‘See it doesn’t look pretty does it?’ Young adults’ airbrushed drinking practices on Facebook

A range of negative health outcomes are associated with young adults’ drinking practices. One key arena where images of, and interaction about, drinking practices occurs is social networking sites, particularly Facebook. This study investigated the ways in which young adults’ talked about and understood their uses of Facebook within their drinking practices. Face-to-face, semi-structured interviews were conducted with seven New Zealand young adults as they displayed, navigated and talked about their Facebook pages and drinking behaviours. Our social constructionist thematic analysis identified three major themes, namely ‘friendship group belonging’, ‘balanced self-display’ and ‘absences in positive photos’. Drinking photos reinforced friendship group relationships but time and effort was required to limit drunken photo displays to maintain an overall attractive online identity. Positive photos prompted discussion of negative drinking events which were not explicitly represented. Together these understandings of drinking photos function to delimit socially appropriate online drinking displays, effectively ‘airbrushing’ these visual depictions of young adults’ drinking as always pleasurable and without negative consequences. We consider the implications of these findings for ways alcohol health initiatives may intervene to reframe ‘airbrushed’ drinking representations on Facebook and provoke a deeper awareness among young people of drinking practices and their online displays.     

Cognitive control of saccadic eye movements

The saccadic eye movement system provides researchers with a powerful tool with which to explore the cognitive control of behaviour. It is a behavioural system whose limited output can be measured with exceptional precision, and whose input can be controlled and manipulated in subtle ways. A range of cognitive processes (notably those involved in working memory and attention) have been shown to influence saccade parameters. Researchers interested in the relationship between cognitive function and psychiatric disorders have made extensive use of saccadic eye movement tasks to draw inferences as to the cognitive deficits associated with particular psychopathologies. The purpose of this review is to provide researchers with an overview of the research literature documenting cognitive involvement in saccadic tasks in healthy controls. An appreciation of this literature provides a solid background against which to interpret the deficits on saccadic tasks demonstrated in patient populations.     

Is task interference in event-based prospective memory dependent on cue presentation?

Whether having an intention produces a performance cost to ongoing activities (task interference) is central to theoretical claims regarding the mechanisms underlying cue detection in event-based prospective memory. Recent evidence suggests that task interference primarily reflects an attention allocation policy stored in memory when intentions are encoded. The present study examined whether these policies can change with ongoing task experience. In Experiment 1, task interference was more greatly reduced when expected cues were not presented than when they were. Experiment 2 replicated this effect when the importance of the prospective memory task was emphasized. In Experiment 3, task interference decreased with time, and this decrease was greater when expected cues were not presented than when they were. Cue presentation is crucial to maintenance of attention allocation policies established by task instructions. This is the first article to demonstrate changes in task interference with ongoing task experience without forewarning individuals of the relevance of upcoming ongoing task trials to intentions.     

Child Anxiety Sensitivity and Family Environment as Mediators of the Relationship between Parent Psychopathology, Parent Anxiety Sensitivity, and Child Anxiety

This study examined child anxiety sensitivity and family environment as mediators of the relationship between (1) parent psychopathology and anxiety sensitivity and (2) child anxiety in a community sample of 157 youths aged 7–18 years. Parents completed measures of anxiety sensitivity, psychopathology, and family environment. Youths completed measures of anxiety sensitivity and anxiety. One structural equation model was tested with child anxiety sensitivity as a mediator of (1) parent psychopathology and parent anxiety sensitivity and (2) child anxiety. Mediation was found with respect to parent psychopathology but not anxiety sensitivity. A second structural equation model was tested with family environment (conflict and control) as a mediator of (1) parent psychopathology and parent anxiety sensitivity and (2) child anxiety. Mediation was found with respect to parent psychopathology and anxiety sensitivity. Possible explanations for these pathways are discussed, including information transmission from parents to children, modeling anxiety-based reactions, temperament, and isolation of children from anxiety-provoking situations.     

The effect of gaze cues on attention to print advertisements

Print advertisements often employ images of humans whose gaze may be focussed on an object or region within the advertisement. Gaze cues are powerful factors in determining the focus of our attention, but there have been no systematic studies exploring the impact of gaze cues on attention to print advertisements. We tracked participants' eyes whilst they read an on‐screen magazine containing advertisements in which the model either looked at the product being advertised or towards the viewer. When the model's gaze was directed at the product, participants spent longer looking at the product, the brand logo and the rest of the advertisement compared to when the model's gaze was directed towards the viewer. These results demonstrate that the focus of reader's attention can be readily manipulated by gaze cues provided by models in advertisements, and that these influences go beyond simply drawing attention to the cued area of the advertisement. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Hypnotic suggestibility,cognitive inhibition,and dissociation

We examined two potential correlates of hypnotic suggestibility: dissociation and cognitive inhibition. Dissociation is the foundation of two of the major theories of hypnosis and other theories commonly postulate that hypnotic responding is a result of attentional abilities (including inhibition). Participants were administered the Waterloo-Stanford Group Scale of Hypnotic Susceptibility, Form C. Under the guise of an unrelated study, 180 of these participants also completed: a version of the Dissociative Experiences Scale that is normally distributed in non-clinical populations; a latent inhibition task, a spatial negative priming task, and a memory task designed to measure negative priming. The data ruled out even moderate correlations between hypnotic suggestibility and all the measures of dissociation and cognitive inhibition overall, though they also indicated gender differences. The results are a challenge for existing theories of hypnosis.     

The influence of extrafoveal emotional faces on prosaccade latencies

Across three experiments we sought to determine whether extrafoveally presented emotional faces are processed sufficiently rapidly to influence saccade programming. Two rectangular targets containing a neutral and an emotional face were presented either side of a central fixation cross. Participants made prosaccades towards an abrupt luminosity change to the border of one of the rectangles. The faces appeared 150 ms before or simultaneously with the cue. Saccades were faster towards cued rectangles containing emotional compared to neutral faces even when the rectangles were positioned 12 degrees from the fixation cross. When faces were inverted, the facilitative effect of emotion only emerged in the ?150 ms SOA condition, possibly reflecting a shift from configural to featural face processing. Together the results suggest that the human brain is highly specialized for processing emotional information and responds very rapidly to the brief presentation of expressive faces, even when these are located outside foveal vision.     

Ignatius of Loyola,Jonathan Edwards,and Indifference

The aim of this paper is threefold: First, I provide a brief account of Ignatian indifference as contained in the Spiritual Exercises. I distinguish between two senses of ‘indifference’ and apply them to an imaginary Regina who is faced with the decision about whether to give an inheritance to UNICEF or use the funds to finance her daughter’s college education. Second, I argue that Jonathan Edwards’s polemic, in Freedom of the Will, against Isaac Watts’s account of indifference, is open to the ‘straw man objection’ when applied to the Ignatian concept. Finally, I put forth a Kantian based critique of Ignatian indifference. I claim that while indifference is a logically consistent notion it may very well be psychologically problematic. If it is an open question whether Regina can ever know with certainty that she has acted from the pure motive of duty, then it is also an open question whether she can ‘find’ herself indifferent in the Ignatian senses of the term.