Life Satisfaction and Incumbent Voting: Examining the Mediating Effect of Trust in Government

Journal of Happiness Studies - An emerging body of evidence suggests a causal relationship between wellbeing and incumbent voting. However, the evidence is primarily founded upon established...     

Hemispheric asymmetry for global and local processing: language is less important than one might think

There have been consistent findings of hemispheric asymmetry in global/local processing, in both neurological patients and the neurologically normal. However, with one exception, these studies have used purely linguistic stimuli (letters made up of letters). The present study investigates lateral asymmetry for processing of global/local objects with less "linguistic" properties (e.g., letters made up of shapes, and shapes made up of letters) using a change detection paradigm. In each case the classic pattern of hemispheric asymmetry was found. These results are discussed in the context of the relative importance of hemispheric asymmetry for both global/local and linguistic information.     

Cultural differences in the development of cognitive shifting: East-West comparison

Prior research has documented that Japanese children's performance on the Dimensional Change Card Sorting (DCCS) task can be influenced by their observation of another person completing the task, which is referred to as social transmission of disinhibition. The current study explored whether Canadian children would also show a social transmission of disinhibition and whether their performance would be comparable to that of Japanese children. In this study, 3- and 4-year-olds in Canada and Japan were given both the standard version and social version of the DCCS. Results indicated that Canadian children displayed the social transmission of disinhibition, but their effects were significantly weaker than those with Japanese children. On the other hand, performance on the standard DCCS was comparable between children in the two countries. We discuss the results in terms of cultural differences in the relationship between self and other.     

The effects of video modeling with voiceover instruction on accurate implementation of discrete-trial instruction

The present study replicates and extends previous research on the use of video modeling (VM) with voiceover instruction to train staff to implement discrete-trial instruction (DTI). After staff trainees reached the mastery criterion when teaching an adult confederate with VM, they taught a child with a developmental disability using DTI. The results showed that the staff trainees' accurate implementation of DTI remained high, and both child participants acquired new skills. These findings provide additional support that VM may be an effective method to train staff members to conduct DTI.     

Encounters with Boundary Challenges: A Preliminary Model of Experienced Psychotherapists’ Working Strategies

Five experienced clinical psychologists were interviewed about their strategies for maintaining boundaries in psychotherapy. The interviews were subjected to qualitative analysis using grounded theory techniques to develop a preliminary model of boundary maintenance. The central principle exhibited by the interviewees was maintaining a therapeutic relationship to facilitate client self care. Overall, the central principle was comprised of three main working strategies: (1) maintaining client boundaries to ensure a clear focus on client needs; (2) maintaining psychotherapist boundaries to protect effective practice; and (3) maintaining psychotherapy boundaries to facilitate client reflection, awareness, and assumption of responsibility. Each strategy included two or three distinct meaning categories, explicated in the paper. Implications for clinical work and future research are discussed.     

Residential mobility breeds familiarity-seeking

Why are American landscapes (e.g., housing developments, shopping malls) so uniform, despite the well-known American penchant for independence and uniqueness? We propose that this paradox can be explained by American mobility: Residential mobility fosters familiarity-seeking and familiarity-liking, while allowing individuals to pursue their personal goals and desires. We reason that people are drawn to familiar objects (e.g., familiar, national chain stores) when they move. We conducted 5 studies to test this idea at the levels of society, individuals, and situations. We found that (a) national chain stores do better in residentially mobile places than in residentially stable places (controlling for other economic and demographic factors; Study 1); (b) individuals who have moved a lot prefer familiar, national chain stores to unfamiliar stores (Studies 2a and 2b); and (c) a residential mobility mindset enhances the mere exposure and familiarity-liking effect (Studies 4 and 5). In Study 5, we demonstrated that the link between mobility and familiarity-liking was mediated by anxiety evoked by mobility.     

