Beyond the hedonic treadmill: revising the adaptation theory of well-being

According to the hedonic treadmill model, good and bad events temporarily affect happiness, but people quickly adapt back to hedonic neutrality. The theory, which has gained widespread acceptance in recent years, implies that individual and societal efforts to increase happiness are doomed to failure. The recent empirical work outlined here indicates that 5 important revisions to the treadmill model are needed. First, individuals' set points are not hedonically neutral. Second, people have different set points, which are partly dependent on their temperaments. Third, a single person may have multiple happiness set points: Different components of well-being such as pleasant emotions, unpleasant emotions, and life satisfaction can move in different directions. Fourth, and perhaps most important, well-being set points can change under some conditions. Finally, individuals differ in their adaptation to events, with some individuals changing their set point and others not changing in reaction to some external event. These revisions offer hope for psychologists and policy-makers who aim to decrease human misery and increase happiness.     

Mother and self-representations: investigating associations with symptomatic behavior and academic competence in middle childhood

This article reports two studies examining the content and structural aspects of maternal and self-representations in middle childhood in two prospective studies of 9 to 11-year-old children, their stability over time and interrelations, and their contribution to symptomatology and academic functioning. In Study 1 (N=169), content and structural dimensions of participants' open-ended narratives of self and mother were assessed, and their factor structure was replicated across two consecutive measurement waves carried out a year apart. In Study 2 (N=137), using an independent sample, the authors investigated the associations of self- and maternal representations with teachers' subsequent reports of children's internalizing and externalizing symptomatology and academic competence. It was assumed that dimensions of self-representations played a mediating role in the prediction of children's symptomatology and competence by their maternal representations. Results corroborated the existence of interdependent but distinct representations of self and mother in middle childhood, as well as the stability over time of the structural and thematic aspects within each representation. The content of the self- and maternal representations was found to associate with observed symptomatic behavior, while their structure associated with children's academic competence. In addition, results indicated that self-representation content mediates the association of maternal representation content with subsequent symptomatic behavior. Findings are discussed in the light of the differentiation and interdependence of self- and maternal representations in middle childhood.     

Chronic passive exposure to aggression escalates aggressiveness of rat observers

Previous studies have documented that exposure to aggression increases aggressiveness of human witnesses. However, the question of whether passive exposure to aggression can exclusively cause a risk of aggressive inclination for observers through a learning process, rather than mimicry effect, has not been readily addressed in the clinical literature. This study aimed to investigate this question by using a simple animal model to test the behavioral effect of chronic passive exposure to aggression. Our results indicate that observer rats that had been passively exposed to aggression for 10 min per day for 23 consecutive days exhibited more aggressive behavior than controls or those groups undergoing a single exposure to passive aggression. Furthermore, aggression levels in the group of 23‐day chronic exposure to aggression lasted 16 days after the recovery from exposure to aggression. These data suggest that the development of aggression in this model occurred through a learning process because only chronic exposure to aggression resulted in this behavioral outcome in the long run. Aggr. Behav. 36:54–66, 2010. © 2009 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.     

“We will work for you” – Social influence may suppress individual food preferences in a communicative situation in dogs

The level of motivation (i.e. incentive power) is thought to be one of the most important factors affecting performance and learning in various tasks. We investigated whether reward quality has an effect on the performance of family dogs in a two-way object choice test in which they can find the hidden food by relying on distal momentary human pointing cues. In three experiments we varied (1) the type of food reward according to the subjects’ own preference; (2) the quality of the reward offered at the same time in the indicated and not-indicated locations; and (3) the order of the high or low quality rewards in consecutive sessions. In Experiment 1, we first tested whether dogs prefer one kind of reward over another. Then one group was tested with the ‘preferred’ food as reward in the indicated bowl, while dogs in the other group received the ‘non-preferred’ food as reward. We did not find any difference between the performance and choice latencies of the two groups. In Experiment 2 for the first group, the indicated bowl contained a piece of carrot and the not-indicated bowl was empty. In the second group the indicated bowl contained carrot, but the not-indicated bowl contained sausage. According to a preliminary preference test, most dogs prefer sausage over carrot invariably. After 20 trials, the two groups performed surprisingly similarly. There was no difference found between groups in the number of correct choices, incorrect choices and non-choices. However, the comparison between the first and last five trials revealed that subjects who found sausage when they chose the not-indicated bowl (did not follow the pointing) chose the non-indicated bowl significantly more often toward the end of their test session. In Experiment 3, each dog received two sessions with 12 pointing trials in each. For the first session, one group was rewarded with sausage and the other with carrot upon choosing the indicated bowl. In the second session, the indicated bowl contained dry dog food for both groups. We found that correct choices and response latencies did not change over two sessions in the ‘sausage’ group. In the ‘carrot’ group, the dogs chose faster in the second session, but their performance did not improve; in fact, they chose the not-indicated bowl more often than the indicated bowl. As a conclusion, we can say that reward quality had some effect on dogs’ choice behavior in these experiments. The drop in their performance was not drastic, taking into account the general refusal to eat one of the ‘rewards’ (carrot) during the preference tests and also during the test trials. It seems that incentive contrast may play a relatively minor role in dog-human social interactions. Appropriate reward quality can be very important in asocial problem solving tasks, but, when interacting with humans, following human signals may override the effect of changed incentive power.     

