Escaping affect: how motivated emotion regulation creates insensitivity to mass suffering

As the number of people in need of help increases, the degree of compassion people feel for them ironically tends to decrease. This phenomenon is termed the collapse of compassion. Some researchers have suggested that this effect happens because emotions are not triggered by aggregates. We provide evidence for an alternative account. People expect the needs of large groups to be potentially overwhelming, and, as a result, they engage in emotion regulation to prevent themselves from experiencing overwhelming levels of emotion. Because groups are more likely than individuals to elicit emotion regulation, people feel less for groups than for individuals. In Experiment 1, participants displayed the collapse of compassion only when they expected to be asked to donate money to the victims. This suggests that the effect is motivated by self-interest. Experiment 2 showed that the collapse of compassion emerged only for people who were skilled at emotion regulation. In Experiment 3, we manipulated emotion regulation. Participants who were told to down-regulate their emotions showed the collapse of compassion, but participants who were told to experience their emotions did not. We examined the time course of these effects using a dynamic rating to measure affective responses in real time. The time course data suggested that participants regulate emotion toward groups proactively, by preventing themselves from ever experiencing as much emotion toward groups as toward individuals. These findings provide initial evidence that motivated emotion regulation drives insensitivity to mass suffering.     

Antecedents and trajectories of achievement goals: A self‐determination theory perspective

Background. Research has shown that both achievement goal theory and self‐determination theory (SDT) are quite useful in explaining student motivation and success in academic contexts. However, little is known about how the two theories relate to each other. Aim. The current research used SDT as a framework to understand why students enter classes with particular achievement goal profiles, and also, how those profiles may change over time. Sample. One hundred and eighty‐four undergraduate preservice teachers in a required domain course agreed to participate in the study. Method. Data were collected at three time points during the semester, and both path modelling and multi‐level longitudinal modelling techniques were used. Results. Path modelling techniques with 169 students, results indicated that students' autonomy and relatedness need satisfaction in life predict their initial self‐determined class motivation, which in turn predicts initial mastery‐approach and ‐avoidance goals. Multi‐level longitudinal modelling with 108 students found that perceived teacher autonomy support buffered against the general decline in students' mastery‐approach goals over the course of the semester. Conclusions. Data provide a promising integration of SDT and achievement goal theory, posing a host of potentially fruitful future research questions regarding goal adoption and trajectories.     

Test expectancy affects metacomprehension accuracy

Background. Theory suggests that the accuracy of metacognitive monitoring is affected by the cues used to judge learning. Researchers have improved monitoring accuracy by directing attention to more appropriate cues; however, this is the first study to more directly point students to more appropriate cues using instructions regarding tests and practice tests. Aims. The purpose of the present study was to examine whether the accuracy metacognitive monitoring was affected by the nature of the test expected. Sample and method. Students (N= 59) were randomly assigned to one of two test expectancy groups (memory vs. inference). Then after reading texts, judging learning, completed both memory and inference tests. Results. Test performance and monitoring accuracy were superior when students received the kind of test they had been led to expect rather than the unexpected test. Conclusion. Tests influence students' perceptions of what constitutes learning. Our findings suggest that this could affect how students prepare for tests and how they monitoring their own learning.     

Generating keywords improves metacomprehension and self-regulation in elementary and middle school children

The ability to monitor understanding of texts, usually referred to as metacomprehension accuracy, is typically quite poor in adult learners; however, recently interventions have been developed to improve accuracy. In two experiments, we evaluated whether generating delayed keywords prior to judging comprehension improved metacomprehension accuracy for children. For sixth and seventh graders, metacomprehension accuracy was greater when generating keywords. By contrast, for fourth graders, metacomprehension accuracy did not differ across conditions. Improved metacomprehension accuracy led to improved regulation of study. The delayed keyword effect in children reported here is discussed in terms of situation model activation.     

Age-related differences in guessing on free and forced recall tests

This study examined possible age-related differences in recall, guessing, and metacognition on free recall tests and forced recall tests. Participants studied categorised and unrelated word lists and were asked to recall the items under one of the following test conditions: standard free recall, free recall with a penalty for guessing, free recall with no penalty for guessing, or forced recall. The results demonstrated interesting age differences regarding the impact of liberal test instructions (i.e., forced recall and no penalty) relative to more conservative test instructions (i.e., standard free recall and penalty) on memory performance. Specifically, once guessing was controlled, younger adults' recall of categorised lists varied in accordance with test instructions while older adults' recall of categorised lists did not differ between conservative and liberal test instructions, presumably because older adults approach standard free recall tests of categorised lists with a greater propensity towards guessing than young adults.     

