Who are you and what do you want? Life aspirations,personality, and well-being

In two studies with undergraduate samples, we investigated the relations between life aspirations and personality and evaluated whether aspirations added to the prediction of psychological well-being and sexuality. Within the HEXACO framework, aspirations were highly related to Honesty–Humility. Within the Big Five framework, intrinsic aspirations were related to high Conscientiousness and Agreeableness, and extrinsic aspirations were most related to low Openness and Agreeableness. Aspirations did not add to the HEXACO’s prediction of well-being in study one, but in study two, aspirations added to the prediction of sexuality variables beyond the two personality frameworks. These results suggest that aspirations may account for beyond personality in explaining specific types of well-being.     

Matching Messages to Motives in Persuasion: A Functional Approach to Promoting Volunteerism1

This study examined a functional strategy for investigating audience responses to motivationally-based persuasive appeals. It was predicted that people exposed to advertisements informing them how they could satisfy personally relevant motivations through volunteering (i.e., functionally matched messages) would judge these ads to be more persuasive, more emotionally positive, and would report being more likely to volunteer than people exposed to advertisements unrelated to their personally relevant motivations (i.e., functionally mismatched messages). These predictions were confirmed in an experiment wherein participants whose attitudes toward volunteerism served a Social Adjustive, Value Expressive, Utilitarian, Knowledge, or Ego Defensive function viewed advertisements promoting volunteerism that either matched or mismatched their personally relevant motivations. Results confirmed predictions as participants responded more favorably to the functionally matched than mismatched messages. The implications of this research for understanding the mechanisms by which functionally matched messages exert persuasive influence and the ramifications of the research for the practice of volunteerism are discussed.     

Fading of Affect Associated with Negative Child‐Related Memories Varies by Parental Child Abuse Potential

Positive memories tend to hold their affective intensity across time better than negative memories, a phenomenon referred to as the fading affect bias (FAB). An initial study explored this bias in the context of parents' affective responses to memories involving their children. Specifically, parents (N = 90 for Study 1) were asked to recall three positive events and three negative events involving their children. Next, parents rated how positively or negatively they felt when each event occurred and at recall. Results revealed that parents at high risk of physical child abuse showed a smaller FAB than low‐risk parents. The smaller FAB effect observed among high‐risk parents occurred largely because affect associated with negative child‐related events faded minimally over time. This risk moderation effect did not emerge in a second study in which parents (N = 90 for Study 2) recalled general events that were not limited to events involving children. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Emotional valence of spoken words influences the spatial orienting of attention

The influence of the affective content of speech on the spatial orienting of auditory attention was examined by adapting the dot probe task. Two words, one of which was emotional in one quarter of the trials, were played simultaneously from a left- and a right-located loudspeaker, respectively, and followed (or not) by a lateralized beep to be detected (Experiments 1 and 2) or localized (Experiment 3). Taboo words induced attentional biases towards their spatial location in all experiments, as did negative words in Experiment 3, but not positive words. Thus, in audition, the identification of an emotional word automatically activates the information about its spatial origin. Moreover, for both word types, attentional biases were only observed when the emotional word was presented on the participant's right side, suggesting that the dominant left hemisphere processing of words constrains the occurrence of spatial congruency effects.     

Coping in Caregivers of Youth with Spinal Cord Injury

This study examined coping among caregivers of youth with spinal cord injuries (SCI). Using a cross-sectional survey study design, 164 caregivers completed a demographics questionnaire and the Brief COPE. Their children, youth with SCI ages 7–18, completed the Kidcope. T-tests were conducted to examine differences in caregiver coping by demographic and injury-related factors. Further, logistic regression models were evaluated to examine predictive relationships between caregiver coping and youth coping. Several demographic and injury-related factors were related to caregiver coping, including caregiver gender, race, and education, as well as youth gender, age at injury, and time since injury. In the logistic regressions, two caregiver coping strategies were related to youth coping: caregiver self-blame coping was related to youth self-criticism, and caregiver behavioral disengagement coping (giving up attempts to cope) was related to youth blaming others coping. The findings suggest that caregiver coping may play a role in the coping of their children, and should be considered when addressing coping among youth with SCI.     

Communicating headings and preview sentences in text and speech

Two experiments tested the effects of preview sentences and headings on the quality of college students' outlines of informational texts. Experiment 1 found that performance was much better in the preview sentences condition than in a no-signals condition for both printed text and text-to-speech (TTS) audio rendering of the printed text. In contrast, performance in the headings condition was good for the printed text but poor for the auditory presentation because the TTS software failed to communicate nonverbal information carried by the visual headings. Experiment 2 compared outlining performance for five headings conditions during TTS presentation. Using a theoretical framework, "signaling available, relevant, accessible" (SARA) information, to provide an analysis of the information content of headings in the printed text, the manipulation of the headings systematically restored information that was omitted by the TTS application in Experiment 1. The result was that outlining performance improved to levels similar to the visual headings condition of Experiment 1. It is argued that SARA is a useful framework for guiding future development of TTS software for a wide variety of text signaling devices, not just headings. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved).     

The importance of mutual positive expressivity in social adjustment: understanding the role of peers and gender

The relations between young children's mutual (reciprocated) and overall positive emotion (PE) with same- and other-gender peers and their social adjustment were explored. Children's PE and peers' PE were observed across the preschool year during peer interactions (N = 166; 46% girls; M age = 52 months). Results revealed that girls and boys had similar frequencies of overall PE and mutual PE when interacting with same-gender peers, but girls were marginally higher compared with boys in overall and mutual PE when interacting with other-gender peers. Girls and boys did not have greater rates of either type of PE after controlling for gender segregation during same- or other-gender interactions. Using structural equation modeling, children's mutual PE, regardless of their gender, positively predicted indicators of positive adjustment (e.g., prosocial behavior, cooperation) and negatively predicted indicators of negative adjustment (e.g., hyperactivity, disruption, exclusion by peers). Children's overall PE did not predict either type of adjustment. Findings support the importance of mutual PE for children's development.