Maintaining close relationships: gratitude as a motivator and a detector of maintenance behavior

This research examined the dual function of gratitude for relationship maintenance in close relationships. In a longitudinal study among married couples, the authors tested the dyadic effects of gratitude over three time points for approximately 4 years following marriage. They found that feelings of gratitude toward a partner stem from the partner's relationship maintenance behaviors, partly because such behaviors create the perception of responsiveness to one's needs. In turn, gratitude motivates partners to engage in relationship maintenance. Hence, the present model emphasizes that gratitude between close partners (a) originates from partners' relationship maintenance behaviors and the perception of a partner's responsiveness and (b) promotes a partner's reciprocal maintenance behaviors. Thus, the authors' findings add credence to their model, in that gratitude contributes to a reciprocal process of relationship maintenance, whereby each partner's maintenance behaviors, perceptions of responsiveness, and feelings of gratitude feed back on and influence the other's behaviors, perceptions, and feelings.     

Looking for a Family Man? Norms for Men Are Toppling in Heterosexual Relationships

Gender norms indicate that men should be agentic and work-oriented rather than communal and family-oriented. Yet, this traditional expectation conflicts with findings that communion is highly valued in romantic partners. Moreover, because more women in industrialized countries are pursuing careers, they may increasingly seek family-oriented partners to share the second shift of family tasks. Investigating the attractiveness of communal, family-oriented men, we show that 87 female college students in Belgium evaluate more family-oriented men as generally more attractive (Study 1) and that especially college women in Belgium with high work ambitions seek communion and family orientation in ideal partners (Study 2, n?=?224). Lastly, women in 198 Belgian heterosexual dual-earning couples are more satisfied with their lives and experience less work and family conflict the more their partner indicates that he is oriented toward his close family (Study 3). Together, our findings outline the contextualized nature of norms and add to knowledge on norm change, showing how gender equality may be fed through romantic relationships. Moreover, our findings suggest the importance of exploring men’s family orientations in couples therapy, and they call for counselors, as well as policymakers and Human Resources practitioners, to guide men in times of norm change to enable men to be family-oriented and to offer family-friendly work policies.

     

Psycholinguistic evidence for the underspecification of morphosyntactic features

This paper investigates the paradigmatic relations between inflected word forms (or their affixes) and the feature specifications of these elements. In two sentence-matching experiments German speakers had to decide whether sentence pairs involving inflected adjectives or determiners were identical or not. In both experiments, there was a delay when an inflected form contained positive feature specifications for grammatical features that did not match the feature specifications of the grammatical context in which it appeared. No delay, however, occurred when an incorrectly inflected form had mismatching negative specifications, whereas its positively specified features matched the respective positive features of the context. This result provides evidence for a different status of positively and negatively specified morphosyntactic features. It supports the idea of radical underspecification according to which only positive feature specifications are part of the representations of morphologically complex forms or affixes, whereas negative feature specifications are assigned on the basis of paradigmatic contrasts.     

Derogation and distancing as terror management strategies: the moderating role of need for closure and permeability of group boundaries

Previous research has revealed that when individuals are confronted with criticism of a personally relevant group, mortality salience can lead to either derogation of the source of criticism or distancing from the group. In this article, the authors investigated closure as a potential moderator of these reactions. In Study 1, mortality salience led to greater derogation of a critic of a relevant group among high-need-for-closure participants but led to distancing from the group among low need-for-closure participants. Study 2 showed that when a relevant group was criticized, mortality salience led to greater derogation among participants who were led to believe that the boundaries of that group were impermeable but led to greater distancing among participants who were made aware of the permeable nature of the group boundaries. These findings demonstrate that closure of group membership moderates reactions to criticism of a personally relevant group after mortality salience.     

