Altering Impulsive Decision Making With an Acceptance-Based Procedure

Delay discounting is one facet of impulsive decision making and involves subjectively devaluing a delayed outcome. Steeply discounting delayed rewards is correlated with substance abuse and other problematic behaviors. To the extent that steep delay discounting underlies these clinical disorders, it would be advantageous to find psychosocial avenues for reducing delay discounting. Acceptance-based interventions may prove useful as they may help to decrease the distress that arises while waiting for a delayed outcome. The current study was conducted to determine if a 60–90 minute acceptance-based training would change delay discounting rates among 30 undergraduate university students in comparison to a waitlist control. Measures given at pre- and posttraining included a hypothetical monetary delay discounting task, the Acceptance and Action Questionnaire-II (AAQ-II), and the Distress Tolerance Scale. Those assigned to the treatment group decreased their discounting of delayed money, but not distress intolerance or psychological inflexibility when compared to the waitlist control group. After the waiting period, the control group received the intervention. Combining all participants’ pre- to posttreatment data, the acceptance-based treatment significantly decreased discounting of monetary rewards and increased distress tolerance. The difference in AAQ-II approached significance. Acceptance-based treatments may be a worthwhile option for decreasing delay discounting rates and, consequently, affecting the choices that underlie addiction and other problematic behaviors.     

Subjective Well-Being Predictors of Academic Citizenship Behavior

Two studies tested the hypothesis that SWB predicts unique variance in academic citizenship attitudes, even while accounting for personality traits. In Study 1, participants (n?=?2,566) completed an online questionnaire assessing their positive and negative affect, ACBs and personality. The results indicated that positive affect predicted consideration, civic virtue, and conscientiousness, whereas negative affect predicted citizenship conscientiousness and sportsmanship while controlling for personality. In Study 2, participants (n?=?260) completed measures of life satisfaction, ACBs and personality. The results showed that life satisfaction predicted all ACBs while controlling for personality. Based on these results, it can be concluded that SWB is an important predictor of ACBs. Implications for the selection of student aids in academic settings are discussed.     

Religious Schools,Home Schools,and the Timing of First Marriage and First Birth

The timing of individuals’ family formation is important for a number of socioeconomic and health outcomes. We examine the influence of religious schools and home schools on the timing of first marriage and first birth using data from the Cardus Education Study Graduate Survey (N = 1,496). Our results from life tables and event-history regression models show that, on average, graduates of evangelical Protestant schools—but not Catholic school or homeschool graduates—have earlier marriages and births than public school graduates. Catholic school students have later first births on average than public school graduates. Models interacting schooling type with age and age-squared suggest that evangelical schoolers’ higher odds of marriage stem from higher odds of marrying at ages 21–30, and their higher odds of first birth stem from higher odds of births from ages 25–34. Catholic school and nonreligious private school students also have higher odds of marrying in the mid-20s and early-30s than do public school students. Evangelical, non-religious private, and Catholic school students all have lower odds of teenage births than public school students but higher odds of birth later in the life course. Homeschoolers do not differ on either outcome at any age. Our findings suggest that schools socialize their students with distinctive attitudes toward family formation that influence their behavior even many years after graduation, though these schools do not appear to be particularly harmful to life chances in terms of fostering marriage or childbearing at very young ages.     

Optimisation and mathematical explanation: doing the Lévy Walk

The indispensability argument seeks to establish the existence of mathematical objects. The success of the indispensability argument turns on finding cases of genuine extra-mathematical explanation (the explanation of physical facts by mathematical facts). In this paper, I identify a new case of extra-mathematical explanation, involving the search patterns of fully-aquatic marine predators. I go on to use this case to predict the prevalence of extra-mathematical explanation in science.     

