Using Message Framing to Promote Social Support in Depression: When Misery Makes Better Company

A depressed person may have particular difficulty obtaining social support unless, as previous research indicates, members of the person’s support network believe that their interactions with the depressed person will be rewarding. Continuing this line of research, two studies investigated how message framing influences perceptions of providing social support to someone diagnosed with depression. In Study 1, participants first evaluated a website created by the research team, which emphasized either the rewards of volunteering to help individuals suffering from depression (gain-framed) or the drawbacks of not volunteering (loss-framed). One week later, participants read a vignette about a friend suffering from depression. Participants initially exposed to the gain-framed website indicated that the friend was in greater need of help, and they expressed stronger intentions to help and maintain supportive contact with the friend. The first phase of Study 2 was identical to the first phase of Study 1. However, a week after evaluating the framed website, participants interacted via instant messaging with a confederate posing as a prospective undergraduate student, who disclosed during the conversation that she had been diagnosed with depression. Participants initially exposed to the gain-framed website indicated greater comfort interacting with the prospective student and greater willingness to engage in follow-up interactions with the student (e.g., exchange emails, talk on the phone) compared to participants initially exposed to the loss-framed website. The implications of these findings for increasing the provision of social support to individuals with depression are discussed.     

Navigating the Unknown: Towards a Positive Conception of Anonymity

Talk of anonymity floats freely and, in many contexts, rampantly in everyday, nonphilosophical discourse. But despite a surge of interest in anonymity—in anonymity protections, on the one hand, and anonymity harms and abuses, on the other—it is not at all clear what anonymity is. Is it simply a matter of being unknown? Or is anonymity something more, or less, than this? Unfortunately, existing analyses frame anonymity very generally as a phenomenon of unknowability and/or concealment. Consequently, they fail to capture what distinguishes anonymity and anonymity relations from, for example, privacy and privacy relations. In this paper, I explore a more precise way of articulating anonymity, developing what I call the “central anonymity paradigm,” which frames anonymity as the result of a specific exercise of control in which true pieces of information about a person are concealed from others with an effect of dissociability. I use this paradigm to show how anonymity is characteristically interpersonal and network‐relative, and deeply connected to issues of personal identity.     

Socially guided attention influences infants’ communicative behavior

For effective prelinguistic communication, infants must be able to direct their attention, vocalizations, and nonverbal gestures in social interactions. The purpose of our study was to examine how different styles of caregiver responses influenced infant attentional and communicative behavior in social interactions, based on prior studies that have shown influences of responsiveness on attention, language and cognitive outcomes. Infants were exposed to redirective and sensitive behavior systematically using an ABA design to examine real-time changes in infants’ behavior as a function of caregiver responses. During the two baseline “A” periods, caregivers were instructed to play as they would at home. During the social response “B” period, caregivers were instructed to respond sensitively to infants’ behavior on one visit and redirectively on the other visit. Results demonstrated that when caregivers behaved redirectively, infants shifted their attention more frequently and decreased the duration of their visual attention. Caregiver responses also resulted in changes in vocal and gesture production. Infants decreased their production of caregiver-directed vocalizations, gestures, and gesture-vocal combinations during in the redirective condition. Results suggest that caregiver sensitive responding to infants’ attentional focus may be one influence on infants’ attentional and prelinguistic communicative behavior.     

Validation of a novel cognitive bias task based on difference in quantity of reinforcement for assessing environmental enrichment

Cognitive bias tasks purport to assess affective states via responses to ambiguous stimuli. We hypothesized that a novel cognitive bias task based on positive reinforcement using quantity differences would detect changes in affect in captive grizzly bears (Ursus arctos horribilis). We trained bears (n = 8) to respond differently (nose or paw touch) to two stimuli (light or dark gray cue cards), with responses counterbalanced across bears. The two cues signaled a small or large food reward, respectively. Responses to ambiguous probe stimuli (i.e., shades of gray) intermediate to the trained stimuli were classified as either ‘optimistic,’ appropriate for the larger reward, or ‘pessimistic,’ appropriate for the smaller reward. In Experiment 1, we explored the contrast in reward size necessary to detect a change in response across probe stimuli (large reward, 3 or 6 apple slices: small reward, 1 slice). We observed a change in response across probe stimuli, with no difference in response between reward-value groups, indicating that a contrast of 3:1 apple slices was sufficient to affect responses. In Experiment 2, we investigated cognitive bias after 2.1 h of exposure to enrichment items varying in attractiveness. Results were unaffected by enrichment type or time spent interacting with enrichments, indicating that the task failed to demonstrate criterion validity for comparing mood following exposure to different enrichment items. However, greater time spent pacing prior to testing was associated with ‘optimistic’ judgments. The data provide some support for use of cognitive bias tasks based on quantity differences in animal welfare assessments involving captive wildlife.     