The psychotic wavelength

In this paper I have endeavoured to draw attention to what is meant when we refer to a patient as psychotic. It is argued that it is not enough just to be ordinarily sensitive to our patients; we need to tune into the psychotic wavelength with all its implications for understanding and management. Illustrative case-histories are presented from everyday psychiatric work.     

Performance in Autobiographical Memory of Older Adults with Depression Symptoms

The aim of this study was to compare the performance in the Autobiographical Memory Test in older adults with high scores on depression symptoms (HDS) compared with a matched group with low scores on depression symptoms (LDS) according to the clinical cut‐off of the Centre for Epidemiological Studies Depression Scale. Participants were asked to generate specific autobiographical memories in response to a series of positive and negative cue words. Latencies of responses for each item were also scored. LDS participants showed a higher proportion of specific memories than HDS participants. Latencies of responses to positive and negative cues were greater for HDS than LDS. Specific autobiographical memory was positively associated with Life Satisfaction. Cognitive emotional changes in the function of memory with age are suggested as a possible explanation for the findings. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Cue competition effects in the planarian

The learning abilities of planarian worms (Dugesia tigrina) were assessed by using a number of Pavlovian conditioning paradigms. Experiment 1 showed that planaria were susceptible to basic conditioning in that they readily developed a conditioned response to a change in ambient luminance when it was consistently paired with an electric shock over a number of trials. In Experiment 2, the change in luminance was presented in a compound with a vibration stimulus during conditioning. Subsequent tests revealed poor conditioning of the elements compared with control groups in which the animals were conditioned in the presence of the elements alone, an instance of overshadowing. In Experiment 3, pre-training of one of the elements before compound conditioning resulted in blocking of learning about the other element. These results add to other studies that have reported cue competition effects in animal species belonging to different phyla (chordate, mollusk, arthropod), suggesting that learning in these phyla could be ruled by similar principles. The results are discussed adopting an evolutionary-comparative approach.     

Job insecurity climate's influence on employees' job attitudes: Evidence from two European countries

An important amount of literature about job insecurity and its consequences has been developed during the past few decades (Sverke, Hellgren, & Näswall, 2002 Sverke, M., Hellgren, J. and Näswall, K. 2002. No security: A meta-analysis and review of job insecurity and its consequences. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 7(3): 242–264. [Crossref], [PubMed] , [Google Scholar]). Most of this research has focused on an individual-analysis perspective, without taking into account social context. Although job insecurity climate has not been empirically examined, several authors have implicitly assumed that job insecurity contexts exist in some organizations where layoffs have occurred. Therefore, they examined layoff survivors' reactions. From this perspective, the aim of this study was to validate the job insecurity climate concept and examine its influence on employees' job attitudes. In order to provide additional support, this objective was examined in two samples: 428 employees belonging to 20 Spanish organizations and 550 employees in 18 Belgian organizations. The results showed that job insecurity climate emerged within the organizations in both samples, and that it influenced employees' job satisfaction and organizational commitment above and beyond individual perceptions of job insecurity in the Spanish sample. The implications and limitations of this study are discussed.     

Religious upbringing and current religiosity in Spanish nursing and medicine students

The influence of religious education in the family upon current spiritual and religious tendencies was assessed in a sample of 599 Spanish nurse and medicine students using a religiosity scale and answers to a series of belief/disbelief statements. Results showed that nursing and medicine students were equally low-religious, with no differences in religiosity total scores between participants coming from religious families; however, medical students coming from nonreligious families showed higher religiousness than the corresponding nursing trainees. This distinction appeared both across religiosity items and in a variety of responses to belief/disbelief of Christian/secular assertions. Regression analysis showed that religious family background was a consistent predictor of religious beliefs at young adulthood, and its influence was higher for medical students. In addition to establish religious upbringing as an important factor modulating enduring religiosity, these findings provide distinctions between nurse and medical trainees, and reproduce, in a Spanish mainly catholic sample, the structure of religiosity factors previously found on North American mainline protestants.     

Using Narrative Approaches to Teach Multicultural Counseling

Narrative approaches to teaching multicultural counseling can assist students in integrating course content with a sense of self. Narrative teaching strategies follow a postmodern view of learning—that is, that truth is constructed through the interaction of participants. Justification for narrative approaches to teaching multicultural counseling and narrative are introduced. Los enfoques narrativos para enseñar la consejería multicultural pueden ayudar a los estudiantes a integrar el contenido del curso con su sentido de ser. Las estrategias de la enseñanza narrativa siguen un panorama postmoderno de aprendizaje—que considera que la verdad se construye por la interacción de participantes. La justificación para enfoques narrativos para enseñar la consejería multicultural y la narrativa se introducen.