Discrepant visual speech facilitates covert selective listening in "cocktail party" conditions

The presence of congruent visual speech information facilitates the identification of auditory speech, while the addition of incongruent visual speech information often impairs accuracy. This latter arrangement occurs naturally when one is being directly addressed in conversation but listens to a different speaker. Under these conditions, performance may diminish since: (a) one is bereft of the facilitative effects of the corresponding lip motion and (b) one becomes subject to visual distortion by incongruent visual speech; by contrast, speech intelligibility may be improved due to (c) bimodal localization of the central unattended stimulus. Participants were exposed to centrally presented visual and auditory speech while attending to a peripheral speech stream. In some trials, the lip movements of the central visual stimulus matched the unattended speech stream; in others, the lip movements matched the attended peripheral speech. Accuracy for the peripheral stimulus was nearly one standard deviation greater with incongruent visual information, compared to the congruent condition which provided bimodal pattern recognition cues. Likely, the bimodal localization of the central stimulus further differentiated the stimuli and thus facilitated intelligibility. Results are discussed with regard to similar findings in an investigation of the ventriloquist effect, and the relative strength of localization and speech cues in covert listening.     

Small Wins Matter in Advocacy Movements: Giving Voice to Patients

In this article, the various players are delineated in a story of a contested illness and patient advocacy, played out within the corridors of federal power. It is suggested that the mistreatment and negative attitudes that health care providers and others have towards those with chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) is possibly due to the social construction of this illness as being a "Yuppie flu" disease. Institutional factors are identified that created these norms and attributions, as well as the multiple stakeholders and constituent groups invested in exerting pressure on policy makers to effect systemic change. This article also provides examples of how the field of Community Psychology, which is fundamentally committed to/based on listening to and giving voice to patients, is broadly relevant to patient activism communities. This approach focused, over time, on epidemiological studies, the name, the case definition, and ultimately the change in CFS leadership at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Keys to this "small wins" approach were coalition building, use of "oppositional experts" (professionals in the scientific community who support patient advocacy goals) to challenge federal research, and taking advantage of developing events/shifts in power. Ultimately, this approach can result in significant scientific and policy gains, and changes in medical and public perception of an illness.     

Readers’ use of source information in text comprehension

In two experiments, we examined the role of discrepancy on readers’ text processing of and memory for the sources of brief news reports. Each story included two assertions that were attributed to different sources. We manipulated whether the second assertion was either discrepant or consistent with the first assertion. On the basis of the discrepancy-induced source comprehension (D-ISC) assumption, we predicted that discrepant stories would promote deeper processing and better memory for the sources conveying the messages, as compared to consistent stories. As predicted, readers mentioned more sources in summaries of discrepant stories, recalled more sources, made more fixations, and displayed longer gaze times in source areas when reading discrepant than when reading consistent stories. In Experiment 2, we found enhanced memory for source–content links for discrepant stories even when intersentential connectors were absent, and regardless of the reading goals. Discussion was focused on discrepancies as one mechanism by which readers are prompted to encode source–content links more deeply, as a method of integrating disparate pieces of information into a coherent mental representation of a text.     

List-method directed forgetting: The forget cue improves both encoding and retrieval of postcue information

In list-method directed forgetting, people are cued to forget a previously studied item list and to learn a new list instead. Such cuing typically leads to forgetting of the first list and to memory enhancement of the second, referred to as list 1 forgetting and list 2 enhancement. In the present study, two experiments are reported that examined influences of items' serial learning position in a list and the two lists' output order on list-method directed forgetting. The results show that list output order influences list 2 enhancement but not list 1 forgetting. The enhancement was higher when list 2 was recalled first than when list 1 was recalled first and, in both cases, was higher for early list 2 items than for middle and late list 2 items. In contrast, the forgetting was equally present for all list 1 items and did not depend on the two lists' output order. The findings suggest that two separate factors can contribute to list 2 enhancement: one (encoding) factor that is restricted to early list 2 items and does not depend on list output order, and another (retrieval) factor that pertains to all list 2 items and varies with the two lists' output order. A new two-mechanism account of directed forgetting is suggested that reconciles previous (encoding or retrieval) views on list 2 enhancement.