A Cross‐Cultural Comparison of U.S. and Japanese Trainees’ Emotion‐Recognition Ability

This study investigated the ability of non‐Hispanic White U.S. counseling psychology trainees and Japanese clinical psychology trainees to recognize facially expressed emotions. Researchers proposed that an in‐group advantage for emotion recognition would occur, women would have higher emotion‐recognition accuracy than men, and participants would vary in their emotion‐intensity ratings. Sixty White U.S. students and 60 Japanese students viewed photographs of non‐Hispanic White U.S. and Japanese individuals expressing emotions and completed a survey assessing emotion‐recognition ability and emotion‐intensity ratings. Two four‐way mixed‐factor analyses of variance were performed, examining effects of participant nationality/race, participant gender, poser nationality/race, and poser gender on emotion‐recognition accuracy scores and intensity ratings. Results did not support the in‐group advantage hypothesis, rather, U.S. participants had higher accuracy rates than Japanese trainees overall. No gender differences in accuracy were found. However, respondents varied in their intensity ratings across gender and nationality. Implications for training applied psychology students and for future research are presented.     

LOVING THEM TO DEATH: THE ANOREXIC AND HER OBJECTS

The author suggests that eating disorders function to reinforce phantasies of control of the internal parents, a feature of Klein's view of the manic defence. Using this hypothesis, she attempts to differentiate between anorexia and bulimia. It is argued that in anorexia objects are felt to be permanently in thrall, suspended or frozen, whereas in bulimia they are attacked in a frenzied and intermittent way. Using case material from three seriously ill patients, the author draws attention to some important differences between them. Two of the patients were treated in psychoanalysis, while the third was seen for an extended consultation and once-weekly treatment thereafter. It is suggested that the nature and degree of the murderous attack on the internal couple may determine the severity of the illness as well as the patient's capacity to benefit from treatment. The conclusions drawn are discussed in relation to some contemporary views on eating disorders as well as writings on the difficulties of working through the Oedipus complex more generally. The author suggests that eating disorders may represent a special case of oedipal illusions.     

A novel integrative method for analyzing eye and hand behaviour during reaching and grasping in an MRI environment

The development of noninvasive neuroimaging techniques, such as fMRI, has rapidly advanced our understanding of the neural systems underlying the integration of visual and motor information. However, the fMRI experimental design is restricted by several environmental elements, such as the presence of the magnetic field and the restricted view of the participant, making it difficult to monitor and measure behaviour. The present article describes a novel, specialized software package developed in our laboratory called Biometric Integration Recording and Analysis (BIRA). BIRA integrates video with kinematic data derived from the hand and eye, acquired using MRI-compatible equipment. The present article demonstrates the acquisition and analysis of eye and hand data using BIRA in a mock (0 Tesla) scanner. A method for collecting and integrating gaze and kinematic data in fMRI studies on visuomotor behaviour has several advantages: Specifically, it will allow for more sophisticated, behaviourally driven analyses and eliminate potential confounds of gaze or kinematic data.     

Neurocognitive development and externalizing problems: the role of inhibitory control deficits from 4 to 6 years

Executive processes have been posited as important regulators of externalizing problems (EP), but there has been little research on the relation between executive dysfunction and EP in early childhood. During the preschool period, maturation of the prefrontostriatal circuitry parallels increases in inhibitory control (IC). Poor IC development could result in elevated levels of aggressive, disruptive, and impulsive behavior. In this investigation, the development of the relation between IC and EP was examined in preschool and early elementary school children using the Day/Night and Tapping tasks. Children with more EP made more incorrect responses on both IC tasks, consistently across age and sex. The associations between EP and response latencies differed across children, however, with longer latencies on the Tapping task being most characteristic for boys with high levels of EP. This association was not apparent for girls. Two prominent aspects of early EP, aggressive and inattentive behavior, showed only weak unique associations with IC performance. These findings imply that diminished IC accompanies elevated EP as early as the preschool years, and that this decrement persists into the elementary school-age years for both girls and boys, and that accuracy and response latency may confer different information about the development of IC.     

The integration of agency and communion in moral personality: Evidence of enlightened self-interest

Agency and communion are fundamental human motives, often conceptualized as being in tension. This study examines the notion that moral exemplars overcome this tension and adaptively integrate these 2 motives within their personality. Participants were 25 moral exemplars-recipients of a national award for extraordinary volunteerism-and 25 demographically matched comparison participants. Each participant responded to a life review interview and provided a list of personal strivings, which were coded for themes of agency and communion; interviews were also coded for the relationship between agency and communion. Results consistently indicated that exemplars not only had both more agency and communion than did comparison participants but were also more likely to integrate these themes within their personality. Consistent with our claim that enlightened self-interest is driving this phenomenon, this effect was evident only when agency and communion were conceptualized in terms of promoting interests (of the self and others, respectively) and not in terms of psychological distance (from others) and only when the interaction was observed with a person approach and not with the traditional variable approach. After providing a conceptual replication of these results using different measures elicited in different contexts and relying on different coding procedures, we addressed and dismissed various alternative explanations, including chance co-occurrence and generalized complexity. These results provide the first reliable evidence of the integration of motives of agency and communion in moral personality.     

Rising up to higher virtues: Experiencing elevated physical height uplifts prosocial actions

Many challenges of society involve getting people to act prosocially in ways that are costly for self-interests but beneficial to the greater good. The authors in four studies examined the novel hypothesis that elevating (vertical) height promotes prosocial actions. In Study 1, shoppers riding up (vs. down) escalators contributed more often to charity. In Study 2, participants sitting higher (vs. lower) helped another longer, while in Study 3 participants sitting higher (vs. lower) were more compassionate. In Study 4, watching video primes depicting scenes from a high perspective led to more cooperative resource conservation. These studies contribute uniquely to the prosociality literature by documenting previously unexamined effects of metaphor-enriched social cognition, and to the metaphor-enriched social cognition literature by documenting effects of elevated height on real prosocial actions.