Psychotropic placebos reduce the misinformation effect by increasing monitoring at test

A psychotropic placebo can help people resist the misinformation effect, an effect thought to be caused by a shift to more stringent source monitoring. When this shift occurs has been unclear. To address this issue we gave some people—but not others—a phoney cognitive-enhancing drug we called R273. Shortly afterwards, everyone took part in a misinformation effect experiment. To gather evidence about source monitoring we surreptitiously recorded time to read the misleading postevent narrative, and response time at test. Our findings suggest that people shifted to more stringent source monitoring at test. Moreover, people with higher working memory capacity (WMC) performed better than people with lower WMC—but only when they were told they had received R273, a finding that fits with research showing that WMC can confer advantages in situations demanding effortful control, but not when automatic heuristics suffice.     

Weathering the storm: Children's long‐term recall of Hurricane Andrew

Children who experienced a highly stressful natural disaster, Hurricane Andrew, were interviewed within a few months of the event, when they were 3–4 years old, and again 6 years later, when they were 9–10 years old. Children were grouped into low, moderate, or high stress groups depending on the severity of the experienced storm. All children were able to recall this event in vivid detail 6 years later. In fact, children reported over twice as many propositions at the second interview as at the first. At the initial interview, children in the high stress group reported less information than children in the moderate stress group, but 6 years later, children in all three stress groups reported similar amounts of information. However children in the high stress group needed more questions and prompts than children in the other stress groups. Yet children in the high stress group also reported more consistent information between the two interviews, especially about the storm, than children in the other stress groups. Implications for children's developing memory of stressful events are discussed.     

What Happens to Physical Activity Behavior,Motivation, Self-Concept,and Flow After Completing School? A Longitudinal Study

With particular focus on the year following completion of high school, the present study sought to establish the status of young people's physical activity behavior, physical activity motivation, physical activity flow, and physical self-concept. Among a sample of 213 Australian participants assessed in their final year of school and then one year later, findings suggested a significant increase in physical activity behavior and a significant reduction in maladaptive behavioral motivation. On other physical measures, females demonstrated significant improvements in their general physical self-concepts and males demonstrated significant improvements in their health self-concepts. Implications for gender-specific and developmentally targeted interventions are discussed.     

Understanding active psychological states: Embedding engagement in a wider nomological net and closer attention to performance

We concur with the authors of the focal article that engagement is a critical topic at work, and we welcome the questions posed in this article. Nevertheless, we advocate a stronger link between engagement research and existing research and theory about active psychological states, including that discussed in the topic domains of job design/empowerment, leadership, and proactivity/job crafting. We outline the advantages of embedding engagement in a wider nomological net. We also advocate closer attention to type of work performance that is prompted and sustained by engagement, as well as considering how both context and individual differences moderate the link between engagement and performance. We suggest there is more to learn about how, when, and why engagement influences specific aspects of performance.     

Human risky choice in a repeated-gambles procedure: an up-linkage replication of Lakshminarayanan, Chen and Santos (2011)

Lakshminarayanan et al. (J Exp Soc Psychol 47: 689–693, 2011) showed that when choice is between variable (risky) and fixed (safe) food amounts with the same expected values, capuchins prefer the safe alternative if choice is framed as a gain, but the risky alternative if it is framed as a loss. These results seem similar to those seen in human prospect-theory tests in choice between variable and fixed gains or losses. Based on this similarity, they interpreted their results as identifying a between-species commonality in cognitive function. In this report, we repeat their experiment with humans as subjects (an up-linkage replication). Whether choices were rewarded with candy or nickels, choice approximated indifference whether framed as gains or losses. Our data mirror those of others who found that when humans make risky choices within a repeated-trials procedure without verbal instruction about outcome likelihoods, preference biases seen in one-shot, language-guided, prospect-theory tests such as Tversky and Kahneman’s (Science 211:453–458, 1981) reflection effect may not appear. The disparity between our findings and those of Lakshminarayanan et al. suggests their study does not evidence a cognitive process shared by humans and capuchins.     

A Multivariate Analysis of the Self-Determination of Adolescents

Self-determination is a general psychological construct within the organizing structure of theories of human agentic behavior. People who are self-determined act volitionally to serve as the causal agent in their lives. To provide a fuller understanding of the self-determination of adolescents, this study collected data on self-determination, quality of life, self-efficacy, and assertiveness for more than 1,400 Italian adolescents. We conducted a series of Multivariate Analyses of Variance to examine the relationships among, differences between, and associations with self-determination, including any differences as a function of age and gender as well as differences in quality of life, self-efficacy, and assertiveness as a function of level of selfdetermination. We also examined which quality of life factors were associated with enhanced self-determination and self-efficacy. Findings support the importance of self-determination to quality of life and enhanced self-efficacy.