The Association Between Childhood Maltreatment and Coping Strategies: The Indirect Effect Through Attachment

Maladaptive coping strategies represent a potentially treatable component of psychopathologies associated with childhood abuse and neglect. Coping strategies are relatively stable constructs that may be viewed as trait-like behavioral manifestations of larger, albeit less accessible, intra- and interpersonal processes, such as activation of the attachment system. The authors investigated a potential mediational pathway from childhood maltreatment (in the form of physical and emotional abuse experiences) to coping strategies developed in emerging adulthood through attachment organization in a sample of undergraduate psychology research participants at a public Midwestern university (N = 225). Avoidant attachment patterns helped to explain the relationship between increased instances of childhood maltreatment and a decreased use of adaptive coping strategies. Further, both anxious and avoidant attachment mediated the relationship between childhood maltreatment and an increased use of maladaptive coping. By utilizing an attachment theory–informed approach as an explanatory guide, researchers and clinicians may be better able to conceptualize, study, and treat complex cases by understanding the underlying relationships between childhood maltreatment, attachment, and coping.     

Schellenberg on the epistemic force of experience

According to Schellenberg, our perceptual experiences have the epistemic force they do because they are exercises of certain sorts of capacity, namely capacities to discriminate particulars—objects, property-instances and events—in a sensory mode. She calls her account the “capacity view.” In this paper, I will raise three concerns about Schellenberg’s capacity view. The first is whether we might do better to leave capacities out of our epistemology and take content properties as the fundamental epistemically relevant features of experiences. I argue we would. The second is whether Schellenberg’s appeal to factive and phenomenal evidence accommodates the intuitive verdicts about the bad case that she claims it does. I argue it does not. The third is whether Schellenberg’s account of factive evidence is adequate to capture nuances concerning the justification for singular but nondemonstrative perceptual beliefs, such as the belief that’s NN, where NN is a proper name. I argue it is not. If I am right, these points suggest a mental-state-first account of perceptual justification, rather than a capacity-first account, and one which treats the good and bad cases alike in respect of justification and complicates the relation between perceptual content and what one is justified in believing.     

The Effect of Male Incarceration on Rape Myth Acceptance: Application of Propensity Score Matching Technique

The aim is to assess the effect of imprisonment on rape myth acceptance. The research used a sample of male prisoners incarcerated for non-sexual crimes (n = 98) and a sample of males drawn from the general population (n = 160). Simple linear regression did not indicate a significant effect of incarceration on rape myth acceptance. After controlling for background covariates using propensity score matching, analysis revealed a positive significant effect of incarceration on rape myth acceptance. Although further research is required, results indicate that being subject to incarceration has a significant positive effect on stereotypical thinking about rape.     

Writing content predicts benefit from written expressive disclosure: Evidence for repeated exposure and self-affirmation

Expressive disclosure regarding a stressful event improves psychological and physical health, yet predictors of these effects are not well established. The current study assessed exposure, narrative structure, affect word use, self-affirmation and discovery of meaning as predictors of anxiety, depressive and physical symptoms following expressive writing. Participants (N = 50) wrote on four occasions about a stressful event and completed self-report measures before writing and three months later. Essays were coded for stressor exposure (level of detail and whether participants remained on topic), narrative structure, self-affirmation and discovery of meaning. Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count software was used to quantify positive and negative affect word use. Controlling for baseline anxiety, more self-affirmation and detail about the event predicted lower anxiety symptoms, and more negative affect words (very high use) and more discovery of meaning predicted higher anxiety symptoms three months after writing. Findings highlight the importance of self-affirmation and exposure as predictors of benefit from expressive writing.     