Stem Complexity and Inflectional Encoding in Language Production

Three experiments are reported that examined whether stem complexity plays a role in inflecting polymorphemic words in language production. Experiment 1 showed that preparation effects for words with polymorphemic stems are larger when they are produced among words with constant inflectional structures compared to words with variable inflectional structures and simple stems. This replicates earlier findings for words with monomorphemic stems (Janssen et al., 2002). Experiments 2 and 3 showed that when inflectional structure is held constant, the preparation effects are equally large with simple and compound stems, and with compound and complex adjectival stems. These results indicate that inflectional encoding is blind to the complexity of the stem, which suggests that specific inflectional rather than generic morphological frames guide the generation of inflected forms in speaking words.     

Variation of meningioma in response to cyproterone acetate in a trans woman

Background: Meningiomas express estrogen and progesterone receptors, suggestive of hormonal responsiveness. So far, eight cases of trans women with a meningioma have been reported in the literature.

Methods: Detailed report of the symptoms, treatment, and follow-up of an individual transgender patient with a meningioma.

Results: A trans woman treated long-term with gender affirming hormone therapy, including cyproterone acetate, a synthetic progestin and anti-androgen, was diagnosed with a meningioma, significantly expanding in volume over 10 years. After stopping cyproterone acetate a substantial volume decrease of the meningioma was noticed within 3 months.

Conclusion: This addition to the literature demonstrates that a conservative approach with interruption of cyproterone acetate may be a sufficient intervention, obviating the need for additional neurosurgical treatment.     

Strong and Weak Readings in the Domain of Worlds: A Negative Polar Modal and Children’s Scope Assignment

This study investigates children’s interpretation of sentences with two logical operators: Dutch universal modal hoeven and negation (niet). In adult Dutch, hoeven is an NPI that necessarily scopes under negation, giving rise to a not > necessary reading. The findings from a hidden-object task with 5- and 6-year-old children showed that children’s performance is suggestive of an interpretation of sentences with hoeft niet in which the modal scopes over negation (necessary > not). This is in line with the Semantic Subset Principle that dictates that children should opt for the strongest possible reading in case of potential scope ambiguities. The full pattern of results, however, seems to be determined, in addition, by a particular strategy children use when facing uncertainty called Premature Closure.     

Brand placement disclosure effects on persuasion: The moderating role of consumer self‐control

The inclusion of branded products in media entertainment has become a popular marketing strategy, because viewers are less likely to recognize the persuasive intent of sponsored content as compared with traditional advertising. To guarantee fair communication and protect consumers against unobtrusive persuasion attempts, European media policy has obligated broadcasters to disclose the presence of brand placement in their television shows. Recent studies demonstrate that disclosures raise viewers' persuasion knowledge; however, the circumstances under which brand placement disclosures may affect brand evaluations and resistance to the persuasive impact of brand placement are still unclear. In two experiments, we uncovered self‐control depletion as an important moderator of disclosure effects on brand evaluations and resistance to brand placement influence. Whereas disclosures increase resistance and decrease persuasion for viewers not depleted of their self‐control, disclosures do not affect resistance and even result in more favorable brand evaluations when viewers' self‐control is depleted by a previous self‐control task. Because a state of self‐control depletion can be perceived as the “couch‐potato” mindset in which people expose themselves to entertaining television content, our findings imply that instead of protecting consumers from hidden persuasion, disclosures may unintentionally increase the persuasive effects of brand placement. We discuss several possible mechanisms that could explain our findings. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Emotions are not always contagious: Longitudinal spreading of self-pride and group pride in homogeneous and status-differentiated groups

The members of task groups are emotionally more similar to each other than to others outside the group; yet, little is known about the conditions under which this emotional similarity emerges. In two longitudinal studies, we tested the idea that emotions only spread when they contain information that is relevant to all group members. We compared the spreading of group pride (relevant) with self-pride (not relevant). The first study followed emotions in 68 task groups (N = 295) across 4 moments. Multilevel cross-lagged path analyses showed that group members mutually influenced each other's group pride, but not self-pride. The second study followed emotions in 27 task groups (N = 195) across 3 moments in time. Longitudinal social network analyses showed that group members adjusted their group pride, but not their self-pride, to members they perceived to be more influential. Findings from both studies are consistent with a social referencing account of emotion spreading.