Scarcity,engagement, and value

Scarcity has been found to intensify value, positive or negative, rather than simply enhancing it. Some researchers have proposed that scarcity affects value by increasing how much attention is paid to a stimulus. We conceptualized sustained attention as stronger engagement and operationalized a situation of scarcity by telling participants who were choosing between two objects that the object that was chosen would then be replaced (Replenish) or not replaced (Scarce). To distinguish sustained attention-stronger engagement in a situation of scarcity from grabbing attention (salience from distinctiveness), the choice was between one option with a single instance (solitary-high salience) and a second option with several duplicates (abundant-low salience). We predicted that stronger engagement from a situation of scarcity would, first, intensify the value of the chosen item regardless of whether it was solitary or abundant, with positive items becoming more positive and negative items becoming more negative, and second, the stronger engagement from the situation of scarcity would transfer intensification to another separate object in the same setting. The results of Studies 1 and 2 supported both of these predictions. Study 3 tested a boundary condition for these scarcity–engagement effects in terms of how real participants experienced the choice items to be, where ‘realness’ is another source of engagement strength. As expected, the scarcity–engagement effect on intensifying value was replicated for participants who experienced the activity as real but was eliminated for those who did not.     

Coping Styles,Pain Expressiveness,and Implicit Theories of Chronic Pain

Whereas some individuals use active coping strategies and are able to adaptively cope with their pain, others use passive strategies and catastrophic appraisals, which are often associated with increased displays of pain behavior and negative pain-related outcomes. To investigate attribution-based implicit theories as a potential underlying mechanism that might affect coping success, we hypothesized that pain patients with an incremental implicit theory of pain (i.e., view pain as malleable) would have more active coping strategies, lower levels of pain expressiveness, and better pain-related outcomes than those with an entity implicit theory of pain (i.e., view pain as nonmalleable). Patients with chronic back pain undergoing a functional assessment completed a variety of self-report measures and participated in a pain-inducing physiotherapy procedure. The results revealed those with an incremental theory of pain used more active coping strategies, displayed less pain behavior, and reported better pain-related outcomes (e.g., lower levels of depression) than individuals with an entity theory of pain. The findings suggest implicit theories of pain may represent an underlying social-cognitive mechanism linked to important coping, emotional, and expressive reactions to chronic pain. Identifying such a mechanism may provide valuable information for the assessment and treatment of chronic pain.     

How to assess children’s virtue literacy: methodological lessons learnt from the Knightly Virtues programme

Character education is of growing importance in educational discourse. The Knightly Virtues programme draws on selected classic stories to teach eight moral virtues to nine- to 11-year-olds; it has proved to be hugely popular with UK schools. A finding of the trial was the different levels of ‘virtue literacy’ in faith and non-faith schools. This article outlines the key features of this trial which yielded the positive results and details its methodological strengths and potential shortcomings. Overall, statistical concerns are less problematic than the practical concerns of running trials designed to measure the impact of character education interventions. Of greatest theoretical interest is the conflation of general and virtue-specific literacy; in addition, we tease apart differences in understanding and motivation. The article highlights and discusses the challenges of running trials designed to measure character education, as well as providing insights into promising methodological approaches.     

Understanding Psychological Safety in Health Care and Education Organizations: A Comparative Perspective

Psychological safety plays a vital role in helping people overcome barriers to learning and change in interpersonally challenging work environments. This article focuses on two such contexts—health care and education. The authors theorize differences in psychological safety based on work type, hierarchical status, and leadership effectiveness. Consistent with prior research, the authors employ cross-industry comparison to highlight distinctive features of different professions. The goal is to illuminate similarities and differences with implications for future psychological safety research. To do this, the authors review relevant literature and present analyses of large data samples in each industry to stimulate further research on psychological safety in both sectors, separately and together.     

Frogs and ponds: a multilevel analysis of the regulatory mode complementarity hypothesis

Regulatory mode is a psychological construct pertaining to the self-regulatory orientation of individuals or teams engaged in goal pursuit. Locomotion, the desire for continuous progress or movement in goal pursuit, and assessment, the desire to critically evaluate and compare goals and means, are orthogonal regulatory modes. However, they are also complementary, in that both locomotion and assessment are necessary for effectual goal pursuit. In the present research, the authors sought to demonstrate that multilevel regulatory mode complementarity can positively affect individual-level performance on goal-relevant tasks. The authors recruited 289 employees (177 men, 112 women) from preexisting work teams in workplace organizations in Italy and obtained (a) employees' individual-level scores on the Regulatory Mode Scale and (b) supervisor ratings of each employee's work performance. The results supported the multilevel complementarity hypothesis for regulatory mode. Limitations and recommendations for future research are discussed.     

