Relationships and Improving Opportunities (BRIO), built in conjunction with the networking literature and social cognitive theory (Bandura, 1986, 1999). A field experiment using 491 unemployed job seekers shows that the intervention increases networking intensity, networking self-efficacy, and proximal networking benefits. Further, the intervention generates higher quality reemployment through its positive effects on networking self-efficacy. Individuals who completed the intervention and were also lower in extraversion showed the most positive improvements in networking self-efficacy and reemployment quality. The study advances the literature by uncovering the mechanisms through which a networking intervention may result in improved reemployment success, and demonstrating the moderating role of individual differences in affecting intervention outcomes. The study helps practice by providing a publicly available, research-based training to improve job search networking.