Revitalizing Narcissistic Perfectionism: Evidence of the Reliability and the Validity of an Emerging Construct

Theorists have long speculated about narcissistic perfectionism—an outwardly directed need for perfection marked by grandiosity, entitlement, and lofty expectations for others. This study provides evidence of reliability and predictive validity for an emerging model of narcissistic perfectionism using two waves of measurement and multiple data sources (self-report and informant-report) in a sample of 155 undergraduate students. As hypothesized, confirmatory factor analysis showed manifest indicators of narcissistic perfectionism cohered together as a constellation of traits while showing reliability and factorial validity across time and source. Hierarchical multiple regression indicated narcissistic perfectionism uniquely and incrementally predicted anger beyond competing measures of other-oriented perfectionism and narcissism. Informant-reports of narcissistic perfectionism uniquely predicted anger beyond self-reports. These results offer promising empirical support for the often discussed, but seldom tested, concept of narcissistic perfectionism.     

The Effect of Adaptive Organizational Culture on Long-Term Survival

Purpose

Organizational culture is a critical resource for organizations to adapt to dynamic environments and to survive in the long term. Unfortunately, a lack of clarity exists in the conceptualization of adaptive cultures and little empirical research investigates its impact on survival. Therefore, the purpose of the present study was twofold: (1) to identify, define, and develop a measure of adaptive organizational culture and (2)  to demonstrate the effect of adaptive culture on organizational survival.

Design/Methodology/Approach

An adaptive culture rating scale was developed based on a review of the existing literature. Ninety-five organizations founded prior to 1940 were rated on nine characteristics of adaptive culture. Ratings were used to predict likelihood to survive using a Cox regression with proportional hazards survival analysis.

Findings

Exploratory factor analysis revealed two broad factors of adaptive culture, values toward change and action-orientation. Findings indicate organizations with adaptive cultures were more likely to survive.

Implications

The present effort provided evidence that culture can serve as an adaptive mechanism with effects spanning decades. Leaders should focus on establishing adaptive cultural norms and values in order to increase chances of surviving.

Originality/Value

This is one of the first historiometric studies to develop and utilize a measure of adaptive culture. Further, this study looked at the impact of adaptive culture on long-term organizational outcomes using survival analysis, a statistical technique not often employed in the organizational literature.

     

Development and initial validation of the anti-racism behavioral inventory (ARBI)

This investigation reports on the development and initial validation of the anti-racism behavioral inventory, a measure designed to assess anti-racism awareness and behavior among students in counseling and counseling psychology programs within the United States (US). Data from 513 participants were collected over three related studies. Factor analyses suggested that the 21-item scale was best represented as a bifactor model with one general anti-racism behavior factor and three domain-specific factors, namely individual advocacy, awareness of racism, and institutional advocacy. Additional validity was supported through inverse associations with measures of symbolic racism and color-blind racial attitudes, as well as positive associations with scores on the Quick Discrimination Index. Potential utility of the measure and future directions for ongoing development is discussed.     

More dead than dead? Attributing mentality to vegetative state patients

In a recent paper, Gray, Knickman, and Wegner (2011) present three experiments which they take to show that people perceive patients in a persistent vegetative state (PVS) to have less mentality than the dead. Following on from Gomes and Parrott (forthcoming Gomes, A., &; Parrott, M. (forthcoming). Epicurean aspects of mental state attributions. Philosophical Psychology. [Google Scholar]), we provide evidence to show that participants' responses in the initial experiments are an artifact of the questions posed. Results from two experiments show that, once the questions have been clarified, people do not ascribe more mental capacity to the dead than to PVS patients. There is no reason to think that people perceive PVS patients as more dead than dead.     

The lottery of life and moral desert: An empirical investigation

As John Rawls makes clear in A Theory of Justice, there is a popular and influential strand of political thought for which brute luck – that is, being lucky (or unlucky) in the so-called “lottery of life” – ought to have no place in a theory of distributive justice. Yet the debate about luck, desert, and fairness in contemporary political philosophy has recently been rekindled by a handful of philosophers who claim that desert should play a bigger role in theories of distributive justice. In the present paper, we present the results of our attempts to fill in some of the missing empirical details of this debate. Our findings provide some preliminary evidence that, contrary to what most contemporary political philosophers have assumed, people are not as worried by natural luck as previously thought. Instead, people’s worries seem to be focused exclusively on inequalities generated by social luck.