Processing fluency affects behavior more strongly among people higher in trait mindfulness

Processing fluency is the ease of processing information about a stimulus, which people can attribute to the experience of enjoyment. Despite consistent findings that processing fluency can affect self-reported judgments, little research has examined whether processing fluency or its interactions with personality traits can affect behavior. The current studies demonstrate that processing fluency is more likely to affect behavior among people higher in trait mindfulness. We manipulated processing fluency with rhyming versus nonrhyming maxims in Study 1 and with regulatory fit versus nonfit in Study 2. Participants higher in mindfulness showed a stronger positive effect for processing fluency on the dependent variable: the number of ideas they listed in a task they continued for as long as they enjoyed it.     

The psychosocial predictors of long-term distress in partners of patients with acute coronary syndrome

Objective: Partners of acute coronary syndrome (ACS) patients are at risk of experiencing long-term distress and the purpose of this study was to identify its predictors.

Design: Using an observational design, 80 partners of ACS patients completed validated questionnaires at three time points. The predictor variables, marital satisfaction and optimism were assessed three weeks after patient hospital discharge (T1). The outcomes, depressive symptoms and physical health status (from a quality of life scale) were measured 6 (T2) and 12 (T3) months post-discharge, and scores were combined to indicate the long-term response.

Main outcome measures: Depressive symptoms and physical health status.

Results: Partner depressive symptoms increased and physical health status deteriorated over the months following the patients’ ACS. After controlling for demographics, clinical severity of ACS and T1 levels of the outcome variable, partners’ long-term depressive symptoms were predicted by poor marital satisfaction and low optimism at T1, and poor physical health status was predicted by low T1 optimism.

Conclusion: Psychosocial factors are predictors of long-term distress for ACS partners. Partners in an unhappy marriage or with low optimism after ACS are at an increased risk of depression and low physical health status, and should be the target of additional support.     

Evaluating Contingent Workers as a Recruitment Source for Full‐time Positions

The popularity of contingent work arrangements means that many people now begin working for organizations in a temporary capacity. However, no research has examined how contingent workers converted to full‐time status compared with new hires that are recruited from other sources. In this study, we found that converted contingent workers performed as well as new hires recruited externally through employee referral or online advertisements, but not as well as employees sourced internally from the organization, 1 year after being hired. However, contingent workers did not differ from other recruiting sources in their start‐up time or in how satisfied their managers were with their early adjustment two months after hire.     

The dynamics of infant visual foraging

Human infants actively forage for visual information from the moment of birth onward. Although we know a great deal about how stimulus characteristics influence looking behavior in the first few postnatal weeks, we know much less about the intrinsic dynamics of the behavior. Here we show that a simple stochastic dynamical system acts quantitatively like 4-week-old infants on a range of measures if there is hysteresis in the transitions between looking and looking away in the model system. The success of this simple three-parameter model suggests that visual foraging in the first few weeks after birth may be influenced more by noise and hysteresis in underlying neural mechanisms than by how infants process visual information after a look begins.     

Encoding during the attentional lapse: accuracy of encoding during the semantic sustained attention to response task

An experiment investigated the relationship between the ability to encode verbal stimuli during an attentional lapse. The task employed a variation on the sustained attention to response task (SART, Robertson, Manly, Andrade, Baddeley, & Yiend, 1997) which involved the detection of an infrequent target against a background of words. As a manipulation, participants were either instructed to encode the stimuli or were merely exposed to the stimuli. Retrieval was measured using process dissociation. Irrespective of the instructions given to the participants during the task, participants were more likely to retrieve information on the basis of recollection after an error was made than before, whilst the likelihood of retrieving information on the basis of familiarity remained invariant over the same period. The implications of this result for methods of investigating subjective experience are discussed.     

Mechanisms underlying dependencies of performance on stimulus history in a two-alternative forced-choice task

In choice reaction time tasks, response times and error rates demonstrate differential dependencies on the identities of up to four stimuli preceding the current one. Although the general profile of reaction times and error rates, when plotted against the stimulus histories, may seem idiosyncratic, we show that it can result from simple underlying mechanisms that take account of the occurrence of stimulus repetitions and alternations. Employing a simple connectionist model of a two-alternative forcedchoice task, we explored various combinations of repetition and alternation detection schemes in an attempt to account for empirical results from the literature and from our own studies. We found that certain combinations of the repetition and the alternation schemes provided good fits to the data, suggesting that simple mechanisms may serve to explain the complicated but highly reproducible higher order dependencies of task performance on stimulus history.     

Adult attachment and body satisfaction. An exploration of general and specific relationship differences

The relationship between general and specific adult relationship attachment and body satisfaction was examined in a community sample of 133 women. Participants completed measures of body image (body surveillance, body-as-object esteem, and body-as-process satisfaction) and general attachment (anxiety and avoidance) and then were primed for a romantic partner or close friend relationship, after which they completed specific measures of attachment and body satisfaction. General attachment results replicated previous research. Specific attachment results demonstrated distinct differences both from general attachment and between romantic partner attachment and close friend attachment. Attachment independently predicted body satisfaction both for general and close friend measures; however, in romantic relationships, only body surveillance independently contributed to body satisfaction.     

The Practice of the Everyday in the Literature of Nursing

If intense pain is "world-destroying," as Elaine Scarry has argued, one of the ways nurses respond to that loss is by re-enacting the commonplace-both in practice and in writing-through daily, accumulating acts of care. Such care poses a critique of medicine's emphasis on the exceptional moment and stresses forms of physical tending that are quotidian rather than heroic, ongoing rather than permanent or conclusive. I develop this view of care through the writings of nurses like Walt Whitman, Louisa May Alcott, Cortney Davis and Joyce Renwick.     

It's a bet! A problem-solving approach promotes the construction of contingent agreements

Negotiators often have different expectations about the future. A contingent agreement, or a bet that makes the ultimate outcome dependent on some future event, builds on negotiators' differences. The authors argue that a problem-solving approach, in which negotiators thoroughly explore options to build on their differences, is most likely to construct contingent agreements. The authors explore two factors expected to influence this problem-solving approach, namely, negotiators' relational and accountability concerns. The authors argue when these considerations are imbalanced, negotiators are less likely to adopt a problem-solving style and construct a contingent agreement. To test this hypothesis, negotiators' relationships and accountability pressures were manipulated in two experiments. In Experiment 1, participants engaged in an integrative negotiation, allowing the authors to examine whether a contingent agreement was constructed and joint gain. Experiment 2 sought to replicate and extend the findings of Experiment 1 using a scenario study. Results across the two experiments support the authors' hypotheses.