Focalism: a source of durability bias in affective forecasting

The durability bias, the tendency to overpredict the duration of affective reactions to future events, may be due in part to focalism, whereby people focus too much on the event in question and not enough on the consequences of other future events. If so, asking people to think about other future activities should reduce the durability bias. In Studies 1-3, college football fans were less likely to overpredict how long the outcome of a football game would influence their happiness if they first thought about how much time they would spend on other future activities. Studies 4 and 5 ruled out alternative explanations and found evidence for a distraction interpretation, that people who think about future events moderate their forecasts because they believe that these events will reduce thinking about the focal event. The authors discuss the implications of focalism for other literatures, such as the planning fallacy.     

Development of an ethanol model using social insects: III. Preferences for ethanol solutions

Experiments are designed to assess whether free-flying honey bees have an aversion to an ethanol solution when given a choice between targets containing an ethanol solution in sucrose or sucrose only. Animals given a choice between a 1% ethanol solution and sucrose only show no aversion to the ethanol solution either in acquisition or extinction. Honey bees given a choice between a 5% ethanol solution and sucrose only show no differences in the initial choice of targets but some ees do switch over to the sucrose-only target. Performance during extinction indicates that bees landed on the previously reinforced sucrose-only target more than the target previously containing the 5% ethanol solution. An experiment in which bees were given a single 5%, ethanol target showed that of 20 bees, 11 returned for the entire 12 trials of the experiment. All bees returned at least 6 times to the 5% ethanol target. Additional experiments were run on harnessed foragers in a palatability study of alcoholic beverages consumed by humans. The results of the palatability experiment indicate that in general, bees prefer more sweet drinks with less alcohol.     

Contrasting task demands alter the perceived duration of brief time intervals

Four experiments were performed to assess the effects of task differences on duration judgments. Experiments 1 and 2 used the method of reproduction in prospective, within-subjects designs; their results supported previous research on the effects of task difficulty. Both experiments, using tasks that varied along somewhat different dimensions, found that subjects provided reproduction values that varied inversely with task difficulty. That is, while subjects tended to underreproduce across all tasks, the more difficult the task performed during the target interval, the greater the extent of the under-reproduction. Experiments 3 and 4 used a modification of the reproduction method by placing demands upon the subjects during both the target interval and the reproduction phase of each trial; they demonstrated that the greater the degree of contrast between demands made by the task performed during the target interval and those made during reproduction, the less accurate the duration reproduction. The results are discussed in terms of the contextual and resource allocation models of duration estimation.     

Patterns of service utilization among pregnant and parenting African American adolescents

This study explored factors associated with differential patterns of social and health service use among pregnant and parenting African American adolescents. One hundred seventy-seven young women between the ages of 14 and 22 took part in the study. Cluster analysis suggested three groups of users: frequent users, moderate users, and inconsistent users. These groups were distinct in terms of their frequency of service usage, perceptions of barriers to usage, and psychological and social functioning. Moderate users appeared to be healthier than either the frequent or inconsistent users, as indicated by their relatively higher levels of psychological functioning. In contrast, inconsistent users were distinguished by their high rates of sexual victimization, their low use of medical services, and their perceptions of many programmatic and personal barriers to usage. Suggestions for research and interventions that encompass the diverse needs of young African American women are made.     

Training in consultation

Conclusions This paper has pointed out some important goals, techniques, and dilemmas associated with consultation training and it has reviewed some of the relevant literature. A variety of ideas have been presented that should be useful to the trainer devising a workshop, a course, or a series of programmatic training experiences. In addition to describing key goals for training, the training techniques included readings, writing projects, and other didactic exercises, as well as modeling, role-playing with feedback, andin vivo practice with feedback. However, it should be noted that one important issue that has been ignored in the literature on consultation training is theconsultee (Meyers, Note 2). Effective consultation would be more likely if consultees receiving training regarding the knowledge base of consultation and the skills necessary to be an effective consultee.This paper was prepared while the author served as Visiting Scientist to the Center for Prevention Research, National Institute of Mental Health. Views expressed are the author's and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the Institute.     

Examining the Association Between Racial Identity Attitudes and Coping With Racism-Related Stress

The authors examined the association between racial identity attitudes and coping with racism-related stress among Asian, Black, and Latinx college students (N = 195). Results of the canonical correlation analysis indicated that higher scores on a combination of all racial identity attitudes were significantly associated with greater active coping for Black and Latinx students. Among Asian students, the authors found that higher scores on conformity, dissonance, and immersion-emersion racial identity attitudes were significantly associated with greater avoidant coping. Los autores examinaron la asociación entre las actitudes de identidad racial y el afrontamiento del estrés relacionado con el racismo en estudiantes universitarios asiáticos, negros y latinxs (N = 195). Los resultados del análisis de correlación canónica indicaron que unos valores más altos en la combinación de todas las actitudes de identidad racial estaban asociados significativamente a un mayor afrontamiento activo en estudiantes negros y latinxs. En estudiantes asiático-americanos, los autores hallaron que unos valores más altos en las actitudes de identidad racial de conformidad, disonancia e inmersión/emersión estaban asociados significativamente a un mayor afrontamiento evasivo.     

Conceptual clusters in figurative language production

Although most prior research on figurative language examines comprehension, several recent studies on the production of such language have proved to be informative. One of the most noticeable traits of figurative language production is that it is produced at a somewhat random rate with occasional bursts of highly figurative speech (e.g., Corts & Pollio, 1999). The present article seeks to extend these findings by observing production during speech that involves a very high base rate of figurative language, making statistically defined bursts difficult to detect. In an analysis of three Baptist sermons, burst-like clusters of figurative language were identified. Further study indicated that these clusters largely involve a central root metaphor that represents the topic under consideration. An interaction of the coherence, along with a conceptual understanding of a topic and the relative importance of the topic to the purpose of the speech, is offered as the most likely explanation for the clustering of figurative language in natural speech.     

What is Nominalistic Mereology?

Hybrid languages are introduced in order to evaluate the strength of “minimal” mereologies with relatively strong frame definability properties. Appealing to a robust form of nominalism, I claim that one investigated language $\mathcal {H}_{\textsf {m}}$ is maximally acceptable for nominalistic mereology. In an extension $\mathcal {H}_{\textsf {gem}}$ of $\mathcal {H}_{\textsf {m}}$ , a modal analog for the classical systems of Leonard and Goodman (J Symb Log 5:45–55, 1940) and Le?niewski (1916) is introduced and shown to be complete with respect to 0-deleted Boolean algebras. We characterize the formulas of first-order logic invariant for $\mathcal {H}_{\textsf {gem}}$ -bisimulations.