The Price of a Piece of Cheese: Value from Fit Between Epistemic Needs and a Learning Versus an Outcome Focus

In decision making, people can focus on decisional outcomes (outcome focus), but they can also focus on gaining knowledge about the decisional domain (learning focus). Furthermore, people differ in the strength of their epistemic needs—their preference for developing a rich and accurate understanding of the world. We invoke the regulatory fit theory to predict that higher epistemic needs better fit a learning focus than lower epistemic needs, resulting in a greater increase in valuation of the chosen option when a learning rather than an outcome focus is induced. This general hypothesis was tested and supported in three studies, each focusing on a different proxy to epistemic needs. Thus, individuals experienced greater value when they had lower expertise (Study 1), higher need for assessment (Study 2), and higher need for cognition (Study 3) when a learning rather than an outcome focus was induced. Implications for work on epistemic needs, regulatory fit theory, and decision‐making practice are discussed. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Social Discounting and Cigarette Smoking During Pregnancy

In this study, we examined the association between social discounting and smoking status in a cohort of pregnant cigarette smokers (n = 91), quitters (n = 27), or never‐smokers (n = 30). The smokers and quitters were participants in clinical trials on smoking cessation and relapse prevention, whereas the never‐smokers were controls in a study on nicotine withdrawal during pregnancy. Social discounting was assessed using a paper‐and‐pencil task that assesses the amount of hypothetical money a person is willing to forgo in order to share with individuals in their social network ranging from the person who is emotionally closest to them to a mere acquaintance. The amount that women were willing to forgo in order to share decreased hyperbolically as a function of social distance, with smokers exhibiting steeper discounting functions (i.e., less generosity) than quitters or never‐smokers; discounting functions of quitters and never‐smokers did not differ significantly. In multivariate analyses controlling for potential sociodemographic and other confounds, social discounting remained a significant predictor of smoking status among smokers versus quitters. Overall, these results suggest that individual differences in social discounting may be a factor influencing the choices that women make about quitting smoking upon learning of a pregnancy. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Changing the body image concern and eating behaviour of chronic dieters: The effects of a psychoeducational intervention

Abstract

A program designed to diminish body image concern and to normalise the eating of chronic dieters was evaluated experimentally and by monitoring outcomes for 12 months. The subjects were 82 females (mean age 44.4 years, mean BMI 31.4). Data from repeated measures of eating style, self-esteem and body shape concern revealed a strong, positive and enduring intervention effect. At 12 months the majority (86%) of the subjects were not dieting and 73% reported “sometimes” or “often” engaging in natural eating, i.e., unrestrained and physiologically cued eating. A positive relationship was found between extent of natural eating and the likelihood of weight loss or weight maintenance. It is concluded that female dieters can derive considerable benefits from programs promoting natural eating.     

Regulatory Mode and Preferred Leadership Styles: How Fit Increases Job Satisfaction

The purpose of this bibliography is to present social psychologists with a comprehensive listing of research works published between 1976 and 1979 by Latin American social psychologists. The bibliography hopes to solve some of the problems encountered by English-speaking psychologists who wish to keep abreast of recent developments in Latin America: Most of the articles are published in Spanish or Portuguese in journals that are difficult to obtain at U.S. or Canadian libraries. This bibliography joins other previous efforts to inform English-speaking psychologists of works carried out in Latin America. Foremost among these are Ardila and Finley's (1975) bibliography on Latin American psychology and Marin's (1978, 1979, 1980) previous bibliographies on Latin American social psychology, Citations included in this bibliography met the following criteria: (1) the work was written by a Latin American or the data was collected in Latin America (throughout the bibliography, Latin America was perceived to be all countries in the .Americas excluding the United States and Canada); (2) the cover date of the publication ranged from 1976 to 1979; and (3) the theme of the article was perceived in Latin America as being within the domain of social psychology. Works are cited by topics, and alphabetically within each topic. All citations include the original title of the article or book and its English translation where appropriate. Each abstract is nonevaluative and includes the most significant aspects of the contents of each citation. Reprints of the articles can be secured by contacting the authors. Their addresses can be obtained by consulting the recent International Directory of Psychologists (Jacobson &; Reinert, 1980), or by writing the author of this bibliography.     

When Group Influence Is More or Less Likely: The Case of Moral Judgments

We investigated whether group influence can change judgments even for high-consensus (i.e., unambiguous) moral norms. We found that participants often matched the judgment of the other current group members even when this moral judgment was normatively incorrect (nonstandard), and this occurred more for more ambiguous issues. Moreover, this social influence on public judgments was generally followed by private agreement and re-interpreting general values to be consistent with those judgements. We also found that participants who experienced a fit between their regulatory focus and their feelings of power (i.e., promotion/high power; prevention/low power) were less influenced by the group.