Normative MMPI-2 Profiles of Christian Counseling Students: An Investigation of Subculture in Standardized Testing

This research sought to explore whether a normative profile on the MMPI-2 emerged for counseling students in a counselor training program at a seminary in the Midwest and the extent to which this profile compares to those proposed for counseling students or those preparing for pastoral ministry. Normative profiles of master’s level counseling students were compared to profiles of similar samples. Findings indicated that profiles of the current student sample are similar to those of other religious students. Implications of these findings are explored regarding the use of the MMPI-2 with counseling students who are members of the Christian subculture.     

Bayesian analogy with relational transformations

How can humans acquire relational representations that enable analogical inference and other forms of high-level reasoning? Using comparative relations as a model domain, we explore the possibility that bottom-up learning mechanisms applied to objects coded as feature vectors can yield representations of relations sufficient to solve analogy problems. We introduce Bayesian analogy with relational transformations (BART) and apply the model to the task of learning first-order comparative relations (e.g., larger, smaller, fiercer, meeker) from a set of animal pairs. Inputs are coded by vectors of continuous-valued features, based either on human magnitude ratings, normed feature ratings (De Deyne et al., 2008), or outputs of the topics model (Griffiths, Steyvers, & Tenenbaum, 2007). Bootstrapping from empirical priors, the model is able to induce first-order relations represented as probabilistic weight distributions, even when given positive examples only. These learned representations allow classification of novel instantiations of the relations and yield a symbolic distance effect of the sort obtained with both humans and other primates. BART then transforms its learned weight distributions by importance-guided mapping, thereby placing distinct dimensions into correspondence. These transformed representations allow BART to reliably solve 4-term analogies (e.g., larger:smaller::fiercer:meeker), a type of reasoning that is arguably specific to humans. Our results provide a proof-of-concept that structured analogies can be solved with representations induced from unstructured feature vectors by mechanisms that operate in a largely bottom-up fashion. We discuss potential implications for algorithmic and neural models of relational thinking, as well as for the evolution of abstract thought.     

Introduction to the special section on the neural substrate of analogical reasoning and metaphor comprehension

The special section on the neural substrate of relational reasoning includes 4 articles that address the processes and brain regions involved in analogical reasoning (Green, Kraemer, Fugelsang, Gray, & Dunbar, 2011; Maguire, McClelland, Donovan, Tillman, & Krawczyk, 2011) and in metaphor comprehension (Chettih, Durgin, & Grodner, 2011; Prat, Mason, & Just, 2011). We see this work as an example of how neuroscience approaches to cognition can lead to increased understanding of cognitive processes. In this brief introduction, we first situate the 4 articles in the context of prior cognitive neuroscience work on relational reasoning. We then highlight the main issues explored in these articles: different sources of complexity and difficulty in relational processing, potential differences between the roles of the 2 hemispheres, and the impact of individual differences in various cognitive abilities. The 4 articles illustrate a range of methodologies, including functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI; Green et al., 2011; Prat et al., 2011), event-related potentials (ERPs; Maguire et al., 2011), and different types of semantic priming (Chettih et al., 2011; Prat et al., 2011). They highlight the connections between research on analogy and on metaphor comprehension and suggest, collectively, that a cognitive neuroscience approach to relational reasoning can lead to converging conclusions.     

Obstacles to research in residential juvenile justice facilities: recommendations for researchers

Federal, state, and local initiatives to improve the treatment and outcomes for young people in the juvenile justice system prompt the need for additional research. Despite the call for empirical data, researchers encounter numerous obstacles when initiating and conducting studies in detention and post-adjudication facilities. These obstacles are often only briefly mentioned in publications, but they can interfere with researchers' desires and abilities to conduct studies in these settings. This paper reviews legal, ethical, and methodological challenges to successfully conducting research in detention and residential post-adjudication placements, including selecting and accessing appropriate facilities, obtaining institutional review board approval, seeking parental permission and youth assent, reporting child abuse and neglect, responding to participants' threats to harm self or others, working effectively with facilities, juvenile justice system-related attrition, and the dissemination of research findings. Recommendations are presented to help investigators anticipate obstacles when designing and executing research protocols to prevent interference and to encourage ethical responses and successful study completion.     

An Inkblot for the Implicit Assessment of Personality: The Semantic Misattribution Procedure

Misattributions people make about their own reaction to ambiguous stimuli can be used to measure personality self‐concepts implicitly. On the basis of a semantic misattribution priming paradigm [semantic misattribution procedure (SMP)], we assessed the implicit personality self‐concept related to three dimensions included in the Big‐Five model: conscientiousness, neuroticism, and extraversion. Across three studies (N1 = 98, N2 = 140, and N3 = 135), the SMP was robustly related, in the expected direction, to individual differences in self‐reported personality questionnaires and managed to predict both self‐reported and objectively measured behaviours. The main advantage of SMP over classical explicit measures of personality is its higher resistance to social desirability tendencies, although its psychometric properties are somewhat lower than those pertaining to explicit measures of personality. Finally, comparisons of our results with studies that used other implicit measures of personality self‐concept indicate that the SMP has higher criterion validity. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.