Would you be happier if you moved more? Physical activity focusing illusion

Current Psychology - Research shows that individuals who are more physically active also report greater happiness. However, subjective well-being is prone to cognitive biases. For instance, people...     

Shades of Awareness on the Mechanisms Underlying the Quality of Conscious Representations: A Commentary to Fazekas and Overgaard ()

Fazekas and Overgaard ( 2018 ) present a novel, multidimensional model that explains different ways in which conscious representations can be degraded. Moreover, the authors discuss possible mechanisms that underlie different kinds of degradation, primarily those related to attentional processing. In this letter, we argue that the proposed mechanisms are not sufficient. We propose that (1) attentional mechanisms work differently at various processing stages; and (2) factors that are independent of attentional ones, such as expectation, previous experience, and context, should be accounted for if we are aiming to construct a comprehensive model of conscious visual perception.     

Retrieval‐induced forgetting in normal ageing

The retrieval‐induced forgetting (RIF) paradigm was used to assess the integrity of unintentional inhibitory functioning in normal ageing. The paradigm was adapted to explore the RIF effect under conditions that allow us to differentiate the contribution of intentional and automatic retrieval processes to performance. The results showed the presence of equivalent and significant RIF effects in young and older adults, for both the intentional and automatic retrieval performance. These results suggest that unintentional inhibitory processes are spared in normal ageing and confirm that RIF effect is independent of the kind of memory processes involved in task performance.     

The care-system for homeless youth in The Netherlands: perceptions of youngsters through a peer research approach

The aim of this study was to examine the perceptions of homeless youth of the care they receive. Since we wanted to involve homeless youth as participants in this project, we adopted the approach of peer-research. This form of collaborative research has a major role for homeless youth in making an inventory of the problems. A parallel is drawn between the parent-adolescent relationship and the relationship between social worker and homeless adolescent.     

Verelendung psychotherapeutischer Rahmenbedingungen

Relationships of dependence in psychotherapeutic training, its high training costs and the taboo against discussing money and power, result in therapists being unable to adequately deal with their counter-transference with the particularly rich and powerful and vice versa with poor patients. In this article characteristic types of counter-transference and its associated entanglements are discussed. Psychotherapy does not take place beyond social developments nor is it able to compensate for their consequences especially in poor, badly educated and disintegrated patients. The author states that psychotherapy cannot be a substitute for a failed social, family, migration or educational policy.     

Magnitude effect contributes to the domain specificity in delay discounting

Discounting is a useful framework for understanding temporal choices. A person who prefers $50 immediately over $100 in 1 month exhibits a higher discount rate than a person deciding to wait for the higher payoff. Although previous research shows that discount rates are domain-specific, we propose an alternative to the domain specificity account. We suggest that differences in discounting alternatives across various domains may result not so much from the domains' nature per se but from differences in perceived attractiveness of the discounted alternatives. We replicated that an illustrative study evidencing domain specificity in discounting (Experiment 1) showed that people's subjective values of the payoffs in domains discounted in this experiment were different (Experiment 2) and used a novel method to match the attractiveness of the available alternatives across domains (Experiment 3). Finally, Experiment 4 showed that when matching was applied, the domain effect disappeared. We conclude that a magnitude effect can, at least partially, explain domain specificity in delay discounting.     

Approaching Shared Heroes: Cultural Transfer and Transnational Jewish History

This special issue of Jewish History is devoted to shared heroes in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. It explores diverse images of heroes that are shared by at least two of these religious traditions by comparing each figure’s origin, inventions, and reinventions within varying cultural contexts in antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the early modern period and by highlighting the cross-cultural significance of their counterstories and entangled histories. The construction and deconstruction, interpretation and reception of these heroic figures and their sociocultural roles over time and space bear witness to the encounters of Jews and Judaism with neighboring cultures. The approaches to our subject presented in this collection illuminate how the long-established rubric of “the hero” benefits from a cross-cultural approach. In turn, empirical data culled from the cross-cultural study of heroes demonstrate the inner workings of cultural transfer and, we believe, contribute an original perspective to the field of transnational history, which focuses on cultural entanglement.     

The stressors of being young and Black: Cardiovascular health and Black young adults

Objective: To examine the impact of stressors relevant to the lives of Black young adults including racial, financial, occupational, and general stress and psychological distress on cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk. Specifically, this study examined the relationship between multiple psychosocial stressors and two CVD risk indicators (i.e. obesity and blood pressure).

Design: This study used a quantitative design which included surveys, the collection of anthropometric and blood pressure (BP) measures. Participants were 124 Black college students aged 18 to 27 years old. Main Outcome Measures: Participants completed measures to assess psychological distress, general, occupational, financial and racial stress. Measures of body mass index (BMI), waist-to-hip ratio (WHR) and BP were collected to assess CVD risk.

Results: Findings indicated a significant effect of internalised racism on BMI and a significant effect of individual racial stress on diastolic BP. Also, depression was significantly associated with systolic BP. There were no significant results for WHR.

Conclusion: Findings suggested that the relationship among racial stress, psychological distress and CVD be further explored.