Home behavioral economics: Childcare decisions in the United States and Norway

This research investigated how a couple decides which parent stays home as a childcare provider by attempting to determine the economic value on maternal care versus paternal care while examining the potential effects of nationality, gender role attitudes, and social support. We collected data from 240 American participants and 250 Norwegian participants who were asked to decide how much a mother needs to earn to allow her husband to stay at home to provide childcare and how much a father needs to earn to allow his wife to stay at home and provide childcare, in addition to items assessing gender role attitudes. No effect of social support was found, but Norwegians were slightly more likely than Americans to place a heavier earning burden on the husband. There were few differences in gender role attitudes by nationality. The impact of public policy and social desirability on the results and childcare decision making are discussed.     

Together in Need: Relational Selfhood,Vulnerability to Harm,and Enriching Attachments

Connections between one's own welfare and that of others abound if we pause to look for them, although philosophical theories of selfhood have only very recently begun to incorporate these connections. This essay draws on recent work on need to argue that one of the strongest expressions of these connections is to be found in the relational needs that they can generate. While paying heed to needs that arise from the relational nature of selfhood at large, this essay pays particular attention to what I call “transpersonal needs”: needs that occur when one's experience of the needs of others gives rise to certain needs of one's own. I argue that the best criterion for defining need is vulnerability to harm, but this does not mean that having a need is something that is purely harmful. Having certain needs can also enrich one's life. Further, while every need entails a corresponding vulnerability to harm, some of these potential harms are more detrimental to one's welfare than others, with some relational needs standing among those that can result in the greatest harm if unanswered.     

Social identities promote well‐being because they satisfy global psychological needs

Social identities are known to improve well‐being, but why is this? We argue that this is because they satisfy basic psychological needs, specifically, the need to belong, the need for self‐esteem, the need for control and the need for meaningful existence. A longitudinal study (N = 70) revealed that gain in identity strength was associated with increased need satisfaction over 7 months. A cross‐sectional study (N = 146) revealed that social identity gain and social identity loss predicted increased and reduced need satisfaction, respectively. Finally, an experiment (N = 300) showed that, relative to a control condition, social identity gain increased need satisfaction and social identity loss decreased it. Need satisfaction mediated the relationship between social identities and depression in all studies. Sensitivity analyses suggested that social identities satisfy psychological needs in a global sense, rather than being reducible to one particular need. These findings shed new light on the mechanisms through which social identities enhance well‐being.     

Feeling Hopeful Inspires Support for Social Change

Hope is an emotion that has been implicated in social change efforts, yet little research has examined whether feeling hopeful actually motivates support for social change. Study 1 (N = 274) confirmed that hope is associated with greater support for social change in two countries with different political contexts. Study 2 (N = 165) revealed that hope predicts support for social change over and above other emotions often investigated in collective action research. Study 3 (N = 100) replicated this finding using a hope scale and showed the effect occurs independent of positive mood. Study 4 (N = 58) demonstrated experimentally that hope motivates support for social change. In all four studies, the effect of hope was mediated by perceived efficacy to achieve social equality. This research confirms the motivating potential of hope and illustrates the power of this emotion in generating social change.     

The Application of Intensive Longitudinal Methods to Investigate Change: Stimulating the Field of Applied Family Research

The use of intensive longitudinal methods (ILM)—rapid in situ assessment at micro timescales—can be overlaid on RCTs and other study designs in applied family research. Particularly, when done as part of a multiple timescale design—in bursts over macro timescales—ILM can advance the study of the mechanisms and effects of family interventions and processes of family change. ILM confers measurement benefits in accurately assessing momentary and variable experiences and captures fine-grained dynamic pictures of time-ordered processes. Thus, ILM allows opportunities to investigate new research questions about intervention effects on within-subject (i.e., within-person, within-family) variability (i.e., dynamic constructs) and about the time-ordered change process that interventions induce in families and family members beginning with the first intervention session. This paper discusses the need and rationale for applying ILM to family intervention evaluation, new research questions that can be addressed with ILM, example research using ILM in the related fields of basic family research and the evaluation of individual-based interventions. Finally, the paper touches on practical challenges and considerations associated with ILM and points readers to resources for the application of ILM.     

