Vicarious goal satiation

A signature feature of self-regulation is that once a goal is satiated, it becomes deactivated, thereby allowing people to engage in new pursuits. The present experiments provide evidence for vicarious goal satiation, a novel phenomenon in which individuals experience “post-completion goal satiation” as a result of unwittingly taking on another person's goal pursuit and witnessing its completion. In Experiments 1 and 2, the observation of a goal being completed (vs. not completed) led to less striving by the observer on the same task. Given that an actor's strength of commitment affects goal contagion, we hypothesized that such commitment would be an important boundary condition for vicarious goal satiation. The results of Experiment 2 showed that observing stronger (vs. weaker) goal commitment lowered accessibility of goal-related words, but only when the goal being observed was completed. Implications of vicarious goal satiation for goal pursuit in everyday environments are discussed.     

Burnout,Secondary Traumatic Stress,and Social Support

The current study examines the extent to which selected work-related variables differentially predict burnout and secondary traumatic stress (STS) and the degree to which social support mitigates both of these occupational stress syndromes. Multiple regression performed on responses from 331 professional chaplains found that: (1) the number of years worked in the same employment position was positively associated with burnout but not STS; (2) STS, but not burnout, was positively associated with the number of hours spent per week counseling patients who had had a traumatic experience; and (3) social support was negatively related to burnout and STS. Only specific sources of social support (supervisory support and family support), however, were negatively associated with burnout. Results highlight the need for counselors to be attuned to not only their clients but also to their own inner dynamics in order to mitigate the possible deleterious effects of their work.     

Individual differences in time perspective predict autonoetic experience

Tulving (1985) posited that the capacity to remember is one facet of a more general capacity—autonoetic (self-knowing) consciousness. Autonoetic consciousness was proposed to underlie the ability for “mental time travel” both into the past (remembering) and into the future to envision potential future episodes (episodic future thinking). The current study examines whether individual differences can predict autonoetic experience. Specifically, the Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory (ZTPI, Zimbardo & Boyd, 1999) was administered to 133 undergraduate students, who also rated phenomenological experiences accompanying autobiographical remembering and episodic future thinking. Scores on two of the five subscales of the ZTPI (Future and Present-Hedonistic) predicted the degree to which people reported feelings of mentally traveling backward (or forward) in time and the degree to which they reported re- or pre-experiencing the event, but not ten other rated properties less related to autonoetic consciousness.     

Growing Up in Violent Communities: Do Family Conflict and Gender Moderate Impacts on Adolescents’ Psychosocial Development?

This study examined the moderating effects of family conflict and gender on the relationship between community violence and psychosocial development at age 18. The study sample consisted of 728 children and families who were part of the Infant Health and Development Program study of low-birth-weight, pre-term infants. In this sample, adolescent psychosocial outcomes were predicted by community violence differently for male and female children and based on their experiences of conflict at home. For male children, being in a high conflict family as a child exacerbated the negative effects of community violence such that internalizing problems (depression and anxiety) and risk-taking behaviors increased as community violence increased, while being in a low conflict family protected the child against the negative impacts of the community. For female adolescents, there were no moderating effects of family conflict on the relationship between community violence and externalizing problems. Moderating effects for internalizing problems demonstrated that being in low conflict families did not serve as protection against community violence for girls as was demonstrated for boys. These findings demonstrate the long-term effects of community violence on child development, highlighting the importance of gender and family context in the development of internalizing and externalizing problems.     

Declarative knowledge and professional vision in teacher education: Effect of courses in teaching and learning

Background. Teachers’ professional vision includes the ability to apply general pedagogical knowledge about components of effective teaching and learning to reason about significant features of classroom practice. It requires teachers to (a) describe, (b) explain, and (c) predict classroom situations. Although the acquisition of underling knowledge can be considered as a key element of university‐based teacher education programmes, to date, there has been little empirical research on teacher candidates’ development of professional vision. Aims. This study aims to improve understanding of how different university‐based courses in teaching and learning impact the development of professional vision. Sample. Participants were teacher candidates (N= 53) attending the same teacher education programme at a German university. They were enrolled in one of three different compulsory courses in teaching and learning, lasting one semester. Methods. In a pre‐test–post‐test design, participants’ declarative knowledge about teaching and learning was measured with a test, professional vision with the online tool Observer. Analysis of covariance and multivariate analysis of variance were conducted. Results. Teacher candidates in all three courses showed significant gains both in declarative knowledge and professional vision. Patterns of results differed depending on the course attended. A video‐based course with a focus on effective teaching resulted in highest gains in prediction of the consequences of observed events for student learning processes, which is the highest level of knowledge transfer. Conclusion. The development of professional vision is a strongly knowledge‐guided process. In line with their content and aims, university‐based courses can enhance teaching‐relevant knowledge for teacher candidates.     

