College Students’ Attitudes Toward Blacks and Arabs Following a Terrorist Attack as a Function of Varying Levels of Media Exposure1

Attitudes toward Blacks and Arabs immediately following a terrorist attack on the United States, as well as 1 year later, were investigated. White undergraduate students completed a modified version of the Should‐Would Discrepancy Questionnaire (Monteith & Voils, 1998), assessing beliefs about what they should do in certain situations pertaining to race and what they would do in these situations. Additionally, daily self‐reported levels of news exposure were measured. The result was that the participants both believed that they should and would be more prejudiced toward Arabs than toward Blacks, at both Time 1 and Time 2. Furthermore, at Time 1, there was a trend for participants reporting high levels of daily news exposure (television, radio, Internet, and newspapers) to be more prejudiced toward Arabs than were participants who reported low levels. No effect of news exposure on attitudes toward Blacks was found at Time 1. At Time 2, however, participants reporting greater amounts of news exposure were more prejudiced toward Blacks than were participants reporting medium or low levels. Possible reasons for and implications of these findings are discussed.     

Explaining prejudice toward the mentally ill: A test of sociopolitical,demographic, and socioeconomic factors

People with mental disorders often face prejudices that can further deteriorate their condition. We tested whether Social Dominance Orientation (SDO), Right‐Wing Authoritarianism (RWA), and Belief in a Just World (BJW), and characteristics of the mentally ill predict such prejudices. Both in a general population sample and a sample of health professionals and trainees, SDO, but not RWA and BJW, predicted more prejudice, although this pattern was less pronounced among health professionals/trainees. BJW interacted with the targets' gender in Study 1, predicting less empathy toward a male but not toward a female mentally ill person. In Study 2, depressed individuals were blamed more for their illness than those with schizophrenia or cancer. Implications for future research and clinical practice are discussed.     

Generalization of the disruptive effects of alternative stimuli when combined with target stimuli in extinction

Differential‐reinforcement treatments reduce target problem behavior in the short term but at the expense of making it more persistent long term. Basic and translational research based on behavioral momentum theory suggests that combining features of stimuli governing an alternative response with the stimuli governing target responding could make target responding less persistent. However, changes to the alternative stimulus context when combining alternative and target stimuli could diminish the effectiveness of the alternative stimulus in reducing target responding. In an animal model with pigeons, the present study reinforced responding in the presence of target and alternative stimuli. When combining the alternative and target stimuli during extinction, we altered the alternative stimulus through changes in line orientation. We found that (1) combining alternative and target stimuli in extinction more effectively decreased target responding than presenting the target stimulus on its own; (2) combining these stimuli was more effective in decreasing target responding trained with lower reinforcement rates; and (3) changing the alternative stimulus reduced its effectiveness when it was combined with the target stimulus. Therefore, changing alternative stimuli (e.g., therapist, clinical setting) during behavioral treatments that combine alternative and target stimuli could reduce the effectiveness of those treatments in disrupting problem behavior.     

Fitting Attitude Analyses of Value and the Partiality Challenge

According to ‘Fitting Attitude’ (FA) analyses of value, for an object to be valuable is for that object to have properties—other than its being valuable—that make it a fitting object of certain responses. In short, if an object is positively valuable it is fitting to favour it; if an object is negatively valuable it is fitting to disfavour it. There are several variants of FA analyses. Some hold that for an object to be valuable is for it to be such that it ought to be favoured; others hold that value is analyzable in terms of reasons or requirements to favour. All these variants of the FA analysis are subject to a partiality challenge: there are circumstances in which some agents have reasons to favour or disfavour some object—due to the personal relations in which they stand to the object—without this having any bearing on the value of the object. A. C. Ewing was one of the first philosophers to draw attention to the partiality challenge for FA analyses. In this paper I explain the challenge and consider Ewing's responses, one of which is preferable to the other, but none of which is entirely satisfactory. I go on to develop an alternative Brentano-inspired response that Ewing could have offered and that may well be preferable to the responses Ewing actually did offer.

