Development of a Facebook Addiction Scale

The Bergen Facebook Addiction Scale (BFAS), initially a pool of 18 items, three reflecting each of the six core elements of addiction (salience, mood modification, tolerance, withdrawal, conflict, and relapse), was constructed and administered to 423 students together with several other standardized self-report scales (Addictive Tendencies Scale, Online Sociability Scale, Facebook Attitude Scale, NEO-FFI, BIS/BAS scales, and Sleep questions). That item within each of the six addiction elements with the highest corrected item-total correlation was retained in the final scale. The factor structure of the scale was good (RMSEA = .046, CFI = .99) and coefficient alpha was .83. The 3-week test-retest reliability coefficient was .82. The scores converged with scores for other scales of Facebook activity. Also, they were positively related to Neuroticism and Extraversion, and negatively related to Conscientiousness. High scores on the new scale were associated with delayed bedtimes and rising times.     

Integrating the study of conformity and culture in humans and nonhuman animals

Conformity--defined here by the fact that an individual displays a particular behavior because it is the most frequent the individual witnessed in others--has long been recognized by social psychologists as one of the main categories of social influence. Surprisingly, it is only recently that conformity has become an active topic in animal and comparative biology. As in any new and rapidly growing field, however, definitions, hypotheses, and protocols are diverse, not easy to organize in a coherent way, and sometimes seriously in conflict with one another. Here we pursue greater coherence by reviewing the newer literature on conformity in behavioral ecology and evolutionary biology in light of the foundational work in social psychology. We suggest that the knowledge accumulated in social psychology can be exploited by behavioral ecologists and evolutionary biologists to bring conceptual clarity to the field, avoid some experimental pitfalls, and help design new and challenging experiments. In particular, we propose that the notions of informational and normative conformity that, until now, have been little recognized in recent literature can resolve some important controversies. In turn, research on animal culture should be of great interest to social scientists, because understanding human culture and human uniqueness requires an evolutionary analysis of our cognitive capacities and their evolutionary origins. Our review suggests excellent opportunities for social and natural scientists to join forces in building an interdisciplinary and integrative approach to the pervasive phenomenon of conformity.     

Development of a work addiction scale

Andreassen, C. S., Griffiths, M. D., Hetland, J. & Pallesen, S. (2012). Development of a work addiction scale. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology 53, 265–272. Research into excessive work has gained increasing attention over the last 20 years. Terms such as “workaholism,”“work addiction” and “excessive work” have been used interchangeably. Given the increase in empirical research, this study presents the development of the Bergen Work Addiction Scale (BWAS), a new psychometrically validated scale for the assessment of work addiction. A pool of 14 items, with two reflecting each of seven core elements of addiction (i.e., salience, mood modification, tolerance, withdrawal, conflict, relapse, and problems) was initially constructed. The items were then administered to two samples, one recruited by a web survey following a television broadcast about workaholism (n = 11,769) and one comprising participants in the second wave of a longitudinal internet‐based survey about working life (n = 368). The items with the highest corrected item‐total correlation from within each of the seven addiction elements were retained in the final scale. The assumed one‐factor solution of the refined seven‐item scale was acceptable (root mean square error of approximation = 0.077, Comparative Fit Index = 0.96, Tucker‐Lewis Index = 0.95) and the internal reliability of the two samples were 0.84 and 0.80, respectively. The scores of the BWAS converged with scores on other workaholism scales, except for a Work Enjoyment subscale. A suggested cut‐off for categorization of workaholics showed good discriminative ability in terms of working hours, leadership position, and subjective health complaints. It is concluded that the BWAS has good psychometric properties.     

Blaming for a better future: future orientation and associated intolerance of personal uncertainty lead to harsher reactions toward innocent victims

People are often encouraged to focus on the future and strive for long-term goals. This noted, the authors argue that this future orientation is associated with intolerance of personal uncertainty, as people usually cannot be certain that their efforts will pay off. To be able to tolerate personal uncertainty, people adhere strongly to the belief in a just world, paradoxically resulting in harsher reactions toward innocent victims. In three experiments, the authors show that a future orientation indeed leads to more negative evaluations of an innocent victim (Study 1), enhances intolerance of personal uncertainty (Study 2), and that experiencing personal uncertainty leads to more negative evaluations of a victim (Study 3). So, while a future orientation enables people to strive for long-term goals, it also leads them to be harsher toward innocent victims. One underlying mechanism causing these reactions is intolerance of personal uncertainty, associated with a future orientation.     

Critical Transference in a Case of Severe Epilepsy

In this paper, the author presents a summary of a brief treatment with a young woman, suffering from severe epileptic illness, which describes the mutuality of cross-transferences of deep and intense feelings and the unorthodox way to receive, to take in persons affected with critical phenomena. This treatment was deeply influenced by the traumatic triad, borrowed from Ferenczi: "amnesia, anaesthesia, aboulia," the ways of forgetting (or erasing) the past/the present/the future. The investigation led us to clarify, on the one hand, the incestophilic-or perhaps incestuous-source in the family, and on the other, the burdensome and tragic genealogy and history of each parent. At the end of this short treatment, which took place at a frequency of one session a week (with the patient sitting, standing, lying on the floor; with sometimes severe fits, deliria, threats; bringing of letters, texts, drawings; and a few phone calls), there was an alleviation of the critical phenomena and revival.     

