Automatic Mechanisms for Social Attention Are Culturally Penetrable

Are mechanisms for social attention influenced by culture? Evidence that social attention is triggered automatically by bottom‐up gaze cues and is uninfluenced by top‐down verbal instructions may suggest it operates in the same way everywhere. Yet considerations from evolutionary and cultural psychology suggest that specific aspects of one's cultural background may have consequence for the way mechanisms for social attention develop and operate. In more interdependent cultures, the scope of social attention may be broader, focusing on more individuals and relations between those individuals. We administered a multi‐gaze cueing task requiring participants to fixate a foreground face flanked by background faces and measured shifts in attention using eye tracking. For European Americans, gaze cueing did not depend on the direction of background gaze cues, suggesting foreground gaze alone drives automatic attention shifting; for East Asians, cueing patterns differed depending on whether the foreground cue matched or mismatched background cues, suggesting foreground and background gaze information were integrated. These results demonstrate that cultural background influences the social attention system by shifting it into a narrow or broad mode of operation and, importantly, provides evidence challenging the assumption that mechanisms underlying automatic social attention are necessarily rigid and impenetrable to culture.     

Job burnout: toward an integration of two dominant resource-based models

The goal of this study was to integrate the job demands-resources model and the conservation of resources model of job burnout into a unified theoretical framework. The data were collected through a mail questionnaire survey among nurses holding managerial positions in the Hospital Authority of Hong Kong. From a computer-generated random sample of nurses, 543 (84.3% women) returned usable surveys, amounting to a response rate of 24.2%. Structural equation modeling was used to test the proposed paths originating from job demands and job resources to the core job burnout dimensions, namely, emotional exhaustion and depersonalization. Results supported the integrated model, indicating that job demands and job resources had differing effects on the burnout dimensions. The effect of job demands was stronger and partially mediated the effect of job resources. Implications of the results from this study on management practices were discussed.     

Vers une prise en compte de la contrainte liée à l’effecteur dans la dynamique de coordination graphomotrice

Comparing two independent experiments following the same paradigm, the present article ponders the influence of constraints on graphic activity. A first study realized by Athènes et al. (2004) on the reproduction of simple graphic shapes revealed the presence of five preferential shapes when the effector was not constrained. With the forearm fastened, our results suggest that four only shapes are preferential when reproducing these same shapes. Overall, our findings suggest that the addition of a constraint related to the effector does not necessarily imply a negative effect on the graphic landscape. Were this assumption to be confirmed by full-fledged studies, it would be then possible to reveal new preferential shapes that are not spontaneously reproduced without additional constraints.     

La durée des vacances scolaires affecte-t-elle les performances attentionnelles en classe au retour des vacances ?

The aim of this research was to study the influence of holiday's duration on children's attentional performances at school. Chronopsychological studies underlined a standard daily attention pattern striking a balance between the different rhythms of the child. This study aimed to answer two questions: the first one considered effect of holiday duration (15 days versus 10 days) on the standard pattern of children attention (returning from their holidays) by taking into account their level of education. The second one considered whether decline of attention on Friday (explained by phenomenon of anticipation of the weekend) was still present after 2 weeks of rest, whatever the children's level of education were. Two hundred and twenty-nine children aged from 6 to 11 took part to this study. Attention level was measured through cross-out tests, which children completed at school during the week following their holidays. The sample was divided into two (schooling) levels: from primary to early elementary (124 first-grade pupils) and late elementary (105 fifth-grade pupils). The study was conducted over 2 weeks, one following All Saints’ Day holidays (which are 10 days long) and one following the Easter holidays (which are 15 days long). The results showed that after a 10-day holiday, the youngest pupils obtained higher performances than after a 2-week holiday, except for Friday, which is considered in the literature as a particularly difficult moment. Furthermore, the pattern collectively admitted as standard was not observed after a 2-week holiday. For older pupils, attention was mobilized 5 consecutive days only after 2 weeks of rest. For all pupils, a 10-day holiday didn’t seem to allow synchronization of children's rhythms, and involved a lower level of attention at the end of week than after a 2-week holiday.     

Surrogate endpoints in suicide research

Surrogate endpoints frequently substitute for rare outcomes in research. The ability to learn about completed suicides by investigating more readily available and proximate outcomes, such as suicide attempts, has obvious appeal. However, concerns with surrogates from the statistical science perspective exist, and mounting evidence from psychometric, neurochemical, genetic, and neuroimaging studies suggests that surrogates may be particularly problematic in suicide research. The need for greater phenotypic refinement of suicide-related behaviors, development of and adherence to a shared suicide nomenclature, and conservative interpretation of investigational results that are limited to the precise population and suicide-related behavior under examination are discussed.     

