Gender Conceptualizations in Female High School Seniors: Relationships with Global Self-Worth and Multiple Measures of Body Image

This study was conducted to determine if gender-role conceptualizations in adolescent girls were related to their global self-worth and several dimensions of their body image. Self-report surveys were administered to 335 predominantly Caucasian Grade 12 girls from religiously-based high schools in the midwestern part of the United States. It was hypothesized that adolescent females?? gender-typing of themselves as well as their gender-related attitudes towards others would be significantly, and possibly divergently, related to their perceptions of themselves and their physical bodies. Obtained data were analyzed using multivariate canonical correlation procedures. The results of these analyses revealed support for the predicted overall relationship between gender conceptualizations and self-perceptions, but also indicated some differences in the way in which the two dimensions of gender-role conceptualizations (personal and attitudes towards others) were associated with adolescents?? perceptions of themselves. Specifically, girls exhibiting more egalitarian gender-related attitudes towards others scored higher on global self-worth and lower in body appearance orientation. In addition, higher self-endorsement on the masculine subscales was linked with higher global self-worth, lower social physique anxiety, and higher use of competence to evaluate the physical body. In contrast, high self-endorsement on the feminine subscales exhibited mixed links to the set of self-perceptual variables.     

Comprehensive Soldier Fitness and the future of psychology

Psychology responded to the national needs in World War I and World War II and was itself transformed. National need calls a third time: unprecedented levels of posttraumatic stress disorder, depression, suicide, and anxiety along with a need for a resilient Army capable of meeting the persistent warfare of the foreseeable future. As a large part of the Comprehensive Soldier Fitness program, positive psychology is meeting this need with new tests, with new fitness courses, and with resilience training. These developments may transform the practice of psychology and psychology's relation to medicine and education.     

Strictly for Evangelical Parenting Support? The Case of Mothers of Preschoolers (MOPS)

Parenting poses a unique set of opportunities and challenges for both mothers who work for pay and for those who stay at home across the United States today. Specific types of ??work-family?? mothers?? groups have thus emerged as a way for these parents to provide support, information, and advocacy to one another in friendly communities. This study analyzes the boundary work undertaken by one national Christian mothers?? group, Mothers of Preschoolers (MOPS), to maximize its membership base and distinguish it from other work-family mothers?? organizations. In this article, I first probe how MOPS engages in a particular presentation of self that I call ??open evangelism?? to market its organization. Open evangelism combines both an open (nonreligious) and evangelical philosophy to appeal to a diversity of mothers across the country. I then use data collected from 25 in-depth interviews with MOPS members in 2009 in order to assess if and how this open evangelism is, in fact, experienced by members at the chapter level. I find that both open and evangelical themes emerge when members describe the benefits that they receive from joining the group and the challenges presented by parenthood, thereby suggesting that MOPS is successful in its self-presentation. I conclude with MOPS?? prospects for survival and growth in the competitive world of both religious and nonreligious mothers?? organizations.     

Making ontology sensitive

The characteristic feature of phenomenology is the phenomenological constraint it exerts on its concepts: they should be embodied in concrete cases. Now, one might take that that possible match between concepts and the given would require some ontological foundation: as if the general determination provided by the concept should correspond to a particular piece of given to be found in the object itself as an abstract ??moment??. Phenomenology would then call for an ontology of abstract particulars. Against such view, the author advocates that such ontological foundation is flawed in principle, and that phenomenology as such does not call for any particular ontology: phenomenology rather introduces some kind of phenomenological constraint on the very way of ontological analysis. In order to determine what one can say to be in particular circumstances, one has to consider what one usually says to be in that kind of circumstances: on this alternative view, ontology rests on examples, as paradigmatic applications of concepts. The phenomenological move consists in disclosing how the very content of concepts depends on the ways they are applied, rather than what would be supposed to ??correspond?? to them would depend on their alleged content??as if the latter was independent of any previous connection with the given.     