The ability of children to delay gratification in an exchange task

The ability to wait for a reward is a necessary capacity for economic transactions. This study is an age-related investigation of children's ability to delay gratification in an exchange task requiring them to wait for a significant reward. We gave 252 children aged 2-4 a small piece of cookie, then offered them an opportunity to wait for a predetermined delay period before exchanging it for a larger one. In a first experiment, the children had to exchange the initial food item for rewards two, four or eight times larger. Results showed that children aged 3-4 years old sustained longer time lags for larger rewards than for smaller rewards. This effect was not found in 2-year-old subjects. In a second experiment, a reward 40 times larger than the initial piece was offered to determine the maximum waiting time that children could sustain. All age groups increased their performances. Older children were more successful at waiting, but some children as young as 2 years old were able to tolerate delays of up to 16 min. Older children who chose to give up waiting earlier than their known capacity demonstrated anticipation skills which had not been seen in younger children, showing that they had anticipated an increase in the time lag, and that they had considered both time and reward value when making their decision. Despite the age effect, we did not establish any limits for delaying gratification in children. This study may have educational implications for dealing with behavioral misconduct, which is known to be related to impulsivity control in young children.     

Chicken or egg? Untangling the relationship between orthographic processing skill and reading accuracy

There is increasing evidence of a relationship between orthographic processing skill, or the ability to form, store and access word representations, and reading ability. Empirical research to date has not, however, clarified the direction of this relationship. We examined this question in a three-year longitudinal study of children from Grades 1 to 3. We included standard measures of orthographic processing skill, at both the lexical and sublexical level, and word reading accuracy, as well as controls of vocabulary, non-verbal reasoning, and phonological awareness. In all analyses, word reading predicted progress in acquiring orthographic processing skill, regardless of grade level or orthographic processing measure. In contrast, orthographic processing skill did not predict progress in word reading. Our results suggest that, between Grades 1 and 3, children acquire orthographic processing skill through their reading and that this ability, as characterized by the most common tasks used to date, does not play an independent role in supporting reading acquisition.     

French Children’s Awareness of Gender Stereotypes About Mathematics and Reading: When Girls Improve Their Reputation in Math

Since 2000, surveys on academic achievement show gender inequalities in favor of girls in the school setting. The aim of the present study was to examine if gender stereotypes about academic abilities that are usually considered as fully demonstrated in the literature have to be updated. Three hundred ninety-eight French fifth graders from a medium-sized provincial town answered a questionnaire designed to examine, both with direct and indirect measures, if they hold different gender stereotypes concerning mathematics and reading depending on target’s age (children vs. adults). As expected, results showed that participants, regardless of their gender, were aware of a math-ability stereotype favorable to men when the stereotyped targets were adults. When the stereotyped targets were children and young adolescents, the math-ability stereotype was less clear. Participants believed that people think that girls succeed as well as boys in math. Concerning reading-ability, participants reported the “usual” stereotype favorable to females, regardless of the stereotyped target’s age (child or adult). Together these results suggest that academic gender stereotypes have to be reconsidered. The math-ability stereotype targeting children and favorable to both genders seems to show an improvement of the French girls’ reputation in mathematics. Moreover, the reputation of French boys in this domain seems to be poorer than reported in previous research.     

Relations between timing,position, and grouping in short-term memory

This article is concerned with how information about time and position in a sequence is represented in short-term memory and expressed in the dynamics of serial recall. Temporal-distinctiveness theories of memory predict that isolating a list item in time will improve recall accuracy for that item. Although the majority of research in short-term memory has failed to demonstrate a temporal isolation effect (TIE), there are occasions on which a TIE is observed. The disparity in results has been explained by assuming that participants can adaptively weight temporal and nontemporal information at retrieval, with differences between experiments promoting or discouraging reliance on time as a source of episodic information. A particular focus of the present study is the finding that the TIE is substantially observed in standard serial recall only when participants are instructed to group the list into minisequences. The findings of two experiments using instructed grouping replicated this effect but showed that it is attributable to a longer gap at the group boundary enhancing the positive effect of grouping on recall accuracy. These results show that the hierarchical representations usually associated with temporal grouping are also elicited by instructed grouping but that an additional and nonspecific benefit to recall obtains from lengthening the pause between groups. An additional role for time is identified in the timing of responses: The dynamics of input sequences tend to be mirrored in output sequences for ungrouped lists, whereas the primacy pattern in grouped lists is for a longer duration to speed access to the following group when that duration occurs at an instructed group boundary.     

Representational momentum in aviation

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of expertise on motion anticipation. We conducted 2 experiments in which novices and expert pilots viewed simulated aircraft landing scenes. The scenes were interrupted by the display of a black screen and then started again after a forward or backward shift. The participant's task was to determine whether the moving scene had been shifted forward or backward. A forward misjudgment of the final position of the moving scene was interpreted as a representational momentum (RM) effect. Experiment 1 showed that an RM effect was detected only for experts. The lack of motion anticipation on the part of novices is a surprising result for the RM literature. It could be related to scene unfamiliarity, encoding time, or shift size. Experiment 2 was run with novices only. It was aimed at testing the potential impact of 2 factors on the RM effect: scene encoding time and shift size. As a whole, the results showed that encoding time and shift size are important factors in anticipation processes in realistic dynamic situations.