Emotional competence and quality of life of children with asthma: The mediating effect of coping strategies

This study explored the mediating effect of coping strategies on the relationship between emotional competence (EC) and quality of life (QOL) among children with asthma. Participants were 87 children (M age?=?11.72, SD?=?2.58) with controlled and partially controlled asthma, undergoing everyday treatment. They filled in questionnaires assessing EC, coping strategies and QOL. Results showed that the association between some ECs and the QOL of children with asthma was fully mediated by two maladaptive cognitive coping strategies. Among children with asthma, a greater ability to differentiate their emotions, a reduced attention to bodily signals of emotions and a reduced analysis of their current emotional state were related to decreased engagement in two coping strategies (‘Ignoring Asthma’ and ‘Worrying about Asthma’), which in turn increased their QOL. These findings show that EC has an indirect effect on QOL through very specific coping strategies. They also emphasise the importance of screening EC in children with asthma and the importance of developing and using multidisciplinary interventions for them.     

An Examination of Irigaray's Commitment to Transcendental Phenomenology in The Forgetting of Air and The Way of Love

Although sexual difference is widely regarded as the concept that lies at the center of Luce Irigaray's thought, its meaning and significance is highly contested. This dissensus, however, attests to more than merely the existence of a recalcitrant conceptual ambiguity. That is, Irigaray's discussion of sexual difference remains fraught not because she leaves this concept undefined but because the centrality of sexual difference in fact marks a complex and unstable nexus of phenomena that shift throughout her work. Consequently, if Irigaray is indeed the preeminent thinker of sexual difference, this is not in virtue of her recurrent appeal to a monolithic, readily digestible concept but rather somehow despite the absence of precisely this gesture. In this paper, I will attempt to elucidate the peculiar preeminence of sexual difference in Irigaray's work by identifying her persistent, though largely unexamined, commitment to transcendental phenomenology. Indeed, I attempt to show that the complex of phenomena of sexual difference emerges in L'oubli de l'air and The Way of Love as a modulation of Heidegger's own revision of transcendental phenomenology. In this sense, the peculiar preeminence of sexual difference does not mark the centrality of a concept but Irigaray's amplification of this Heideggerian gesture.     

Convergent,Discriminant, and Incremental Validity of the Pictorial Attitude Implicit Association Test and the Picture Story Exercise as Measures of the Implicit Power Motive

The Pictorial Attitude Implicit Association Test (PA‐IAT) has recently been proposed as new measure of implicit motives. We report a study that provides the first evidence for the convergent validity of the PA‐IAT by showing that the PA‐IAT correlates significantly with a standard measure of implicit motives [i.e. the Picture Story Exercise (PSE)]. Discriminant validity of the PA‐IAT was verified in the sense that the PA‐IAT shared virtually no common variance with explicit motive measures. Our analyses revealed that the PA‐IAT and PSE can best be conceived as related but distinct measures. We further showed that the PA‐IAT had incremental validity in predicting performance on a memory recall task over and above the PSE. In general, our results confirm that the PA‐IAT is a valid measure of implicit motives and can serve as valid alternative to the PSE. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Recruiting Highly Educated Graduates: A Study on the Relationship Between Recruitment Information Sources,the Theory of Planned Behavior,and Actual Job Pursuit

Using the theory of planned behavior, we examined the effects of different recruitment-related information sources on the job pursuit of highly educated graduates. The study was conducted using a real-life longitudinal design. Participants reported on potential employers they were interested in. We used hierarchical linear modeling to analyze within-participant relationships of different information sources with the theory of planned behavior variables, job pursuit behavior, and actual job choice. The theory of planned behavior relationships was supported. Recruitment advertising and positive word of mouth related positively to job pursuit intention and behavior. Negative publicity and word of mouth partly related to job pursuit behavior, indicating their role in the recruitment process. On-campus presence related negatively to job pursuit intention and behavior, suggesting that recruiters should convey parsimonious and realistic job-related information.     

Enacting Actuarial Fairness in Insurance: From Fair Discrimination to Behaviour-based Fairness

ABSTRACT

In line with developments in the personalisation of risk, the idea that insurance products should above all be ‘fair’ to the policyholders is increasingly voiced by commentators. The performativity thesis in Science and Technology Studies usually used to study economic markets can be used to investigate different enactments of ‘actuarial fairness’ in insurance practice. Actuarial fairness functions as a technical economic concept and was coined by the neoclassical micro-economist Kenneth Arrow (1921–2017). Faced with anti-discrimination legislation, the insurance industry has, since the 1980s, advanced the principle of actuarial fairness to legitimise their medico-actuarial technologies to discriminate between risk groups. In the absence of this actuarial fairness, it is assumed that dynamics of adverse selection—derived from neoclassical assumptions about economic actors— will result in the bankruptcy of insurance providers. The paradigmatic case of Fairzekering, a showcase of contemporary behaviour-based personalisation in car insurance, demonstrates an important shift in how actuarial fairness is enacted through behaviour-based calculative devices. Here, policyholders are enacted as being personally in control of their driving style while an interactive discount-infrastructure is set up to provide real-time feedback to incentivize policyholders towards ‘good behaviour.’ This enactment of behaviour-based fairness simultaneously implies a shift in the enactment of the economic actors involved, constitutive of the making of new economic ideas in behavioural economics.     

