Mindfulness and acceptance-based group therapy versus traditional cognitive behavioral group therapy for social anxiety disorder: A randomized controlled trial

Recent research has supported the use of mindfulness and acceptance-based interventions for Social Anxiety Disorder (SAD).     

Communication comforting strategies and social bereavement: Verbal and nonverbal planning and appropriateness

Abstract

Based on Applegate's (1980) hierarchy of comforting strategies, this study assessed the effects of verbal planning (e.g., Berger & Bell, 1988; Infante, 1980) and nonverbal planning on the perceived appropriateness of comforting communication. Participants indicated their verbal and nonverbal communication strategies in response to a hypothetical bereavement scenario, and these strategies were coded into Apple-gate's (1980) hierarchy. Bereavement counselors also rated the appropriateness of each respondent's comforting message strategies. Results are discussed in terms of reflection-enhancing relational strategies and the bereavement counselors' perspectives of the effects on surviving family members.     

Why Is It Now?

Adolf Grünbaum, following J.J.C. Smart, has argued that the A-Theory of time is untenable due to its inability to answer the question, uniquely attending the A-theory, as to why it is now 2000. I argue, however, that Grünbaum's explication of the question's meaning makes the question a triviality. But there may be lurking here a somewhat different question, which is meaningful on a A-Theory of time, the answer to which may have surprising implications concerning the past infinitude of time.     

Psychological Safety: A Meta‐Analytic Review and Extension

Although psychological safety research has flourished in recent years, and despite the empirical support for the important role of psychological safety in the workplace, several critical questions remain. In order to address these questions, we aggregate theoretical and empirical works, and draw on 136 independent samples representing over 22,000 individuals and nearly 5,000 groups, to conduct a comprehensive meta‐analysis on the antecedents and outcomes of psychological safety. We not only present the nomological network of psychological safety but also extend this research in 4 important ways. First, we compare effect sizes to determine the relative effectiveness of antecedents to psychological safety. Second, we examine the extent to which psychological safety influences both task performance and organizational citizenship behaviors over and beyond related concepts such as positive leader relations and work engagement. Third, we examine whether research design characteristics and national culture alter validities within the nomological network, thus promoting a more accurate and contextualized understanding of psychological safety. Finally, we test the homology assumption by comparing the effect sizes of the antecedents and outcomes of psychological safety across individual and group levels of analysis. We conclude with a discussion of the areas in need of future examination.     

Conditionals,Context, and the Suppression Effect

Modus ponens is the argument from premises of the form If A, then B and A to the conclusion B (e.g., from If it rained, Alicia got wet and It rained to Alicia got wet). Nearly all participants agree that the modus ponens conclusion logically follows when the argument appears in this Basic form. However, adding a further premise (e.g., If she forgot her umbrella, Alicia got wet) can lower participants’ rate of agreement—an effect called suppression. We propose a theory of suppression that draws on contemporary ideas about conditional sentences in linguistics and philosophy. Semantically, the theory assumes that people interpret an indicative conditional as a context‐sensitive strict conditional: true if and only if its consequent is true in each of a contextually determined set of situations in which its antecedent is true. Pragmatically, the theory claims that context changes in response to new assertions, including new conditional premises. Thus, the conclusion of a modus ponens argument may no longer be accepted in the changed context. Psychologically, the theory describes people as capable of reasoning about broad classes of possible situations, ordered by typicality, without having to reason about individual possible worlds. The theory accounts for the main suppression phenomena, and it generates some novel predictions that new experiments confirm.     

Entropy,semantic relatedness and proximity

Although word co-occurrences within a document have been demonstrated to be semantically useful, word interactions over a local range have been largely neglected by psychologists due to practical challenges. Shannon’s (Bell Systems Technical Journal, 27, 379–423, 623–665, 1948) conceptualization of information theory suggests that these interactions should be useful for understanding communication. Computational advances make an examination of local word–word interactions possible for a large text corpus. We used Brants and Franz’s (2006) dataset to generate conditional probabilities for 62,474 word pairs and entropy calculations for 9,917 words in Nelson, McEvoy, and Schreiber’s (Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, & Computers, 36, 402–407, 2004) free association norms. Semantic associativity correlated moderately with the probabilities and was stronger when the two words were not adjacent. The number of semantic associates for a word and the entropy of a word were also correlated. Finally, language entropy decreases from 11 bits for single words to 6 bits per word for four-word sequences. The probabilities and entropies discussed here are included in the supplemental materials for the article.