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.     

The neural bases of distracter-resistant working memory

A major difference between humans and other animals is our capacity to maintain information in working memory (WM) while performing secondary tasks, which enables sustained, complex cognition. A common assumption is that the lateral prefrontal cortex (PFC) is critical for WM performance in the presence of distracters, but direct evidence is scarce. We assessed the relationship between fMRI activity and WM performance within subjects, with performance matched across distracter and no-distracter conditions. Activity in the ventrolateral PFC during WM encoding and maintenance positively predicted performance in both conditions, whereas activity in the presupplementary motor area (pre-SMA) predicted performance only under distraction. Other parts of the dorsolateral and ventrolateral PFCs predicted performance only in the no-distracter condition. These findings challenge a lateral-PFC-centered view of distracter resistance, and suggest that the lateral PFC supports a type of WM representation that is efficient for dealing with task-irrelevant input but is, nonetheless, easily disrupted by dual-task demands.     

Youth and the sociability of “Vaping”

This article examines the contemporary and evolving social ritual of vaping (also known as the use and consumption of e‐cigarettes). This novel research finds a typology of users in a heterogeneous youth market and shows how the introduction of this new practice challenges existing ritual boundaries. Previous research has focused on the de‐marketing of tobacco and smoking cessation. Here, virtuous, dynamic, vulnerable, and invisible vapers are identified with each demonstrating differing levels of emotional engagement and characteristics of vaping behaviors. Utilizing Collins' theory of interaction rituals as a lens, this qualitative study explores the sociability of vaping practices to gain a deeper understanding of the enduring appeal of vaping and the subsequent consequences for youth “smoking” behaviors. While some vapers advocate the health benefits of this relatively new practice, the use of e‐cigarettes is also used as a form of resistance as well as mechanism for misbehavior. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Insomnia Complaint Versus Sleep Diary Parameters: Predictions of Suicidal Ideation

The purpose of this study was to determine which aspects of insomnia best predict suicidal ideation (SI). Participants were grouped according to whether they complained of insomnia and whether their sleep would be characterized as poor or good by applying quantitative criteria for insomnia to their sleep diary data. Analyses revealed that insomnia complaint was more strongly associated with SI than was poor sleep. These findings suggest that patients who complain of insomnia, regardless of the presence or absence of poor sleep, may be at greater risk for suicide than those who are content with their sleep.     

Response Mode Effects and Moral Values

In five studies, we measured the extent to which subjects weight moral product attributes in different response modes. We found that nonprice judgments such as likelihood of purchase ratings were more reflective of expressed moral attitudes than were pricing responses, and that holistic price evaluations were especially unlikely to reflect moral considerations. Post-task ratings confirmed the preference results, as did an experiment controlling for the influence of task goals. Our results have implications for compatibility theories of preference elicitation, the predictability of respondent ratings of attribute unacceptability, and the measurement of utilities for morally charged attributes.     

Contributions of response set and semantic relatedness to cross-modal Stroop-like picture-word interference in children and adults

Resistance to interference from irrelevant auditory stimuli undergoes development throughout childhood. To test whether semantic processes account for age-related changes in a Stroop-like picture-word interference effect, children (3- to 12-year-olds) and adults named pictures while listening to words varying in terms of semantic relatedness to the pictures and response set membership. In Experiments 1 and 2, with animal and clothing pictures, the interference effect observed in children, but not in adults, depended on the distractors' status as members of the response set. In Experiment 3, with unrelated pictures, adults, but not children, showed greater interference for trials with distractors in the response set. These results indicate developmental changes in picture-word interference involving the establishment of a response set in working memory.