Membership in a Devalued Social Group and Emotional Well-Being: Developing a Model of Personal Self-Esteem,Collective Self-Esteem,and Group Socialization

We proposed and tested a theoretical model that links membership in a devalued social group to emotional health. People who identify with devalued social groups (e.g., ethnic minorities, gay men/lesbians, bisexuals, women) may be at increased risk for distress via 3 different pathways. First, some members of devalued groups may internalize negative stereotypes about their group, which negatively impact personal self-esteem. Second, being devalued simply on the basis of one's group membership could lead to emotional distress independent of one's own personal self-esteem. Third, some members of devalued groups may be socialized to develop attitudes and behaviors that increase their risk for emotional distress. Data were collected from a sample of White, middle-to-upper-class undergraduate women and men with respect to personal self-esteem, collective self-esteem on the basis of their gender group, attitudes and behaviors associated with female socialization, and emotional distress. Results supported the direct effect of each pathway in predicting concurrent depression and partially supported the prediction of concurrent anxiety. Each pathway fully accounted for women's greater levels of depression relative to men's. Implications for the study of devalued groups are discussed.     

Evidence against integration of spatial maps in humans: generality across real and virtual environments

A real-world open-field search task was implemented with humans as an analogue of Blaisdell and Cook’s (Anim Cogn 8:7–16, 2005) pigeon foraging task and Sturz, Bodily, and Katz’s (Anim Cogn 9:207–217, 2006) human virtual foraging task to 1) determine whether humans were capable of integrating independently learned spatial maps and 2) make explicit comparisons of mechanisms used by humans to navigate real and virtual environments. Participants searched for a hidden goal located in one of 16 bins arranged in a 4 × 4 grid. In Phase 1, the goal was hidden between two landmarks (blue T and red L). In Phase 2, the goal was hidden to the left and in front of a single landmark (blue T). Following training, goal-absent trials were conducted in which the red L from Phase 1 was presented alone. Bin choices during goal-absent trials assessed participants’ strategies: association (from Phase 1), generalization (from Phase 2), or integration (combination of Phase 1 and 2). Results were inconsistent with those obtained with pigeons but were consistent with those obtained with humans in a virtual environment. Specifically, during testing, participants did not integrate independently learned spatial maps but used a generalization strategy followed by a shift in search behavior away from the test landmark. These results were confirmed by a control condition in which a novel landmark was presented during testing. Results are consistent with the bulk of recent findings suggesting the use of alternative navigational strategies to cognitive mapping. Results also add to a growing body of literature suggesting that virtual environment approaches to the study of spatial learning and memory have external validity and that spatial mechanisms used by human participants in navigating virtual environments are similar to those used in navigating real-world environments.     

Are self-explanations always beneficial?

We present evidence suggesting that the effect of self-explanations on learning is not always beneficial and, in fact, in some contexts has a detrimental effect. Over eight sessions, fourth-graders engaged in investigation of a database with the goal of identifying causal effects. In a separate task, children in one condition also generated self-explanations regarding the mechanisms underlying the causal effects they believed to be present. In a comparison condition, they did not. On a transfer task, children in the no-explanations condition showed superior causal inference performance. The findings are discussed as reflecting the development of “data-reading” skill with which an emphasis on explanations may interfere.     

汶川地震三年半后中学生的感恩对创伤后成长的影响：社会支持的中介作用

采用感恩问卷、社会支持问卷和创伤后成长问卷对汶川地震三年半后的376名中学生进行调查,考察其感恩与社会支持对创伤后成长的影响,并检验社会支持在感恩与创伤后成长之间的中介作用。结果发现：（1）灾后中学生的创伤后成长水平较高,其中自我觉知的改变与人际体验的改变水平高于生命价值观的改变水平,女生人际体验的改变水平高于男生,初一学生的创伤后成长水平相对低于高年级学生;（2）感恩和社会支持可显著地正向预测创伤后成长;（3）社会支持在感恩与创伤后成长之间起着部分中介作用。这表明,汶川地震三年半后中学生的感恩可以直接正向预测创伤后成长,也可通过社会支持正向影响创伤后成长。     

Cognitive and life stress predictors of relapse in remitted unipolar depressed patients: test of the congruency hypothesis.

Remitted depressed subjects (N = 59) were followed longitudinally to determine whether dependent or self-critical persons are more vulnerable to relapse after exposure to life events that have a bearing on interpersonal or achievement concerns. Regression analyses indicated that congruency effects, as measured by the occurrence of achievement-related adversity in the lives of self-critical subjects, accounted for a significant increment in relapse variance over each variable entered singly. When data from the 2 months just before relapse were analyzed, some evidence of congruency effects in dependent subjects experiencing interpersonal-related adversity was obtained. These findings highlight the dimensional qualities of life even impact and call for greater differentiation in modeling the activation of a diathesis and precipitation of depression after life stress.     

Grammatical priming effects between pronouns and inflected verb forms

Summary Deciding on the lexical status of a word can be facilitated by a preceding, semantically related word. Three experiments are reported demonstrating a different kind of facilitation due to the grammatical relation between function words and content words in Serbo-Croatian. A pronoun facilitated or inhibited the lexical decision on a following verb depending on whether the person of the verb, as represented by its inflected ending, agreed with the person of the pronoun. Also, verbs primed subsequent pronouns but the pattern of results for the verbal priming of pronouns was markedly different from that for the pronominal priming of verbs. The results suggest that the organization of the internal lexicon is sensitive to grammatical relations as well as semantical relations between words.     

Dominance and typicality norms for properties: Convergent and discriminant validity

Sensory properties of verbally depicted items, such as those of color or shape, were indexed for dominance (frequency of output) and typicality (perceptual “goodness”). Participants (total N=193) served in one of four conditions. The most dominant property response was computed for 105 nouns by one group. A second group rated these properties for typicality, relative to a constituent property (i.e., given one’s idea of yellow, how typically “yellow” are the following items: butter, canary, daffodil, ...). A third group produced as many properties as possible for each of 65 nouns. Dominance was computed for all 459 properties so produced. The last group rated these 459 properties for typicality relative to the parent noun (i.e., Given your image of an apple, how typically round is it? How typically soft is it? etc.). A multimethod-multitrait analysis indicated that both typicality and dominance were reliable, and that both exhibited convergent and discriminant validity. Typicality measured relative to an ideal property exhibited greater discriminant validity from dominance than when measured relative to the parent noun. Selected uses of these norms in studies of semantic memory, metaphor judgment, and concept identification were discussed.