Arguments about the nature of concepts: Symbols,embodiment, and beyond

How are the meanings of words, events, and objects represented and organized in the brain? This question, perhaps more than any other in the field, probes some of the deepest and most foundational puzzles regarding the structure of the mind and brain. Accordingly, it has spawned a field of inquiry that is diverse and multidisciplinary, has led to the discovery of numerous empirical phenomena, and has spurred the development of a wide range of theoretical positions. This special issue brings together the most recent theoretical developments from the leaders in the field, representing a range of viewpoints on issues of fundamental significance to a theory of meaning representation. Here we introduce the special issue by way of pulling out some key themes that cut across the contributions that form this issue and situating those themes in the broader literature. The core issues around which research on conceptual representation can be organized are representational format, representational content, the organization of concepts in the brain, and the processing dynamics that govern interactions between the conceptual system and sensorimotor representations. We highlight areas in which consensus has formed; for those areas in which opinion is divided, we seek to clarify the relation of theory and evidence and to set in relief the bridging assumptions that undergird current discussions.     

Extrinsic cognitive load impairs low-level speech perception

Recent research has suggested that the extrinsic cognitive load generated by performing a nonlinguistic visual task while perceiving speech increases listeners’ reliance on lexical knowledge and decreases their capacity to perceive phonetic detail. In the present study, we asked whether this effect is accounted for better at a lexical or a sublexical level. The former would imply that cognitive load directly affects lexical activation but not perceptual sensitivity; the latter would imply that increased lexical reliance under cognitive load is only a secondary consequence of imprecise or incomplete phonetic encoding. Using the phoneme restoration paradigm, we showed that perceptual sensitivity decreases (i.e., phoneme restoration increases) almost linearly with the effort involved in the concurrent visual task. However, cognitive load had only a minimal effect on the contribution of lexical information to phoneme restoration. We concluded that the locus of extrinsic cognitive load on the speech system is perceptual rather than lexical. Mechanisms by which cognitive load increases tolerance to acoustic imprecision and broadens phonemic categories were discussed.     

Women are more sensitive than men to prior trial events on the Stop‐signal task

Sexual dimorphism in the brain and cognition is a topic of widespread interest. Many studies of sex differences have focused on visuospatial and verbal abilities, but few studies have investigated sex differences in executive functions. We examined two key components of executive function – response inhibition and response monitoring – in healthy men (n = 285) and women (n = 346) performing the Stop‐signal task. In this task, participants are required to make a key press to a stimulus, unless a tone is presented at some delay following the initial stimulus presentation; on these infrequent trials, participants are instructed to inhibit their planned response. Response inhibition was assessed with an estimate of the latency needed to inhibit a response (stop‐signal reaction time), and response monitoring was measured by calculating the degree to which participants adjusted their reaction times based on the immediately preceding trial (e.g., speeding following correct trials and slowing following errors). There were no sex differences in overall accuracy or response inhibition, but women showed greater sensitivity to trial history. Women sped up more than men following correct ‘Go’ trials, and slowed down more than men following errors. These small but statistically significant effects (Cohen's d = 0.25–0.3) suggest more flexible adjustments in speed–accuracy trade‐offs in women and greater cognitive flexibility associated with the responsive control of action.     

Understanding Humility and Its Role in Relational Therapy

Humility is a character trait and virtue that has received scant attention in psychotherapy literature. A panel of experts was assembled to confer on their beliefs about humility for this Delphi study. They responded to a proposed definition of humility and provided a variety of statements regarding the role of humility in client change and relational therapy in general. The results suggest that key elements of change that occur during the process of relational therapy (including certain “common factors”) seem to be related to humility. Also, humility’s unique relationship to self and other suggests it is often at work in relational change. The authors propose further exploration of humility and its role as a pre-cursor to client change efforts. Humility’s role in the Transtheoretical Model of Change is hypothesized and future directions for theory and research are suggested.