Childhood personality predicts long-term trajectories of shyness and aggressiveness in the context of demographic transitions in emerging adulthood

In a 19-year longitudinal study, childhood personality characteristics (assessed by teachers at ages 4 to 6) were significantly related to both initial levels and changes in parental judgments of shyness and aggressiveness. Long-term stability was demonstrated by the fact that overcontrollers had consistently higher scores in shyness and undercontrollers in aggressiveness. However, undercontrollers' shyness and overcontrollers' aggressiveness changed over time from a low to a high level. Also, both types assumed adult social roles, such as leaving the parental home, establishing a first romantic relationship, and getting a part-time job, at a later time than the resilient participants. A mediation analysis indicated that under- and overcontrollers' increasing aggressiveness between age 17 and 23 was due to their longer latency of getting a part-time job. Together, results demonstrate the importance of considering person-environment transactions in explaining both change and stability in personality between childhood and adulthood.     

Evidence for conditional sex differences in emotional but not in sexual jealousy at the automatic level of cognitive processing

The two evolutionary psychological hypotheses that men react more jealous than women to sexual infidelity and women react more jealous than men to emotional infidelity are currently controversial because of apparently inconsistent results. We suggest that these inconsistencies can be resolved when the two hypotheses are evaluated separately and when the underlying cognitive processes are considered. We studied jealousy with forced‐choice decisions and emotion ratings in a general population sample of 284 adults aged 20–30 years using six infidelity dilemmas and recordings of reaction times. The sex difference for emotional jealousy existed for decisions under cognitive constraint, was also evident in the decision speed, increased for faster decisions, and was stronger for participants with lower education. No evidence for a sex difference in sexual jealousy was found. Our results support the view of a specific female sensitivity to emotional infidelity that canalizes the development of an adaptive sex difference in emotional jealousy conditional to the sociocultural environment. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Buddhist insight meditation (Vipassanā) and Jon Kabat-Zinn’s “Mindfulness-based Stress Reduction”: an example of dedifferentiation of religion and medicine?

For about 25 years, mindfulness meditation has attracted growing attention. Developed in the context of a traditional Asian religious tradition, mindfulness meditation originally served soteriological goals. In therapeutic settings, it has been claimed, it has become a secular ‘consciousness technology’. So far, studies have mainly been interested in clinical evidence for salutogenetic effects. Questions about if and how practices such as “Mindfulness-based Stress Reduction” (MBSR) are to be conceptualized as ‘religious’ still require further analysis. To provide a more fitting criteriology, we propose to distinguish between ‘salvific’ (‘liberating’) and ‘salvetive’ (‘healing’) settings of meditation, with the latter denoting a more ‘therapeutic’ outlook. It will be argued that MBSR bears elements of salvetive and salvific meditation. In the paradigm of a functional differentiation between ‘religion’ and ‘biomedicine’, MBSR’s presence in biomedical institutions seems to provide a counter-example, which will be discussed in the final section.     

Day-level transformational leadership and followers’ daily level of stress: a moderated mediation model of team cooperation,role conflict,and type of communication

This study contributes to the literature on leadership by linking day-level transformational leadership behaviour with employees’ daily level of stress. A first-stage moderated mediation framework consisting of team cooperation, role conflict, and type of daily communication is introduced to specify how and when leaders’ transformational behaviour is related to followers’ daily stress. Two hundred five participants took part in a diary study over five consecutive working days and provided information on their leaders’ transformational behaviour, team cooperation, role conflict, type of communication with supervisors, as well as information on their daily level of stress. Results show that transformational leader behaviour is significantly related to followers’ level of stress on a day-to-day basis. This relationship is mediated by team cooperation, but not by role conflict. The type of communication moderates this mediation framework. If only indirect means of communication are used, the negative indirect relation between transformational leader behaviour via team cooperation on daily stress is strengthened. The results are discussed in the context of leadership literature, and the implications for future research as well as practice are presented.     

A benefit of context reinstatement to recognition memory in aging: the role of familiarity processes

Reinstatement of encoding context facilitates memory for targets in young and older individuals (e.g., a word studied on a particular background scene is more likely to be remembered later if it is presented on the same rather than a different scene or no scene), yet older adults are typically inferior at recalling and recognizing target–context pairings. This study examined the mechanisms of the context effect in normal aging. Age differences in word recognition by context condition (original, switched, none, new), and the ability to explicitly remember target–context pairings were investigated using word–scene pairs (Experiment 1) and word–word pairs (Experiment 2). Both age groups benefited from context reinstatement in item recognition, although older adults were significantly worse than young adults at identifying original pairings and at discriminating between original and switched pairings. In Experiment 3, participants were given a three-alternative forced-choice recognition task that allowed older individuals to draw upon intact familiarity processes in selecting original pairings. Performance was age equivalent. Findings suggest that heightened familiarity associated with context reinstatement is useful for boosting recognition memory in aging.     

A simple framework (ASF) for behavioral and neuroimaging experiments based on the psychophysics toolbox for MATLAB

The cognitive neurosciences combine behavioral experiments with acquiring physiological data from different modalities, such as electroencephalography, magnetoencephalography, transcranial magnetic stimulation, and functional magnetic resonance imaging, all of which require excellent timing. A simple framework is proposed in which uni- and multimodal experiments can be conducted with minimal adjustments when one switches between modalities. The framework allows the beginner to quickly become productive and the expert to be flexible and not constrained by the tool by building on existing software such as MATLAB and the Psychophysics Toolbox, which already are serving a large community. The framework allows running standard experiments but also supports and facilitates exciting new possibilities for real-time neuroimaging and state-dependent stimulation.     

Local and global cross-modal influences between vision and hearing, tasting, smelling, or touching

It is suggested that the distinction between global versus local processing styles exists across sensory modalities. Activation of one-way of processing in one modality should affect processing styles in a different modality. In 12 studies, auditory, haptic, gustatory or olfactory global versus local processing was induced, and participants were tested with a measure of their global versus local visual attention; the content of this measure was unrelated to the inductions. In a different set of 4 studies, the effect of local versus global visual processing on the way people listen to a poem or touch, taste, and smell objects was examined. In all experiments, global/local processing in 1 modality shifted to global/local processing in the other modality. A final study found more pronounced shifts when compatible processing styles were induced in 2 rather than 1 modality. Moreover, the study explored mediation by relative right versus left hemisphere activation as measured with the line bisection task and accessibility of semantic associations. It is concluded that the effects reflect procedural rather than semantic priming effects that occurred out of participants' awareness. Because global/local processing has been shown to affect higher order processing, future research may activate processing styles in other sensory modalities to produce similar effects. Furthermore, because global/local processing is triggered by a variety of real world variables, one may explore effects on other sensory modalities than vision. The results are consistent with the global versus local processing model, a systems account (GLOMOsys; F?rster & Dannenberg, 2010).     

Narrowing down to open up for other people's concerns: Empathic concern can be enhanced by inducing detailed processing

In three experiments inducing a detailed versus abstract processing style using perceptual (Experiment 1), motivational (Experiment 2), and social (Experiment 3) manipulations, we found that empathic concerns are enhanced in contexts associated with a more detailed processing style (i.e., local perceptual scope, prevention motivation, and low power, respectively). Hence, simple contextual changes known to impact on processing styles may influence empathy beyond individual differences. The present findings are discussed in terms of their implications for empathy research and their relation with research on mood and level of construal.     

Roache’s Argument against the Cohabitation View

Rebecca Roache’s recent critique of David Lewis’s “cohabitation” view assumes that a person cannot be properly concerned about something that rules out that she ever exists. In this brief response, I argue against this assumption.