Priming effects for affective vs. neutral faces

Affective and Neutral Tasks (faces with negative or neutral content, with different lighting and orientation) requiring reaction time judgments of poser identity were administered to 32 participants. Speed and accuracy were better for the Affective than Neutral Task, consistent with literature suggesting facilitation of performance by affective content. Priming effects were significant for the Affective but not Neutral Task. An Explicit Post-Test indicated no conscious knowledge of the stimulus frequency that was associated with performance facilitation. Faster performance by female vs. male participants, and differential speeds and susceptibility to priming of different emotions were also found. Anger and shock were responded to most rapidly and accurately in several conditions, showed no gender differences, and showed significant priming for both RT and accuracy. Fear and pain were responded to least accurately, were associated with faster female than male reaction time, and the accuracy data showed a kind of reverse priming.     

Spiritual pain: a brief overview and an initial response within the Christian tradition

The author notes that spiritual pain is widespread, both within individuals and society. Drawing on personal experiences and a literature survey, he offers an overview of current work on spiritual pain. As distinct from palliative caregivers, he suggests that spiritual pain can be noticed, but is difficult to define. Drawing on some of the Church's spiritual masters, the author offers a broad typology for spiritual pain, claiming that current methods for attending to spiritual pain are too complex to be useful. He therefore offers, and briefly explores, the image of retreat for attending to spiritual pain--compassionate hospitality, tempered by a form of "tough love" that enables the retreatAnt to embrace, welcome, and dialogue with pain. He suggests that essential features within such an image include an experience of support; a safe and sacred space, a sense of freedom; appropriate expressions of reassurance, and opportunities for forgiveness and reconciliation.     

Reactions of male subordinates to the sex-role congruency of immediate supervision

Male subjects (N=90) worked under supervision for two hours. A 2×2×2 factorial design was employed so that the supervisor was male or female, autocratic or democratic, and possessed a sex-role congruent or incongruent job title. The hypotheses were supported in part: For female supervision only, the more traditionally incongruent the situation, the more unfavorable were the reactions elicited. This finding was true, however, only for subordinates' verbal comments and not for their task performance or written evaluation of the supervisor. Discussion of the specific hypotheses is provided and an alternate explanation concerning the supervisors' alleged prior experience is offered. A more dynamic approach to the study of leader—subordinate relationships — especially in light of the implications for acceptance of female supervision offered by this study — is advocated.     

The effects of didactic classroom instruction versus field exposure on career maturity

This study tested two types of career training (field exposure and didactic classroom) to determine which is more effective in bringing about the development of career maturity. Forty-six first-year Upward Bound students were assigned to either a field exposure or a didactic group by the use of a stratified random assignment technique. A pretest/post-test design was utilized with the Career Maturity Inventory as the data-collecting instrument. The data were analyzed by analysis of covariance. The results of the study indicate that field exposure career training is an effective method to increase career maturity.     

Are families supported to come to terms with an autism diagnosis? A service evaluation of referrals to family therapy for young people with autism in one NHS trust

Young people with autism are increasingly being referred for family therapy (FT) owing to impaired family functioning, but few studies have investigated the support families receive following a diagnosis through specific NHS Trusts. This study examined (1) the proportion of autism cases referred for FT in one Trust and (2) the post-diagnostic support families received. Participants (n = 144; 9.5–19.3 years) were FT referrals between 2019–2020. Autism diagnostic status and the support families received from FT, from the neurodevelopmental (ND) service which specialises in autism, and for co-occurring conditions [e.g., cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT)] was extracted retrospectively from routine data. Forty FT referrals met autism criteria: several families did not receive FT; few were provided with support from the ND service; and if CBT was offered, no adaptations for autism were noted. Families received insufficient support following a diagnosis through this Trust. Implications include improving post-diagnostic support for families in practice.     

Do facial first impressions reflect a shared social reality?

Influential facial impression models have repeatedly shown that trustworthiness, youthful–attractiveness, and dominance dimensions subserve a wide variety of first impressions formed from strangers’ faces, suggestive of a shared social reality. However, these models are built from impressions aggregated across observers. Critically, recent work has now shown substantial inter-observer differences in facial impressions, raising the important question of whether these dimensional models based on aggregated group data are meaningful at the individual observer level. We addressed this question with a novel case series approach, using factor analyses of ratings of twelve different traits to build individual models of facial impressions for different observers. Strikingly, three dimensions of trustworthiness, youthful/attractiveness, and competence/dominance appeared across the majority of these individual observer models, demonstrating that the dimensional approach is indeed meaningful at the individual level. Nonetheless, we also found differences in the stability of the competence/dominance dimension across observers. Taken together, results suggest that individual differences in impressions arise in the context of a largely common structure that supports a shared social reality.     

Children's understanding of habitual behaviour

Research into the development of Theory of Mind (ToM) has shown how children from a very early age infer other people's goals. However, human behaviour is sometimes driven not by plans to achieve goals, but by habits, which are formed over long periods of reinforcement. Habitual and goal‐directed behaviours are often aligned with one another but can diverge when the optimal behavioural policy changes without being directly reinforced (thus specifically hobbling the habitual learning strategy). Unlike the flexibility of goal‐directed behaviour, rigid habits can cause agents to persist in behaviour that is no longer adaptive. In the current study, all children predict agents will tend to behave consistently with their goals, but between the ages of 5 and 10, children showed an increasing understanding of how habits can cause agents to persistently take suboptimal actions. These findings stand out from the typical way the development of social reasoning is examined, which instead focuses on children's increasing appreciation of how others' beliefs or expectations affect how they will act in service of their goals. The current findings show that children also learn that under certain circumstances, people's actions are suboptimal despite potentially ‘knowing better.’     

The role of inferior frontal cortex in phonological processing

Recent neuroimaging studies of language processing are examining the neural substrate of phonology because of its critical role in mapping sound information onto higher levels of language processing (e.g., words) as well as providing codes in which verbal information can be temporarily stored in working memory. However, the precise role of the inferior frontal cortex in spoken and written phonological tasks has remained elusive. Although lesion studies have indicated the presence of selective deficits in phonological processing, the location of lesions underlying these impairments has not revealed a consistent pattern. Despite efforts to refine methods and tasks, functional neuroimaging studies have also revealed variability in activation patterns. Reanalysis of evidence from these neuroimaging studies suggests that there are functional subregions within the inferior frontal gyrus that correspond to specific components of phonological processing (e.g., orthographic to phonological conversion in reading, and segmentation in speech).