Evaluation of a Booster Intervention Three Years After Acute Treatment for Early-Onset Disruptive Behavior Disorders

This study examines the impact of a brief booster treatment administered 3 years after the delivery of an acute treatment in a group (n?=?118) of clinically referred boys and girls (ages 6 to 11) originally diagnosed with Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD) or Conduct Disorder (CD). At the conclusion of the acute treatment and three-year follow-up period (i.e., study month 42), the sample was re-randomized into Booster treatment or Enhanced Usual Care and then assessed at four later timepoints (i.e., post-booster, and 6-, 12- and 24-month booster follow-up). Booster treatment was directed towards addressing individualized problems and some unique developmental issues of adolescence based on the same original protocol content and treatment setting, whereas the Enhanced Usual Care condition involved providing clinical recommendations based on the assessment and an outside referral for services. HLM analyses identified no significant group differences and few time effects across child, parent, and teacher reports on a broad range of child functioning and impairment outcomes. Analyses examining the role of putative moderators or predictors (e.g., severity of externalizing behavior, dose of treatment) were likewise non-significant. We discuss the nature and implications of these novel findings regarding the role and timing of booster treatment to address the continuity of DBD over time.     

Children Use Temporal Cues to Learn Causal Directionality

The ability to learn the direction of causal relations is critical for understanding and acting in the world. We investigated how children learn causal directionality in situations in which the states of variables are temporally dependent (i.e., autocorrelated). In Experiment 1, children learned about causal direction by comparing the states of one variable before versus after an intervention on another variable. In Experiment 2, children reliably inferred causal directionality merely from observing how two variables change over time; they interpreted Y changing without a change in X as evidence that Y does not influence X. Both of these strategies make sense if one believes the variables to be temporally dependent. We discuss the implications of these results for interpreting previous findings. More broadly, given that many real‐world environments are characterized by temporal dependency, these results suggest strategies that children may use to learn the causal structure of their environments.     

ERNEST BECKER'S PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION FORTY YEARS ON: A VIEW FROM SOCIAL COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY

This article distinguishes between three projects in Ernest Becker's (1924–1974) later work: his psychology of “religion,” his psychology of religion, and his psychology of Religion (with a capital R). The first is an analysis of culture and civilization as immortality projects, means by which to deny death. The second, which overlaps with the first, is a characterization of religion‐as‐practiced (e.g., by adherents of the world religions) as a particularly effective immortality project vis‐à‐vis death anxiety. The third is less social scientific and more theological; Becker argues for a view of God that is in the tradition of Søren Kierkegaard and Paul Tillich (and, arguably, Pseudo‐Dionysius, Augustine, and Thomas Aquinas). Focusing on the second of these projects—as much has already been written on the first, and little can be said about the third—this article evaluates Becker's claims about religion‐as‐practiced in light of recent developments in social cognitive psychology.     

Constraints on the Acquisition of Social Category Concepts

Determining which dimensions of social classification are culturally significant is a developmental challenge. Some suggest this is accomplished by differentially privileging intrinsic visual cues over nonintrinsic cues (Atran, 1990 Atran , S. (1990). Cognitive foundations of natural history: Towards an anthropology of science . New York , NY : Cambridge University Press. [Google Scholar]; Gil-White, 2001 Gil-White , F. J. ( 2001 ). Are ethnic groups biological ‘species’ to the human brain? Essentialism in our cognition of some social categories . Current Anthropology , 42 , 515 – 554 .[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]), whereas others point to the role of noun labels as more general promoters of kind-based reasoning (Bigler &; Liben, 2007 Bigler , R. S. , &; Liben , L. S. ( 2007 ). Developmental intergroup theory: Explaining and reducing children's social stereotyping and prejudice . Current Directions in Psychological Science , 16 , 162 – 166 .[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]; Gelman, 2003 Gelman , S. A. ( 2003 ). The essential child: Origins of essentialism in everyday thought . New York , NY : Oxford University Press .[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]). A novel groups procedure was employed to examine the independent effects of noun labels and visual cues on social categorization. Experiment 1 demonstrated that in the absence of a visual cue, a noun label supported social categorization among 4-year-olds and 7-year-olds. Experiments 2 and 3 demonstrated that children and adults fail to differentiate between intrinsic and nonintrinsic visual cues to category membership, suggesting that this distinction is not central to the acquisition of social category concepts. Experiments 2 and 3 also showed that in the absence of a shared noun label, visual cues were not sufficient for younger children to form social categories. Experiment 4 ruled out a potential demand characteristic in the previous experiments. Together, these results reveal the primacy of verbal labels over visual cues for social categorization in young children and suggest a developmental change between ages 4 and 7 in the ability to construct new representations of social category concepts.