Interdependence and Social Identity in Youth Sport Teams

The degree to which team members believe that they rely on one another to perform successfully and achieve collective outcomes may relate to perceptions about the extent that they integrate the group within their own identity. This study examined the relationship between interdependence and social identity among 422 high school team sport athletes. Youth completed measures of task and outcome interdependence, as well as social identity. Multilevel analyses revealed that higher perceptions of outcome interdependence at an individual and team level predicted greater social identity. Results highlight the role of outcome interdependence on athletes’ perceptions of social identity in sport teams.     

Religion,Evolution, and Mental Health: Attachment Theory and ETAS Theory

This article reviews the historical origins of Attachment Theory and Evolutionary Threat Assessment Systems Theory (ETAS Theory), their evolutionary basis and their application in research on religion and mental health. Attachment Theory has been most commonly applied to religion and mental health in research on God as an attachment figure, which has shown that secure attachment to God is positively associated with psychological well-being. Its broader application to religion and mental health is comprehensively discussed by Kirkpatrick (2005). ETAS Theory explains why certain religious beliefs—including beliefs about God and life-after-death—should have an adverse association, an advantageous association, or no association at all with mental health. Moreover, it makes specific predictions to this effect, which have been confirmed, in part. The authors advocate the application of ETAS Theory in research on religion and mental health because it explains how religious and other beliefs related to the dangerousness of the world can directly affect psychiatric symptoms through their affects on specific brain structures.     

Ambiguity Advantage Revisited: Two Meanings are Better than One When Accessing Chinese Nouns

This paper revisits the effect of lexical ambiguity in word recognition, which has been controversial as previous research reported advantage, disadvantage, and null effects. We discuss factors that were not consistently treated in previous research (e.g., the level of lexical ambiguity investigated, parts of speech of the experimental stimuli, and the choice of non-words) and report on a lexical decision experiment with Chinese nouns in which ambiguous nouns with homonymic and/or metaphorical meanings were contrasted with unambiguous nouns. An ambiguity advantage effect was obtained—Chinese nouns with multiple meanings were recognized faster than those with only one meaning. The results suggested that both homonymic and metaphorical meanings are psychologically salient semantic levels actively represented in the mental lexicon. The results supported a probability-based model of random lexical access with multiple meanings represented by separate semantic nodes. We further discuss these results in terms of lexical semantic representation and how different experimental paradigms result in different ambiguity effects in lexical access.     

Strategic Interventions in Hospital Transitions

This paper describes two different strategic interventions designed to provide emotional and practical support to employees during downsizing in two large urban hospitals. The first program was hospital-wide and developed by a team of human resource professionals. The second program was smaller in scale and designed for a single hospital department. Both programs were initiated to minimize the negative impact of job loss and to address the concerns and heighten the morale of remaining employees.     

Sartre and Spinoza on the nature of mind

What surfaces first when one examines the philosophy of mind of Sartre and Spinoza are the differences between them. For Spinoza a human mind is a mode of the divine mind. That view is a far cry from Sartre’s view of human consciousness as a desire never achieved: the desire to be god, to be the foundation of one’s own existence. How could two philosophers, one a determinist and the other who grounds human freedom in the nature of consciousness itself, be seen as having any commonalities worth exploring? How could the noted user of the deductive method and one of the most important phenomenologists of the twentieth century share any philosophical ground at all? I will argue in this paper that despite the very real differences between their two philosophies, there are striking similarities between Sartre’s view of consciousness and Spinoza’s view of the mind. They become apparent when one examines each one’s analysis of the nature of mind and its relationship to itself, the body, and the world. Both are heir to a kind of Aristotelian naturalism. This commonality between them derives from their mutual rejection of Descartes’ substance dualism. I first explore the consequences of that rejection on how each one conceives of the relationship between the mind and its objects. Next I examine their view of the mind’s relation to itself and finally I look at how each one understood the mind’s relationship to the body and the world. The examination of their two views reveals how much they anticipate and support theories of mind defended by contemporary analytic philosophers of mind.