Vigilance for threat: effects of anxiety and defensiveness

Eysenck’s (1997) theory that attentional biases for threat vary as an interactive function of trait anxiety and defensiveness was tested using a visual probe task. Two stimulus exposure conditions were used to explore a secondary issue concerning attentional allocation over time. Results indicated that, among high trait anxious participants, only those with low levels of defensiveness showed vigilance for threatening faces presented for 500 ms. They also showed an attentional preference for neutral faces, relative to happy faces, irrespective of exposure condition. This pattern was reversed in high trait anxious participants with high levels of defensiveness, who showed an attentional bias towards happy faces (relative to neutral faces) under both exposure conditions. The findings are discussed in relation to their implications for (a) the significance of measures of defensiveness for the conceptualization of high trait anxious individuals, and (b) the status of anxiety-related biases at different stages of information processing.     

Profiles of Identity Exploration and Commitment Across Domains

We examined the relationships between family structure, gender and age and profiles of identity exploration and commitment in the ideological (occupation, values, politics, religion, gender roles) and interpersonal identity (dating, friendships, and family) domains among 388 young adults. The general profile revealed low exploration in both domains, with ideological exploration being the lower, compared to high and comparable levels of commitment in the two domains. Older participants explored more than younger ones, and females gave more attention to the interpersonal domain than did males. Participants from original families explored more in the interpersonal domain than in the ideological domain, but their commitment was the same for the two domains. Participants from non-original families explored in equal amounts in the two domains, but were more committed in the interpersonal domain compared to participants from original families. Participants from non-original families explored more in the ideological domain than did participants from original families. Our findings indicate that individuals from non-original families exhibit positive outcomes and strengths that are often overlooked in the literature.     

Should supervisors communicate goals or visions? The moderating role of subordinates' psychological distance

There is an ongoing debate about how supervisors should communicate desired end‐states to subordinates, that is, whether they should set concrete goals (according to goal setting theory) or communicate abstract visions (according to transformational leadership theory). In this paper, we draw on construal level theory (CLT) to reconcile both views and develop a model of when supervisors communicating concrete goals versus abstract visions are seen as more effective. According to CLT, being psychologically removed from (vs. near to) an event or object makes people construe the event or object in a more abstract (vs. concrete) way, which, in turn, leads people to process abstract (vs. concrete) information more fluently and thus evaluate the sender of this information more favorably. Accordingly, supervisor effectiveness may be higher in conditions where communication and psychological distance to the supervisor converge (vision/far and goals/close) rather than diverge (vision/close and goals/far). We tested this hypothesis in two experiments, using different operationalizations of psychological distance. In these studies, we found supervisor effectiveness to be higher when vision was communicated at a far versus near distance and goals were communicated at a near versus far distance.     

Universal parental support for parents of adolescents: Who wants municipality‐based parental support and in what form?

Parenting a child through adolescence can be a challenge for many parents; adolescents go through notable developmental, physical, and psychological changes that affect the relationships around them. Most parents find parental support during these years important. These young people's relationships with their parents are important to their mental health, but although parental support is universally available to parents of younger children, it is still scarce for parents of adolescents. The aim of this study was to explore what factors are associated with interest in universal parental support through telephone interviews and questionnaires with 223 parents of 13‐ to 17‐year‐olds. Parents’ interest in parental support was linked to their own anxious mood, their lower perceived parental capacity, their perception of the child as having psychiatric problems, the parents’ perception of their adolescents’ openness about things and their perception of the adolescent's overall difficulties in daily life due to psychiatric symptoms. The results show that lighter forms of support such as lectures or seminars were more appealing to parents with higher social status. Offering community‐based individual counseling and leader‐led parent training groups therefore has the potential to reach parents with difficulties more equally, while offering support only through lectures and seminars could increase the inequality between parents in different social situations.     

An artificial opposition between grammaticality and frequency: comment on

In a recent Cognition paper (Cognition 85 (2002) B21), Bornkessel, Schlesewsky, and Friederici report ERP data that they claim “show that online processing difficulties induced by word order variations in German cannot be attributed to the relative infrequency of the constructions in question, but rather appear to reflect the application of grammatical principles during parsing” (p. B21). In this commentary we demonstrate that the posited contrast between grammatical principles and construction (in)frequency as sources of parsing problems is artificial because it is based on factually incorrect assumptions about the grammar of German and on inaccurate corpus frequency data concerning the German constructions involved.     

A tale of four countries: How Bowlby used his trip through Europe to write the WHO report and spread his ideas

Attachment theory, developed by child psychiatrist John Bowlby, is considered a major theory in developmental psychology. Attachment theory can be seen as resulting from Bowlby's personal experiences, his psychoanalytic education, his subsequent study of ethology, and societal developments during the 1930s and 1940s. One of those developments was the outbreak of World War II and its effects on children's psychological wellbeing. In 1950, Bowlby was appointed WHO consultant to study the needs of children who were orphaned or separated from their families for other reasons and needed care in foster homes or institutions. The resulting report is generally considered a landmark publication in psychology, although it subsequently met with methodological criticism. In this paper, by reconstructing Bowlby's visit to several European countries, on the basis of notebooks and letters, the authors shed light on the background of this report and the way Bowlby used or neglected the findings he gathered.     

Measuring Social Welfare by Proximity to an Optimum Population

This essay introduces a new type of measure of social welfare, where populations are evaluated by their resemblance to an optimum population, which is an (in principle) possible population with the highest degree of social welfare, relative to some circumstances. Here, it is argued to be the largest possible population where everyone fares maximally well. The new measure is responsive to quality of welfare, equality of welfare and the number of people. It satisfies dominance and negative monotonicity, and it avoids both the repugnant conclusion and a reverse repugnant conclusion for comparisons relative to our future on earth.