Personality trait scores among occupationally active bullied persons and witnesses to bullying

There is little research on the personalities and emotional stability of persons who report being bullied or witnessing bullying at work. Men and women (N = 247) from 19 to 64 years of age and in manual labour completed a questionnaire concerning the psychosocial work climate, bullying and personality. Three groups were defined: bullied (N = 14), witnesses (N = 31) and non-bullied respondents (N = 202). The Swedish universities Scale of Personality was used to assess personality traits related to the three major dimensions of neuroticism, extraversion, and aggressiveness. Bullied persons had higher scores on all six scales within the neuroticism dimension as well as higher irritability (aggressiveness dimension) and impulsiveness scores (extraversion dimension), when compared with their non-bullied work colleagues. To conclude, bullied persons display a self-image that is dominated by mistrust and embitterment as well as irritability and impulsiveness. Accordingly, when dealing with bullying at work, the need for ego-supportive actions should be considered in conjunction with more organisational, collective oriented action.     

Culture, self, and the emergence of reactance: Is there a “universal” freedom?

In this article we suggest that independent vs. interdependent aspects of the self yield different manifestations of psychological reactance and that this is especially relevant in a cross-cultural context. In Studies 1, 2, and 4 we showed that people from collectivistic cultural backgrounds (individuals holding more interdependent attitudes and values) were less sensitive to a threat to their individual freedom than people from individualistic cultural backgrounds (individuals holding more independent attitudes and values), but more sensitive if their collective freedom was threatened. In Study 3 we activated independent vs. interdependent attitudes and values utilizing a cognitive priming method and yielded similar results as the other studies hinting at the important causal role of self-related aspects in understanding reactance in a cross-cultural context.     

Selective exposure and decision framing: The impact of gain and loss framing on confirmatory information search after decisions

When people make decisions, they often prefer to receive information that supports rather than conflicts with their decision. To date, this effect has mainly been investigated in the context of decisions about gains, whereas decisions about losses have received less attention. Based on Prospect Theory, we expected information search to be differently affected by whether people previously have decided about gains or losses. Three studies have revealed that selectivity of information search is stronger after gain-framed rather than after loss-framed decision problems. An investigation of the underlying psychological processes revealed that gain decisions are made with increased subjective decision certainty (i.e. they are easier and less effortful to make), which in turn systematically increases confirmatory information search.     

The role of control motivation in mortality salience effects on ingroup support and defense

Terror management research has shown that mortality salience (MS) leads to increased support and defense of cultural ingroups and their norms (i.e., worldview defense, WD). The authors investigated whether these effects can be understood as efforts to restore a generalized sense of control by strengthening one's social ingroup. In Studies 1-3, the authors found that WD was only increased following pure death salience, compared with both dental pain salience and salience of self-determined death. As both the pure death and the self-determined death conditions increased accessibility of death-related thoughts (Study 4), these results do not emerge because only the pure death induction makes death salient. At the same time, Study 5 showed that implicitly measured control motivation was increased in the pure death salience condition but not under salience of both self-determined death and dental pain. Finally, in Study 6, the authors manipulated MS and control salience (CS) independently and found a main effect for CS but not for MS on WD. The results are discussed with regard to a group-based control restoration account of terror management findings.     

Observing repetitive finger movements modulates response times of auditorily cued finger movements

Our motor and perceptual representations of actions seem to be intimately linked and the human mirror neuron system (MNS) has been proposed as the mediator. In two experiments, we presented biological or non-biological movement stimuli that were either congruent or incongruent to a required response prompted by a tone. When the tone occurred with the onset of the last movement in a series, i.e., it was perceived during the movement presentation, congruent biological stimuli resulted in faster reaction times than congruent non-biological stimuli. The opposite was observed for incongruent stimuli. When the tone was presented after visual movement stimulation, however, no such interaction was present. This implies that biological movement stimuli only affect motor behaviour during visual processing but not thereafter. These data suggest that the MNS is an "online" system; longstanding repetitive visual stimulation (Experiment 1) has no benefit in comparison to only one or two repetitions (Experiment 2).     

Insight without cortex: lessons from the avian brain

Insight is a cognitive feature that is usually regarded as being generated by the neocortex and being present only in humans and possibly some closely related primates. In this essay we show that especially corvids display behavioral skills within the domains of object permanence, episodic memory, theory of mind, and tool use/causal reasoning that are insightful. These similarities between humans and corvids at the behavioral level are probably the result of a convergent evolution. Similarly, the telencephalic structures involved in higher cognitive functions in both species show a high degree of similarity, although the forebrain of birds has no cortex-like lamination. The neural substrate for insight-related cognitive functions in mammals and birds is thus not necessarily based on a laminated cortical structure but can be generated by differently organized forebrains. Hence, neither is insight restricted to mammals, as predicted from a “scala naturae”, nor is the laminated cortex a prerequisite for the highest cognitive functions.