Children's essentialist reasoning about language and race

Across four studies, we directly compared children's essentialist reasoning about the stability of race and language throughout an individual's lifespan. Monolingual English-speaking children were presented with a series of images of children who were either White or Black; each face was paired with a voice clip in either English or French. Participants were asked which of two adults each target child would grow up to be - one who was a 'match' to the target child in race but not language, and the other a 'match' in language but not race. Nine- to 10-year-old European American children chose the race-match, rather than the language-match. In contrast, 5-6-year-old European American children in both urban, racially diverse, and rural, racially homogeneous environments chose the language-match, even though this necessarily meant that the target child would transform racial categories. Although surprising in light of adult reasoning, these young children demonstrated an intuition about the relative stability of an individual's language compared to her racial group membership. Yet, 5-6-year-old African American children, similar to the older European American children, chose the race-match, suggesting that membership in a racial minority group may highlight children's reasoning about race as a stable category. Theoretical implications for our understanding of children's categorization of human kinds are discussed.     

Bending perception to desire: Effects of task demands,motivation, and cognitive resources

Determinants of motivated judgments were examined in this research. Three experiments investigated how dominant motivation, biasing difficulty and mental resources combine to produce motivationally congruent judgments. Studies 1 and 2 showed that where a biasing motivation is dominant the presence of resources can augment a motivational bias in judgment. Study 3 replicated that result and showed that resources contribute to the formation of biased judgments only where biasing is difficult to accomplish, but not where it is relatively easy to accomplish. In addition, Study 3 showed that where the accuracy motivation is dominant and biasing is the easy default, unbiased judgments will occur only in the presence (vs. absence) of resources. In contrast, where unbiased judgments are easy to come by, such judgments occur irrespective of resources.     

Opposing determinants of compliance and interrogative suggestibility

The Gudjonsson Suggestibility Scales (GSS 1 & 2) can illuminate social and cognitive factors which affect forensic interviewees’ vulnerability to pressure from interrogators. Variations of the GSS procedure can highlight detail in the dynamics of interrogative suggestibility (IS). Induced malingering is one such variation. The present study used this method in an attempt to reconcile conflicting findings of two previous malingering studies. An innovation was to pre-test participants on the standard GSS 2 to identify them as showing Low, Medium, or High IS. These groups then undertook the parallel GSS 1 but with the instruction to role-play a suspect who is attempting to appear abnormally suggestible. Results showed marked differences in the direction in which faking scores changed, from those at pre-testing, between the Low and the High groups, with the High group showing a decrease in GSS scores and the Low group an increase: the Medium group scores followed the trend of the Low group scores. It is suggested that these results explain why previous results using induced malingering have been inconsistent. The results are also discussed in terms of how differing expectancies and levels of interpersonal trust may affect interviewees.     

A Pain to Practice: Attitudes of Medical Family Therapists Working With Patients With Opioid Use Disorder

ABSTRACT

The prevalence of patients with opioid misuse in medical settings continues to rise, and it is unknown how much exposure medical family therapists (MedFTs) have in treating this issue. This study explored the attitudes of MedFTs (n = 58) when working with patients struggling with opioid use disorder in clinical practice. Results revealed that 43% of MedFTs had a low comfort level in working with this population and preferred to make referrals to primary care providers. Given that opioid use disorder cases are rising in healthcare settings, emerging mental health professionals would benefit from additional training to effectively treat this population.     

Choice as a Moderator of Placebo Expectation Effects: Additional Support From Two Experiments

Two experiments investigated the hypothesis that treatment choice enhances placebo treatment efficacy. In Experiment 1, prior to a pain task, participants were given either an expectation that two (inert) products could reduce pain or no expectation. In addition, participants either selected between the two products or were assigned a product to use. Participants given both the placebo expectation and treatment choice reported the lowest pain. Experiment 2 conceptually replicated this finding using a placebo paradigm with aversive auditory stimuli. Additional control conditions indicated that a choice availability (rather than choice restriction) explanation best accounted for these results.     

Target–target similarity and the attentional blink: Task-relevance matters!

Studies of the attentional blink (AB) indicate that similarity modulates the magnitude of the impairment in reporting the second of two masked targets. The present experiments tested whether similarity-based modulations of the AB are determined by all object dimensions or by task-relevant dimensions only. Similarity between target faces was manipulated on two dimensions, only one of which was task relevant. The results indicated that similarity on the task-relevant dimension modulated the AB, whereas similarity on task-irrelevant dimension did not. These results suggest that selection during the AB can occur on the level of task-relevant dimensions.