Reduced visual feature binding in the near-hand space

Growing evidence suggests that visual information is processed differently in the near-hand space, relative to the space far from the hands. To account for the existing literature, we recently proposed that the costs and benefits of hand proximity may be due to differential contributions of the action-oriented magnocellular (M) and the perception-oriented parvocellular (P) pathways. Evidence suggests that, relative to the space far from the hands, in near-hand space the contribution of the M pathway increases while the contribution of the P pathway decreases. The present study tested an important consequence of this account for visual representation. Given the P pathway’s role in feeding regions in which visual representations of unified objects (with bound features) are formed, we predicted that hand proximity would reduce feature binding. Consistent with this prediction, two experiments revealed signs of reduced feature binding in the near-hand space, relative to the far-hand space. We propose that the higher contribution of the M pathway, along with the reduced contribution of the P pathway, shifts visual perception away from an object-based perceptual mode toward a feature-based mode. These results are discussed in light of the distinction between action-oriented and perception-oriented vision.     

Association of personality with physical,social, and mental activities across the lifespan: Findings from US and French samples

Despite evidence for its health‐related benefits, little is known on the psychological predictors of the participation in leisure activities across the lifespan. Therefore, this study aimed to identify whether personality is associated with a variety of different types of activities, involving physical, cognitive, and social components. The samples included individuals from the second wave of the National Study of Midlife in the United States (N = 3,396) and community‐dwelling French individuals (N = 2,917) aged between 30 and 84. Both samples completed measures of the five‐factor model of personality. To create an activity index, we combined the physical, social, and cognitive (games and developmental) activities performed at least once a month. In both samples, individuals who scored higher on extraversion and openness were more likely to engage in a variety of activity types. The findings were consistent across two samples from different western societies and suggest that extraversion and openness contribute to social, cognitive, and physical functioning across the lifespan.     

When does anxiety help or hinder cognitive test performance? The role of working memory capacity

Cognitive interference theories (e.g. attentional control theory, processing efficiency theory) suggest that high levels of trait anxiety predict adverse effects on the performance of cognitive tasks, particularly those that make high demands on cognitive resources. We tested an interaction hypothesis to determine whether a combination of high anxiety and low working memory capacity (WMC) would predict variance in demanding cognitive test scores. Ninety six adolescents (12‐ to 14‐years‐old) participated in the study, which measured self‐report levels of trait anxiety, working memory, and cognitive test performance. As hypothesized, we found that the anxiety‐WMC interaction explained a significant amount of variance in cognitive test performance (ΔR² .07, p < .01). Trait anxiety was unrelated to cognitive test performance for those adolescents with average WMC scores (β = .13, p > .10). In contrast, trait anxiety was negatively related to test performance in adolescents with low WMC (β = ?.35, p < .05) and positively related to test performance in those with high WMC (β = .49, p < .01). The results of this study suggest that WMC moderates the relationship between anxiety and cognitive test performance and may be a determinant factor in explaining some discrepancies found in the literature. Further research is needed to fully understand the mechanisms involved.     

Religion and Attitudes Toward Family Planning Issues Among US Adults

Although religion is an important influence on a variety of social attitudes, the relationship between religion and views on family planning remains underexplored, especially in terms of attitudes relating to public policy. Using data from a nationally-representative survey (N = 1,500) fielded in 1998, we examine the influence of religious affiliation, subcultural identification, and attendance on three aspects of attitudes toward contraception in the public sphere. Specifically, we explore opinions regarding the public consequences of contraception and the responsibility for making contraception available as part of health care services in the United States. More frequent religious attendance is linked to less-approving opinions about contraception and less support for its provision by the US government and health insurers. Catholic affiliation is not consistently associated with the examined opinions, and we find mixed results for conservative Protestants. Including religious subcultural identities yields additional information, with born-again Christians reporting less positive opinions about the consequences of contraceptive availability, while evangelical identity is linked to negative views on policy aimed at increasing access to family planning services. These findings contribute to knowledge about the relationship between religion and attitudes toward policy-relevant aspects of contraception, as well as the broader social influences of religious subcultural identification.     

Structured contexts and anaphoric dependencies

Sensitivity to the extra-linguistic context, as exhibited by indexical and demonstrative expressions, and sensitivity to the linguistic context, as exhibited by, for example, anaphoric uses of third person pronouns, are regularly regarded as different and independent phenomena. The data on indexicals, demonstratives, and third person pronouns, however, call for a more unified notion of context and of context sensitivity. This paper aims to develop such a unified picture by generalizing the notion of anaphora to encompass extra-linguistic context dependency and generalizing the notion of a structured discourse context so that contexts contain antecedents for expressions that refer to entities in the extra-linguistic context.