The intergenerational transmission of need for closure underlies the transmission of authoritarianism and anti-immigrant prejudice

Previous research has identified need for closure (NFC) as an important motivational-cognitive basis of authoritarianism and prejudice. However, to date, the role of NFC in the intergenerational similarity in authoritarianism and prejudice has remained unclear. In a sample of 169 parent–child dyads, we investigated the similarity between parents and children in NFC and tested whether this intergenerational similarity may account for the intergenerational similarity in authoritarianism and anti-immigrant prejudice. Our results revealed that parental levels of NFC were indeed concordant with the levels of NFC in their children. Even more importantly, parental NFC was indirectly related to child authoritarianism and prejudice in two ways. The first pathway proceeded through the direct relationships between parental and children’s levels of authoritarianism and prejudice. The second pathway, however, bypassed parental levels of authoritarianism and prejudice and proceeded through the intergenerational similarity in NFC. Our findings thus indicate that a significant portion of children’s levels of authoritarianism and anti-immigrant prejudice can be explained by parent–child similarity in motivated cognition. Implications for developmental theories of prejudice acquisition are discussed.     

Effects on High School Students of a Teaching Module for Reducing Homophobia

Outcomes of an antihomophobia teaching unit for 130 high school students were evaluated in a pretest-posttest follow-up design, with gender and school type as independent variables. Dependent variables were cognition (Modified Attitudes Toward Homosexuality Scale; Price, 1982); homophobic guilt, homophobic anger, and delight (Affective Reactions to Homosexuality Scale; Van de Ven, Bornholt, & Bailey, in press); behavioral intentions (Homophobic Behavior of Students Scale; Van de Ven et al., in press); and short-story responses. Multivariate analyses of variance revealed that participants' anger (p < .05) and behavioral intentions (p < .0005) were significantly less homophobic at posttest and follow-up. Analyses of the cognition variable showed that hostility toward homosexuals was significantly reduced for girls (p < .0005) and initially for boys (p < .0005); however, boys reverted to previous levels of homophobia on this variable at 3-month follow-up. Similarly, analyses of the delight variable for students in single-sex schools showed that girls became less hostile (p < .05) and maintained their reduced levels of homophobia, whereas boys became less hostile initially (p < .05) but then regressed. The intervention had no effect on students' guilt and no effect on delight for coeducational students. Analysis of all participants' short-story content using sign tests indicated that the instruction had the desired effect (p < .005). However, only the female, coeducational school cohort yielded significant results (p < .05). The findings reinforce the importance of using multiple dependent measures of homophobic response and of collecting follow-up data. They also imply that extensions of the unit are warranted, especially in the absence of longer term impact for boys.     

Signals for threat modulate attentional capture and holding: Fear-conditioning and extinction during the exogenous cueing task

This experiment investigated whether acquired signals for threat capture and hold visual attention. Cues that were presented in an exogenous attentional cueing task were emotionally modulated using a fear-conditioning paradigm. During acquisition, undergraduate students (55 women, 11 men) learned that one cue (CS+) of the attentional task was a signal for an aversive white noise burst (UCS, 100 dBA) and that another cue (CS?) signalled its nonoccurrence. In a subsequent extinction phase, no UCSs were presented anymore during the cueing task. Results indicated that during acquisition, the CS+ cues strongly captured and held visual attention in comparison with the CS? cues, and that these effects diminished during extinction.     

Difficulties in disengaging attentional resources from self-generated thoughts moderate the link between dysphoria and maladaptive self-referential thinking

Negative emotions increase self-focused attention, a core feature of depression and anxiety-related disorders. However, the cognitive mechanisms associated with the tendency to self-focus—and, conversely, with the ability to voluntarily disengage attentional resources from the self and direct them towards the external environment—remain poorly understood. Thus, this study aimed to examine whether a specific cognitive control mechanism that directs attention between self-generated thoughts and external information might moderate the relationship between dysphoria and maladaptive self-referential thinking. Results showed that dysphoria increases the frequency of rumination, self-blame, and catastrophising, especially for participants who have more difficulty in switching from self-generated thoughts to information provided by the environment. These results shed new light on the cognitive mechanisms underlying maladaptive self-referential thinking associated with dysphoria. More specifically, this specific cognitive mechanism might play a key role in the maintenance or amplification of a depressed mood.     

Emotion and the construal of social situations: Inferences of cooperation versus competition from expressions of anger,happiness, and disappointment

The notion that emotional expressions regulate social life by providing information is gaining popularity. Prior research on the effects of emotional expressions on observers’ inferential processes has focused mostly on inferences regarding the personality traits of the expresser, such as dominance and affiliation. We extend this line of research by exploring the possibility that emotional expressions shape observers’ construal of social situations. Across three vignette studies, an interaction partner's expressions of anger, compared to expressions of happiness or disappointment, led observers to construe hypothetical situations as less cooperative, both in dyads and groups. These effects occurred even when factual information regarding the cooperativeness or competitiveness of the situation was provided, attesting to the power of emotional expressions in shaping the construal of social situations. Results are discussed in relation to appraisal theory, reverse appraisals, emotions as social information theory, and the emergence of cooperation in groups and cultures.