The Primacy of the “Shoulds”: Where Is the Evidence?

A central tenet of rational emotive behaviour therapy (REBT) has always been that irrational beliefs which express demands through absolutistic shoulds, musts or oughts are the basic cause of emotional disturbance. This premise is characteristic of Ellis' theory but is not always supported by other REBT writers or other writers within the cognitive therapy field. This paper reviews a range of research findings which appear to call into question Ellis' tenet of the primacy of the shoulds and which, in turn, raise theoretical and methodological difficulties in the measurement of beliefs. This along with the current theoretical debate regarding irrational belief processes may preclude the possibility of testing the proposition that demandingness is the primary irrational or dysfunctional belief.     

Bootstrap assessment of the reliability of maxima in surface maps of brain activity of individual subjects derived with electrophysiological and optical methods

Surface maps of brain activity can be obtained with electrophysiological and optical recordings. However, there are no established methods for determining the reliability of maps of brain activity across subject groups or across tasks within the same subject. In this paper, we use bootstrapping to establish the reliability of the locations of maxima in maps of surface brain activity of individual subjects obtained with ERP and optical (EROS) recordings and report sample analyses for two data sets. Bootstrapping is a nonparametric method for estimating statistical accuracy from the data in a single sample. The distribution of the statistic of interest is estimated by constructing “bootstrap samples” from a pool of all available cases (with replacement). Many “bootstrap replications” are obtained by calculating the statistic of interest for each sample. In the case of brain activity, many (e.g., 10,000) amplitude distributions can be derived from the data of an individual subject. Frequency counts are then computed for each recording location to establish how many times that location corresponds to a maximum. The value obtained in this fashion represents an estimate of the reliability of the observation.     

Self-Esteem, Erotophobia, and Retention of Contraceptive and AIDS Information in the Classroom

It has been well documented that people with negative emotional reactions to sex (e.g., "erotophobia,""sex guilt") have less knowledge about contraception than do people with more positive reactions. Recent research has suggested that this deficit is not related to an inability to learn the information, but is due at least in part to the fact that erotophobics actively avoid contraceptive information. The current study was designed to examine the role of erotophobia and high self-esteem in resistance to learning sexual information. More specifically it compared pretest and posttest knowledge of contraception and AIDS in high self-esteem and low self-esteem, erotophobia, and erotophilic women in a university class on human reproduction. As expected, high self-esteem erotophobic subjects were less Likely than other subjects to retain contraceptive and AIDS information presented in the class. Implications of this study for contraceptive and AIDS educational strategies are discussed.     

Individual variable pay for performance,controlling effects,and intrinsic motivation

Motivation and Emotion - A core question in research on compensation and motivation is whether individual variable pay for performance (IVPFP) can undermine intrinsic motivation in the workplace....     

Children can optimally integrate multisensory information after a short action‐like mini game training

Combining information across different sensory modalities is of critical importance for the animal's survival and a core feature of human's everyday life. In adulthood, sensory information is often integrated in a statistically optimal fashion, so that the combined estimates of two or more senses are more reliable than the best single one. Several studies have shown that young children use one sense to calibrate the others, which results in unisensory dominance and undermines their optimal multisensory integration abilities. In this study we trained children aged 4–5 years with action‐like mini games, to determine whether it could improve their multisensory as well as their visuo‐spatial skills. Multisensory integration abilities were assessed using a visuo‐haptic size discrimination task, while visuo‐spatial attention skills were investigated using a multiple object tracking task (MOT). We found that 2‐weeks training were sufficient to observe both optimal multisensory integration and visuo‐spatial enhancements selectively in the group trained with action‐like mini games. This plastic change persisted up to 3 months, as assessed in a follow‐up. Our novel findings reveal that abilities that are commonly known to emerge in late childhood can be promoted in younger children through action‐like mini games and have long‐lasting effects. Our data have clinical implications, in that they suggest that specific trainings could potentially help children with multisensory integration deficits.     

A model to study orienting responses in zebrafish,and applications towards the emotion–cognition interaction

Animal Cognition - Orienting responses (ORs) are whole-organism reflexes that are elicited by innocuous stimuli, and which decrease in magnitude after stimulus repetition. ORs represent relatively...     

Consumption systems: Unveiling bi-residential and delegated consumption

Based on an exploratory study of 29 semi-structured interviews followed by a grounded theory analysis, this research explores the circulation of local products and brands enacted by bi-residential consumers with geographically dispersed networks across two places. The results show that two new consumption systems are emerging at the frontier between conventional and collaborative consumption: bi-residential and delegated consumption. In these two consumption systems, the bi-residential consumer mediates the relationship between the retailer and the final consumer, thus informally extending the retailer's downstream value chain. Bi-residential and delegated systems partly overlap but also differ from conventional or collaborative consumption systems in two ways: (a) they are linked in a modelized process sustained by the perception of ‘access’ and the ‘logistic role’ of the bi-residential consumer; (b) they are embedded in a hybrid exchange system intertwining gift-giving and monetary exchange. These consumption systems occur at the interstice between conventional and collaborative consumption. Local retailers and brands could benefit from knowledge in this area with a view to opening up new opportunities in value co-creation with bi-residential consumers.     

Contextual guidance of eye movements and attention in real-world scenes: the role of global features in object search

Many experiments have shown that the human visual system makes extensive use of contextual information for facilitating object search in natural scenes. However, the question of how to formally model contextual influences is still open. On the basis of a Bayesian framework, the authors present an original approach of attentional guidance by global scene context. The model comprises 2 parallel pathways; one pathway computes local features (saliency) and the other computes global (scene-centered) features. The contextual guidance model of attention combines bottom-up saliency, scene context, and top-down mechanisms at an early stage of visual processing and predicts the image regions likely to be fixated by human observers performing natural search tasks in real-world scenes.     

Empathy and viewing the other as a subject

Empathy and viewing another person as a subject rather than an object are often associated in theoretical contexts, but empirical research of the relation is scarce. The purpose of the present research was to investigate the relationship between subject/object view and empathy. In Study 1, participants watched film clips and indicated their empathy for specific characters in the clips, as well as the extent to which they saw these persons as subjects and objects. The subject/object view explained some, but not all, of the differences in empathy, which raised the question of what else accounts for differences in empathy. A second study was conducted to investigate whether the difficulty of the other's situation also contributes. In Study 2, another group watched the film clips and rated the difficulty of the film character's situations in addition to empathy and subject/object view. The results of Study 2 revealed that subject view/object and perceived difficulty together explain a substantial part of differences in empathy. It was concluded that empathy is evoked primarily when a person in difficulty is viewed as a subject.