Trends in Behavior-Analytic Gambling Research and Treatment

The purpose of the present review was to analyze research outcomes for all gambling studies reported in the behavior analysis literature. We used the search term “gambling” to identify articles that were published in behaviorally oriented journals between the years 1992 and 2012 and categorized the content of each article as empirical or conceptual. Next, we examined and categorized the empirical articles by inclusion of an experimental manipulation and treatment to alleviate at least some aspect of pathological gambling, participant population used, type of gambling task employed in the research, whether the participants in the study actually gambled, and the behavioral phenomena of interest. The results show that the rate of publication of gambling research has increased in the last 6 years, and a vast majority of articles are empirical. Of the empirical articles, examinations of treatment techniques or methods are scarce; slot machine play is the most represented form of gambling, and slightly greater than half of the research included compensation based on gambling outcomes within experiments. We discuss implications and future directions based on these observations of the published literature.     

Reported Contact with the Dead, Religious Involvement, and Death Anxiety in Late Life

The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between contact with the dead and death anxiety. The data come from an ongoing nationwide survey of older adults. A conceptual model is developed that contains the following theoretical linkages: (1) making contact with the dead instills a deeper appreciation of the connection that exists among all people; (2) this fundamental sense of connectedness with others fosters a deeper sense of religious meaning in life; and (3) individuals with a deeper sense of religious meaning in life are less likely to experience feelings of death anxiety than people who have not been able to find meaning in life through religion. The findings from this study provide support for each of these relationships. The theoretical implications of these hypotheses are discussed.     

Self–Serving Perceptions of Terrorism Among Israelis and Palestinians

Definitions of political violence as terrorism are often tainted by self–serving motivations. Groups in conflict in particular tend to justify the use of indiscriminate violent means by highly regarded political ends. This study explores such self–serving perceptions of terrorism in the context of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. In two surveys during December 2001, Israeli Jews, Israeli Arabs and Palestinians were asked whether 11 local and international incidents were acts of terrorism in their view, and whether they were considered acts of terrorism by the international community. Self–serving judgments on both sides were expected, but their extent is striking, and they extend also to the international incidents. Israeli Arabs judge all acts of violence as terrorism in high percentages. Israeli Jews and Palestinians' definitions present a mirror image; however, they do not project these definitions to the international community. Instead, they perceive an international norm largely divergent from their own point of view, inflating world judgment of their own acts of violence as terrorism and underestimating world judgment of the other side's violence, in what amounts to a hostile–world phenomenon.     

Trustworthiness Processing and Psychobiological Responses to Natural Disaster-Induced Distress in Adolescents

In this study, we examine the role of trust perceptions on psychological well-being and salivary cortisol levels of adolescents who were exposed to pervasive, noninterpersonal trauma, displacement, and relocation caused by Hurricane Katrina. Compared to demographically matched controls, affected adolescents reported higher perceptions of other people's trustworthiness, decreased externalizing behaviors, increased internalizing behaviors, greater desire for consolation from others, and lower cortisol activity. Follow-up analyses suggested that the relation between hurricane exposure and lower self-esteem might be mediated partly by increased trustworthiness perceptions. These results suggest that adolescents might respond to different types of stressors with varying patterns of distress and the manner in which the stressors alter trust processing might predict the development of internalizing or externalizing behaviors.     

Knowledge,Safety, and Meta‐Epistemic Belief

This article raises problems both for the view that safe belief is necessary for knowledge and for the view that it is sufficient. Focusing on ‘meta‐epistemic beliefs,’ or beliefs about the epistemic status of one's own beliefs, it is shown that the necessity claim has counterintuitive implications and that the sufficiency claim implies a contradiction. It is then shown that meta‐epistemic beliefs raise similar problems for a wide range of accounts of knowledge, and hence that they provide a powerful test for theories of knowledge.     

An Ideal Student Factor and the validity of noncognitive measures of student potential

The presence of a general factor has been found in previous research on the utilization of personality tests in selection contexts. Termed the Ideal Employee Factor (IEF), this factor is thought to represent an effort to present oneself as an ideal employee to some degree on all items in the test. Examining the responses to biodata and situational judgment items, we provide evidence for the existence of a factor similar to the IEF within the college admissions context, termed the Ideal Student Factor (ISF), but the magnitude of this factor relative to specific factors was small. Mixed support was found for the hypothesized differences in the factor loadings on the ISF for different constructs included in the model. The presence of the ISF was not found to substantially impact the validity of other predictors within this study. The overall conclusion is that this general factor would not impact the use of these biodata and situational judgment items in college admissions.     

The influence of spatial context and the role of intentionality in the interpretation of animacy from motion

We present three experiments investigating how spatial context influences the attribution of animacy to a moving target. Each of our displays contained a moving object (the target) that might, depending on the way it moved, convey the impression that it was alive (animate). We investigated the mechanisms underlying this attribution by manipulating the nature of the spatial context surrounding the target. In Experiment 1, the context consisted of a simple static dot (the foil), whose position relative to the target's trajectory was manipulated. With some foil positions--for example, when the foil was lying along the path traveled by the target--animacy judgments were elevated relative to control foil locations, apparently because this context supported the impression that the target was "reacting to" or was in some other way mentally influenced by the foil. In Experiment 2, contexts consisted of a static oriented rectangle (the "paddle"). On some trials, the target collided with the paddle in a way that seemed to physically account for the target's motion pattern (in the sense of having imparted momentum to it); this condition reduced animacy ratings. Experiment 3 was similar, except that the paddles themselves were in motion; again, animacy attribution was suppressed when the target's motion seemed to have been caused by a collision with the paddle. Hence, animacy attributions can be either elevated or suppressed by the nature of the environment and the target's interaction with it. Animacy attribution tracks intentionality attribution; contrary to some earlier proposals, we conclude that attributing animacy involves, and may even require, attributing to the target some minimal mental capacity sufficient to endow the target with intentionality.