The Experience of Insight Facilitates Long-Term Semantic Priming in the Right Hemisphere

While past research has demonstrated a link between the subjective “Aha” experience of insight and verbal insight problem solution activation in the right hemisphere (RH), no one has yet linked insight to long term semantic priming. We propose that through a shared process of semantic integration both of these concepts are linked and thus the experience of insight should facilitate semantic priming in the RH. Participants attempted to solve a group of compound remote associate problems and afterwards completed a lexical decision task. The results showed that the experience of insight facilitated semantic priming in the RH, but only for unsolved compound remote associate problems. It was also shown that participants who indicated that they generated more solutions through insight that were incorrect demonstrated the most semantic priming in the RH. These results indicate that long-term semantic priming can occur as a result of insight solutions, and that this activation occurs predominantly in the RH. This study extends both the evidence for long-lasting semantic priming as well the theory of coarse semantic coding in the RH.     

Class and compassion: socioeconomic factors predict responses to suffering

Previous research indicates that lower-class individuals experience elevated negative emotions as compared with their upper-class counterparts. We examine how the environments of lower-class individuals can also promote greater compassionate responding-that is, concern for the suffering or well-being of others. In the present research, we investigate class-based differences in dispositional compassion and its activation in situations wherein others are suffering. Across studies, relative to their upper-class counterparts, lower-class individuals reported elevated dispositional compassion (Study 1), as well as greater self-reported compassion during a compassion-inducing video (Study 2) and for another person during a social interaction (Study 3). Lower-class individuals also exhibited heart rate deceleration-a physiological response associated with orienting to the social environment and engaging with others-during the compassion-inducing video (Study 2). We discuss a potential mechanism of class-based influences on compassion, whereby lower-class individuals' are more attuned to others' distress, relative to their upper-class counterparts.     

Transforming Spirituality in Artistic Leisure: How the Spiritual Meaning of Belly Dance Changes Over Time

Studies show that different dimensions of religiosity change throughout the life course. Yet, we have little information about how spirituality that some people experience outside of formal religious organizations may change. The purpose of this study is to examine how spirituality associated with artistic leisure may emerge or decline over time. Drawing from two waves of semistructured qualitative interviews conducted five years apart, I examine how the spirituality dancers associate with belly dance changes over time and factors associated with those transformations. Rather than emerging, findings show that whether dancers instill belly dance with spirituality remains stable or decreases. Furthermore, much of the decrease in the spiritual meaning that dancers link to belly dance can be understood in the context of their changing involvement in the dance, different meanings they attach to belly dance, revisiting their personal beliefs about spirituality, and expanding their spiritual outlets.     

Buddhist Perspectives for Addressing Values Conflicts in Counseling: Possibilities From Practice

In recent years, the issue of value conflicts in counseling has become more salient, whereas equitably working with such conflicts has been increasingly contested. Interest in the confluence of counseling and spirituality has also grown. Using relevant Buddhist principles, the authors offer a spiritual framework that is illustrated through clinical case studies. These are used to conceptualize concerns, understand the conflict, and find ways to be responsive to the disjunction between client and counselor.     

Manipulating Games by Sharing Information

We address the issue of manipulating games through communication. In the specific setting we consider (a variation of Boolean games), we assume there is some set of environment variables, the values of which are not directly accessible to players; the players have their own beliefs about these variables, and make decisions about what actions to perform based on these beliefs. The communication we consider takes the form of (truthful) announcements about the values of some environment variables; the effect of an announcement is the modification of the beliefs of the players who hear the announcement so that they accurately reflect the values of the announced variables. By choosing announcements appropriately, it is possible to perturb the game away from certain outcomes and towards others. We specifically focus on the issue of stabilisation: making announcements that transform a game from having no stable states to one that has stable configurations.     

Tactile communication, cooperation, and performance: an ethological study of the NBA

Tactile communication, or physical touch, promotes cooperation between people, communicates distinct emotions, soothes in times of stress, and is used to make inferences of warmth and trust. Based on this conceptual analysis, we predicted that in group competition, physical touch would predict increases in both individual and group performance. In an ethological study, we coded the touch behavior of players from the National Basketball Association (NBA) during the 2008-2009 regular season. Consistent with hypotheses, early season touch predicted greater performance for individuals as well as teams later in the season. Additional analyses confirmed that touch predicted improved performance even after accounting for player status, preseason expectations, and early season performance. Moreover, coded cooperative behaviors between teammates explained the association between touch and team performance. Discussion focused on the contributions touch makes to cooperative groups and the potential implications for other group settings.     

The Social Ladder: A Rank-Based Perspective on Social Class

Scholars across the social sciences have studied social class for centuries. In this review, we suggest that social class is a fundamental means by which individuals are ranked on the social ladder of society. A rank-based perspective on social class shines light on several future areas of research: Specifically, understanding how social class ranks individuals vis-à-vis others leads to predictions about how class is signaled in interactions, influences social cognition and health, is shaped by global economic inequality trends, and changes across the life course. Importantly, our theory highlights the potential of experimental manipulations of social class rank for testing the causal role of social class in shaping basic patterns of cognition, emotion, and behavior. Future predictions regarding the channels of social class rank signals, along with how position on the social ladder shapes political attitudes and interacts with cultural values, are considered.