The Health Orientation Scale: A measure of psychological tendencies associated with health

Health professionals have recently begun to examine the impact of psychological tendencies on people's physical health. The present investigation sought to facilitate this research endeavour through the development and validation of a self-report instrument designed to measure multiple health-related psychological tendencies. Reliability analyses provided evidence of internal consistency for the subscales of the Health Orientation Scale. Other results indicated that both gender and age jointly influenced people's responses to the Health Orientation Scale. A final set of results revealed that the psychological variables measured by the Health Orientation Scale were predictive of women's and men's self-reported compliance with health-promoting behaviours. The discussion focuses on the potential uses of the Health Orientation Scale in both research and applied settings.     

Effects of self-control training for elementary students with emotional and behavioral disorders

Progressive delay training (PDT) has been used to promote self-controlled choices (i.e., selecting a larger, later reward over a smaller, immediate reward) for people with a variety of developmental characteristics. However, the efficacy of PDT has not been evaluated in children with emotional and behavioral disorders (EBD), who often have co-occurring symptoms of impulsivity. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effects of PDT with a rule-following requirement on the impulsive choices of 6 elementary students with EBD using a modified changing criterion design. Results indicated that PDT alone did not improve self-control, but a modified version of PDT with a rationale and rule for selecting the delayed reward promoted self-control for 3 participants. The remaining 3 participants continued to make impulsive choices despite further modifications to the PDT protocol. We discuss implications of our results and directions for future research on treating impulsivity in children with EBD.     

Cognitive emissions of 1/f noise

The residual fluctuations that naturally arise in experimental inquiry are analyzed in terms of their time histories. Although these fluctuations are generally relegated to a statistical purgatory known as unexplained variance, this article shows that they may harbor a long-term memory process known as 1/f noise. This type of noise has been encountered in a number of biological and physical systems and is theorized to be a signature of dynamic complexity. Its presence in psychological data appears to be associated with the most elementary aspect of cognitive process, the formation of representations.     

A Millennial Misconception: Prophets as prognosticators

A preoccupation with predicting the second coming of Christ and the end of the world has led premillennialists to regard the Hebrew prophets primarily as prognosticators who foretold events which would take place hundreds of years after their own time. This article explores the background to and the legacy of this misconception. After noting the premillennialist understanding of prophecy, it considers the perceived relationship between the Jewish people and the end-time in Christian fundamentalist thought. The dangers associated with such a distorted view of Scripture are highlighted in the final part.     

Metamemorial influences in recognition memory: Pictorial encoding reduces conjunction errors

Two experiments are presented that explore the role of the distinctiveness heuristic (e.g., Schacter, Israel, & Racine, 1999) on rates of conjunction errors as a function of encoding condition. The results of Experiment 1 demonstrate a reliable reduction of conjunction errors when participants study pictures relative to both reading words aloud and silently. Experiment 2 demonstrates that the nature of the pictures presented during the study phase is important for reducing conjunction errors. Collectively, the experiments demonstrate that participants can use the distinctiveness heuristic in addition to recall-to-reject strategies to avoid conjunction errors. These findings add to a growing body of literature that suggests that participants are able to use expectations for memory to guide their recognition decisions.     

Response variability in attention-deficit disorders

Reaction times in a mental rotation task were measured across a diverse population that sorted into two groupings based on overall variability. Although both the low- and the high-variance groups produced data that displayed the trends typical of mental rotation, the two groups' reaction time sequences had very different autocorrelation functions. Power spectra derived from the two groups' data showed the presence of distinctive noise processes with long memory. Normal levels of variance were associated with 1/f noise, whereas high-variance data had substantial traces of random walk contour. These findings provide new perspectives on cognitive assessments of attention dysfunction.     

Reflections on the use of spirituality to privilege religion in scientific discourse: incorporating considerations of self

Many lay writers have claimed that psychologists and other scientists need to integrate something called “spirituality” into their work. This spirituality, usually undefined, is not something the truth of which may be determined by scientific means, yet it should be called upon to guide or govern our actions in certain all-important ways. This paper deconstructs two such calls that, in the end, are based on the notion of revealed, or religiously held, truth. A paradigm by which spirituality can be investigated integrating the individual self with culture is proposed, and use of this paradigm when considering modernization and supply-side theses of religious propagation is suggested.

The role of career adaptability in predicting entrepreneurial intentions: A moderated mediation model

Guided by the Career Construction Theory (Savickas, 2013), we view entrepreneurship as an adaptive vocational behavior driven by an individual's self-regulatory capacity to thrive in a complex entrepreneurial career context. Our research model posited that individuals rely on their adaptive resources and entrepreneurial self-efficacy as they form entrepreneurial intentions. Career adaptability, as self-regulatory competencies, is further strengthened by prior exposure to family business. We collected data over three measurement periods from Serbian business students (n = 380) and validated the Career Adapt-Abilities Scale (CAAS). The moderated mediation model was supported and as predicted: (a) career adaptability was positively associated with entrepreneurial intentions and (b) the mediated relationship between career adaptability and entrepreneurial intentions via entrepreneurial self-efficacy was stronger for individuals with prior exposure to family business. In addition, we provide evidence for the psychometric properties of CAAS by examining its internal consistency, test–retest reliability, and factor structure. Taken together, our study offers the groundwork for understanding successful adaptation in the entrepreneurial career context and supports the cross-national measurement equivalence and utility of CAAS in a developing economy.