Prevalence of borderline personality disorder and its clinical correlates in Chinese patients with recent deliberate self-harm

This study examined the point prevalence of Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) and its clinical correlates in patients with recent deliberate self-harm (DSH) in Hong Kong. A representative consecutive sample (n = 160) of patients with DSH referred to Prince of Wales Hospital from April 1, 2007 to March 31, 2008 was recruited. Their BPD status was determined according to the BPD subscale of the Chinese version of Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-IV Axis II Personality Disorders (SCID-II). The point prevalence of BPD was calculated. Subjects with and without BPD were compared in terms of demographic and clinical characteristics. Thirty out of 160 (18.8%) DSH patients were found to suffer from BPD. DSH patients with BPD were more likely to be female (p = .020), more often reported history of childhood physical (p = 0.043) and sexual abuse (p < 0.001), history of past DSH (p = 0.010), being younger at first DSH (p = 0.039), and more likely to suffer from current alcohol and substance use disorder (p = 0.043) and eating disorder (p = 0.040) than those without BPD. Being female, having history of childhood sexual abuse and current alcohol and substance use disorder were found to be independent predictors of BPD status by binary logistic regression.     

Context specificity in stability of hyperactivity-impulsivity

This paper exemplifies a secondary data analysis of context-specific differences in children's hyperactivity-impulsivity while controlling for informant-specific effects. Participants were boys and girls from the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development who were measured in 1(st), 3(rd), and 5(th) grades. Latent factor models were structured using multi-informant reports including mothers, fathers, teachers, and observers. Temporal stability within a context was stronger than cross-context consistency, and the magnitude of longitudinal stability was higher in the home context compared to the school context. Controlling for informant-specific effects resulted in a significantly improved model fit and increased within-context stability. Our findings highlight the importance of considering both context and informant effects when studying longitudinal stability and change in personality development.     

Social cognitive influences on Mexican Americans’ career choices across Holland’s themes

This study examined several propositions of social cognitive career theory ( [Lent et al., 1994] and [Lent et al., 2000]) with a sample of 393 Mexican American college students. It was hypothesized that person input (i.e., age) and background contextual variables (i.e., Anglo orientation, Mexican orientation, familism, instrumentality, and expressivity) would predict career self-efficacy across Holland’s (1997) six RIASEC types. In addition, we examined the proposed relations between career self-efficacy, career interests, and career choice goal across the six RIASEC areas. Our results indicated that (a) Artistic, Social, Enterprising, and Conventional career models were similar across gender and university affiliation groups, (b) gender differences were found in the Realistic career model, (c) institutional affiliation differences were found in the Investigative career model, and (d) the models were a good fit to the data. Implications for future vocational research and career interventions are discussed.     

Body dissatisfaction, maternal appraisal, and depressive symptoms in Hong Kong adolescents

Body dissatisfaction, its risk factors and association with depressed mood have been well investigated in the West. However, more studies are needed to examine further the relation between body dissatisfaction and depressive symptoms and the factors influencing body dissatisfaction in non-Western cultures. The present study examined in a sample of Hong Kong Chinese adolescents the relation between body dissatisfaction and depressive symptoms, and the relation of maternal appraisal of their adolescent's figure to the adolescent's body dissatisfaction and depressive symptoms. We obtained information from 379 boys and 254 girls about their body dissatisfaction and depressive symptoms. Their mothers provided information about their appraisal of their adolescent's body shape and size compared to ideal. Body dissatisfaction was related to depressive symptoms in girls (B = 2.58, p <.01), but not in boys (B = -0.08, p >.10). Negative maternal appraisal did not have direct effects on adolescents' depressive symptoms (B = 0.14, p =.75), but the association between negative maternal appraisal and body dissatisfaction was significantly stronger in adolescents whose ideal was smaller than they perceived themselves to be (B = 0.32, p <.01) than those whose ideal was larger than their own perception (B = 0.14, p < .01). Our findings suggest that maternal appraisal had indirect effects on mood, acting through adolescents' body dissatisfaction, and that body dissatisfaction may be a sex-specific risk factor for depression. This study points to the need for testing and adapting programs to reduce body dissatisfaction particularly in girls at risk for depression, and to raise mothers' awareness of the link between their negative appraisals and their adolescents' body dissatisfaction and depressive symptoms.     

ASSESSMENT OF THE RELATIVE EFFECTS OF ATTENTION AND ESCAPE ON NONCOMPLIANCE

The current study presents a method for assessing the relative effects of attention and escape on noncompliance in preschoolers. Attention and escape conditions were alternated in a multielement design, and a contingency reversal procedure, in which one test condition served as a control for the other, was used to demonstrate control. For all 3 participants, noncompliance was maintained, at least in part, by social attention. Functional analyses of noncompliance such as the one described here may be valuable for developing function‐based treatments.