Do students studying therapy have more problems?

This study examined several questions on whether graduate students studying therapy reported more personal counseling or traumas than other students. The 66 students studying therapy did not report significantly different experiences or attitudes than 52 students in other areas, indicating that they did not seem to have more emotional problems or traumas than others.     

“Go and Do Likewise”: Investigating Whether Involvement in Congregationally Sponsored Community Service Activities Predicts Prosocial Behavior

Some congregations sponsor activities through which people can serve in the community, like serving meals at a soup kitchen or homeless shelter, offering after-school programs for neighborhood children, and hosting counseling and support groups. This study investigates whether attenders who are involved in congregationally sponsored community service activities (CSCSA) are more likely to engage in forms of prosocial behavior that are not organized or sponsored by their congregation. In doing so, it draws on past literatures about three key predictors of prosocial behavior—congregational involvement, religious beliefs and values, and community involvement. Results from the 2008/2009 U.S. Congregational Life Survey indicate that: (1) even when controlling for congregational involvement, religious beliefs and values, and community involvement, involvement in CSCSA is positively related to providing social support, charitable giving, civic engagement, and involvement in non-congregationally related community organizations; (2) involvement in CSCSA improves the model fit when predicting these outcomes. These results suggest that: (1) despite its similarity to past predictors, involvement in CSCSA matters for predicting prosocial behavior (i.e., it is more than the sum of the past predictors); (2) engaging in prosocial behavior through CSCSA may spill over into attenders’ everyday lives and encourage them to engage in forms of prosocial behavior that are not organized or sponsored by a congregation.     

Judgments of voluntary and physical causes in causal chains: probabilistic and social functionalist criteria for attributions

Four experiments investigated judgments about voluntary human actions and physical causes that were embedded in causal chains ending in negative outcomes (e.g., a forest fire). Causes were judged for their explanatory quality, their effect on the probability of the outcome, and the extent to which they could be socially controlled. Results supported legal theorists' claim that voluntary actions are judged better explanations than physical causes. Indices derived from theories of probability change generally failed to predict the preference for voluntary actions. In contrast, this preference was mediated by the perceived extent to which voluntary versus physical causes may be brought under social control. These results suggest that causal explanation, at least within causal chains, is not driven solely by changes in the probability of an outcome when a cause is added, and that observers recognize the potential social function of explanations in drawing attention to socially controllable causes. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Illusory Control and Motives for Control: The Role of Connection and Intentionality

An experiment was done to examine the control heuristic perspective on illusory control and the effects of motives on control judgments, using a computer task similar to the light onset task used in previous research. Desire for the outcome and reinforcement were manipulated. As predicted from a control heuristic perspective, the effect of level of reinforcement on judgments of personal control was mediated by the measure of perceived connection: the perception of the number of positive confirming cases. Motives increased illusions of control, but only in the high reinforcement condition. A mediational analysis that examined how motives affect control judgments found that when the motive to get the outcomes was high, participants had higher estimates of having acted intentionally and these estimates partially mediated the relationship between the motivation manipulation and judgments of control. It appears that perceptions of connection mediate the relationship between reinforcement and illusory control, while judgments of intentionality partially mediate the effect of motives for control and illusory control.     

Adult age differences in frontostriatal representation of prediction error but not reward outcome

Emerging evidence from decision neuroscience suggests that although younger and older adults show similar frontostriatal representations of reward magnitude, older adults often show deficits in feedback-driven reinforcement learning. In the present study, healthy adults completed reward-based tasks that did or did not depend on probabilistic learning, while undergoing functional neuroimaging. We observed reductions in the frontostriatal representation of prediction errors during probabilistic learning in older adults. In contrast, we found evidence for stability across adulthood in the representation of reward outcome in a task that did not require learning. Together, the results identify changes across adulthood in the dynamic coding of relational representations of feedback, in spite of preserved reward sensitivity in old age. Overall, the results suggest that the neural representation of prediction error, but not reward outcome, is reduced in old age. These findings reveal a potential dissociation between cognition and motivation with age and identify a potential mechanism for explaining changes in learning-dependent decision making in old adulthood.