Recruiting Through Job Advertisements: The Effects of Cognitive Elaboration on Decision Making

We applied a model of persuasion – the elaboration likelihood model – to investigate whether individuals' decisions about responding to job advertisements are affected by how deeply they process recruitment messages (i.e., elaboration likelihood, EL). We manipulated individuals' (N=112) motivation and ability to carefully process job advertisements (ads). As hypothesized, individuals in the lower (vs. higher) EL conditions chose more ads containing cues unrelated to the job (e.g., bolded font), and fewer ads containing higher quality arguments. Participants also reported that they “skimmed” and carefully read job ads in the past, providing evidence for variability in EL among job seekers. We discuss the implications of the findings for recruiters who wish to increase the size of their applicant pool.     

The Psychiatric Diagnosis of Alcohol Abuse and the Medical Diagnosis of Alcoholic Related Liver Disease: Effects on Liver Transplant Survival

The present study investigated whether differing diagnostic criteria for alcoholism used by mental health professionals versus hepatologists lead to different outcomes in predicting liver transplant survival as determined by the medical record and without a priori judgments. This was in contrast to past studies, particularly in the liver transplant literature, demonstrating comparable survival rates between alcoholics and non-alcoholics that have typically employed a diagnosis of Alcoholic Liver Disease (ALD), which does not capture the salient maladaptive behavioral and interpersonal features associated with DSM-IV-TR diagnoses of Alcohol Abuse (AA) and Alcohol Dependence (AD). A series of survival analyses were conducted using data culled from the psychological and medical records of 358 first-time liver transplant recipients at Barnes-Jewish Hospital in St. Louis, Missouri. The primary outcome investigated was liver graft survival following transplant surgery. Follow-up times varied from 0 days to 13 years, depending on the time of transplant and length of graft survival, with a median follow-up time of 6.2 years. Diagnoses of AA and AD predicted significantly poorer survival rates, while diagnoses of ALD did not. DSM-IV-TR alcoholism criteria appear to have greater utility for predicting survival differences beyond pathophysiologically defined alcoholic liver failure.     

Coherence between emotional experience and physiology: does body awareness training have an impact?

Two fundamental issues in emotion theory and research concern: (a) the role of emotion in promoting response coherence across different emotion systems; and (b) the role of awareness of bodily sensations in the experience of emotion. The present study poses a question bridging the two domains; namely, whether training in Vipassana meditation or dance, both of which promote attention to certain kinds of bodily sensations, is associated with greater coherence between the subjective and physiological aspects of emotion. We used lag correlations to examine second-by-second coherence between subjective emotional experience and heart period within individuals across four different films. Participants were either: (a) experienced Vipassana meditators (attention to visceral sensations), (b) experienced dancers (attention to somatic sensations), and (c) controls with no meditation or dance experience. Results indicated a linear relationship in coherence, with meditators having highest levels, dancers having intermediary levels, and controls having lowest levels. We conclude that the coherence between subjective and cardiac aspects of emotion is greater in those who have specialized training that promotes greater body awareness.     

The evolution of the tattoo in defiance of the immutable definition of deviance: current perceptions by law enforcement of tattooed arrestees

Tattoos have made their way from prisons to fashion runways, but are they still perceived by law enforcement as marks of deviance? The purpose of this study is to examine law enforcement arrest patterns to determine the relationship between tattoos and offense charges. This study analyzes a random sample of arrestees from a large county in the Southern U.S. Using logistic regression models, the relationship between tattoos, tattoo location, number of offense charges, and severity of offense charges is examined.     

Trait Socio-Cognitive Mindfulness is Related to Affective and Cognitive Empathy

Research regarding the relationship between empathy and mindfulness is sparse. Within the social scientific literature, there are two major branches of mindfulness research: meditative mindfulness (Kabat-Zinn in Gen Hosp Psychiatry 4(1):33–47, 1982) and non-meditative, socio-cognitive mindfulness (Langer and Moldoveanu in J Soc Issues 56(1):1–9, 2000). Meditative mindfulness is the awareness that arises through paying attention non-judgmentally to the present moment whereas socio-cognitive mindfulness is the process of drawing novel distinctions leading to greater attention to the present moment and sensitivity to context. We hypothesized that the two types of mindfulness would correlate with each other and with empathy broadly defined but that there would be divergence in these relationships given their conceptual distinctions. Four hundred and eighty-four participants from Mechanical Turk completed tasks of socio-cognitive mindfulness, meditative mindfulness, affective empathy, cognitive empathy, and social desirability. Socio-cognitive mindfulness correlated with both affective and cognitive empathy as well as with meditative mindfulness. Meditative mindfulness correlated with only affective empathy but not with cognitive empathy. These findings suggested that, in contrast to meditative mindfulness, socio-cognitive mindfulness involves cognitive processes (e.g., perspective-taking, flexibility) potentially amenable to experimental manipulation aimed at increasing empathy more generally.     

Assessing changes in brain electrical activity and functional connectivity while overtaking a vehicle

ABSTRACT

Driving is a daily requirement and an indispensable activity for many people. However, still little is known about how driving is supported by the brain. We used electroencephalography to study the changes in brain activity and its functional connectivity in a simulated driving task. We focused on overtaking and studied this activity in three phases: before overtake, during overtake, and after overtake. Our results showed that mu power in motor and sensorimotor areas decreased during overtake and again increased after overtake. On the other hand, beta oscillations in frontal areas were at their highest level in the “before overtake” phase. It can be interpreted that the “before overtake” was the most attention-demanding phase. In addition, we found that the connectivity between right and left prefrontal regions and right and left occipital regions in alpha (and mu) band power was significantly stronger in the “during overtake” compared to the other two conditions.