The vicissitudes of attitudes and similar representational constructs in twentieth century psychology

‘Attitudes’ has been the central concept of social psychology in three different periods, over which the interest evolved to three progressively more sophisticated topics. The first of these three peakings was the 1920s and 1930s preoccupation with the static topics of attitude scaling and relation to behaviour. Then, after a 1935–1955 interlude in which the study of group processes supplanted attitude as the central concern of social psychology, attitude research re-emerged as the dominant interest during the 1950s and 1960s enthusiasm for the dynamic topic of attitude change, approached by a convergent style in the 1950s and a divergent style in the 1960s. During the 1965–1985 period interest shifted from attitudes to social cognition, including representational reductions in information encoding and decoding as well as inferential extrapolations in meaning attribution, person perception, and cognitive ramifications. Now we are experiencing the beginnings of a third flourishing of attitude research likely to dominate the 1980s and 1990s, this third peaking focused on more evolved structural issues, including the structure of individual attitudes, of systems of attitudes, and of attitudinal systems as they relate to other systems within the person. Intrinsic and extrinsic forces underlying these shifts of interest are considered.     

Impact of Social Networking Sites on Children in Military Families

Youth in military families experience a relatively unique set of stressors that can put them at risk for numerous psychological and behavior problems. Thus, there is a need to identify potential mechanisms by which children can gain resiliency against these stressors. One potential mechanism that has yet to be empirically studied with military youth is social networking sites (SNSs). SNSs have gained significant popularity among society, especially youth. Given the significance of these communication tools in youths’ lives, it is important to analyze how SNS use may affect military youth and their ability to cope with common military life stressors. The current review examines the potential positive and negative consequences associated with SNS use in coping with three common stressors of youth in military families: parent deployment, frequent relocation, and having a family member with a psychological or physical disability. By drawing from SNS and military literature, we predict that SNS use can be a positive tool for helping children in military families to cope with stressors. However, certain SNS behaviors can potentially result in more negative outcomes. Recommendations for future research are also discussed.     

Caregiver-patient dyads: Documenting the verbal instructions caregivers provide in joint cognitive tasks

Thirty spousal caregivers and their partners (who had been diagnosed as having primary degenerative dementia) jointly performed four cognitive tasks: Block Design (from the WAIS-R), the Token Test, and two memory tasks. Two of the tasks were unstructured, and two were structured. Caregivers served as the instructor on all tasks. Interactions were videotaped. Results showed that caregivers provided appropriate verbal instructions to a greater extent on the unstructured nonverbal task (Block Design) than on the unstructured memory task. Results are discussed in terms of implications for dyadic cognition research and intervention in dementia.     

Effort discounting in human nucleus accumbens

A great deal of behavioral and economic research suggests that the value attached to a reward stands in inverse relation to the amount of effort required to obtain it, a principle known as effort discounting. In the present article, we present the first direct evidence for a neural analogue of effort discounting. We used fMRI to measure neural responses to monetary rewards in the human nucleus accumbens (NAcc), a structure previously demonstrated to encode reference-dependent reward information. The magnitude of accumbens activation was found to vary with both reward outcome and the degree of mental effort demanded to obtain individual rewards. For a fixed level of reward, the NAcc was less strongly activated following a high-demand for effort than following a low demand. The magnitude of this effect was noted to correlate with preceding activation in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, a region that has been proposed to monitor information-processing demands and to mediate in the subjective experience of effort.