Locked into the System? Critical Community Psychology Approaches to Personal Debt in the Context of Crises of Capital Accumulation

The considerable and sustained boom in personal debt recently has in many countries around the world led to experiences of over‐indebtedness that are associated with very considerable distress and suffering. This article explores critical perspectives that situate personal debt, material deprivation and suffering, and specific ways of knowing and acting, within the context of recent political and economic practices. There is a need to focus on positioning people's experiences of debt within a broader matrix of factors of national and international practices and policies, including globalisation, changing labour markets, and poorly regulated financial industries. These factors appear to have allowed a network of international financial institutions to adopt practices that have proved successful in creating personal debt. Yet, an individualised discourse of financial capability has been propagated, configuring personal debt as a problem of irresponsible individual consumption. In order to explore ways of resisting reactionary and individualised modes of addressing personal debt, proposals will be made of alternative paradigms for responding to personal debt, defined by two dimensions of community psychological practice, with examples. This article aims to increase collective awareness of the systemic character of debt and the collective responses required. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

How Many Perspectives Provide a Compass? Differentiating 360‐Degree and Multi‐Source Feedback

Researchers have been inconsistent regarding (a) the relationship between 360° feedback and multi‐source feedback and (b) the definition of 360° feedback. In the present paper, we review these topics and offer two solutions that could facilitate effective communication about these terms.     

Will Julia Roberts harm Nicole Kidman? Semantic priming effects during face naming

Three experiments are reported, which examine whether face naming is vulnerable to semantic competition in a similar way to object naming. Previous experiments with object naming have shown that a related prime picture presented 3 trials before a target picture results in an increase in error rate and naming latencies when compared to unrelated prime conditions. The experiments here use the same paradigm, with errors as the main dependent variable. In Experiment 1, the prime and target faces were from the same occupational category (e.g., politicians, actors), and in Experiment 2, the primes and target faces were also associated to each other. In Experiment 3, the prime was presented as a name to be read aloud. Unrelated filler stimuli intervened between prime and target. In all experiments, there was a reduction in target-naming errors in the related conditions, and in Experiment 3 this was shown to be largely a reduction in naming failures. The results suggest that related name representations for famous people are not activated in parallel and in competition, and that there is some evidence for a relatively long lasting facilitatory effect. These results require some modification to any serial account of face naming to differentiate it from the generally well-established serial account of object naming.     

The effect of explicitly varying the proportion of “same” and “different” responses on sex differences in the Shepard and Metzler mental rotation task

The mental rotation of three-dimensional objects is consistently identified as the most salient cognitive sex difference in humans. The Shepard and Metzler task (1971) requires participants to rotate an object in their “mind's eye” and then compare the shape to a second object to identify if the two objects can be aligned in an identical orientation (warranting a “same” response) or represent mirror image shapes of one another (warranting a “different” response). The mental rotation task not only involves a rotational component but also nonrotational components such as comparison and decision making. Recent research has suggested that the sex difference in mental rotation resides in the nonrotational aspects of “different” decisions specifically. This experiment examined this proposal by varying the proportion of “different” decisions across conditions. Participants were ether exposed to the traditional format (50:50 same/different) or a bias towards (75:25) or away from (25:75) different responses. Contrary to previous research, the sex difference was found to reside in “same” responses that required a greater degree of rotation when assessing error rates in mental rotation. Sex differences in mental rotation error rates were particularly sensitive to the rotational aspect of same responses, not rotational aspects of different responses nor nonrotational aspects of both same and different responses. For reaction time, however, a sex difference emerged in the nonrotational aspects of the task. The bias described here affected these nonrotational aspects of the task, but not the rotational aspects, in line with prediction. A second study reran the experiment without making the bias explicit. Under this implicit bias, no sex differences were identified between conditions.