Elevated self‐esteem 12 months following a 10‐day developmental voyage

The following article examined elevated self‐esteem as a function of a 10‐day developmental voyage. Two studies were conducted. Study 1 demonstrated that participants who completed the voyage experienced elevated self‐esteem. Study 2 replicated and extended these results insofar as it revealed that (a) elevated self‐esteem was maintained 12 months following the voyage; and (b) increasing levels of perceived self‐efficacy and belonging (as assessed on the last day of the voyage), but not social support, each made a unique contribution to these effects. Together, these findings provide converging evidence to suggest that a 10‐day developmental voyage upon the Spirit of New Zealand promotes elevated self‐esteem that is maintained over time, and that perceived self‐efficacy and belonging contribute to this outcome.     

Phenomenology of Bibliotherapy in Modifying Teacher Punitiveness

The authors examined the phenomenology of bibliotherapy and its effects in changing preservice teachers' punitive attitudes toward children. Participants (N = 29) were enrolled in a university course (Introduction to Emotional Disturbance). Five books by Torey Hayden, autobiographical accounts of teaching and building relationships with students with emotional and behavioral disorders, were read and discussed within the framework of group bibliotherapy. Participants completed a self-report rating form measuring their tendency toward punitiveness during the first and last weeks of the 15-week semester. Participants also completed a questionnaire measuring the bibliotherapeutic impact of reading Hayden's texts, and they kept journals about the experience of reading Hayden. Comparison of the group's pre- and post-measures on punitiveness showed a small, albeit significant decrease in punitiveness; decreased punitiveness was associated with the therapeutic impact of reading Hayden. Phenomenological analysis of the participants'journal entries revealed that the structure of the experience of reading Hayden was one of identification with the protagonist, leading to emotional and cognitive learning.     

A Conversation between Theory,Methods, and Data

The 10 year anniversary of the COGITO Study provides an opportunity to revisit the ideas behind the Cattell data box. Three dimensions of the persons × variables × time data box are discussed in the context of three categories of researchers each wanting to answer their own categorically different question. The example of the well-known speed-accuracy tradeoff is used to illustrate why these are three different categories of statistical question. The 200 persons by 100 variables by 100 occasions of measurement COGITO data cube presents a challenge to integrate theories and methods across the dimensions of the data box. A conceptual model is presented for the speed-accuracy tradeoff example that could account for cross-sectional between persons effects, short-term dynamics, and long-term learning effects. Thus, two fundamental differences between the time axis and the other two axes of the data box include ordering and time scaling. In addition, nonstationarity in human systems is a pervasive problem along the time dimension of the data box. To illustrate, the difference in nonstationarity between dancing and conversation is discussed in the context of the interaction between theory, methods, and data. An information theoretic argument is presented that the theory-methods-data interaction is better understood when viewed as a conversation than as a dance. Entropy changes in the development of a theory-methods-data conversation provide one metric for evaluating scientific progress.     

Event-based prospective memory in depression: The impact of cue focality

This study is the first to compare event-based prospective memory performance in individuals with depression and healthy controls. The degree to which self-initiated processing is required to perform the prospective memory task was varied. Twenty-eight individuals with depression and 32 healthy controls worked on a computerised prospective memory task. Prospective cues were either presented focally or non-focally to the ongoing activity. Collapsing data across both conditions, controls outperformed individuals with depression in the prospective memory task. Overall, participants showed a poorer prospective memory performance in the non-focal condition that required self-initiated processing to a higher degree than the focal condition. Importantly, as revealed by a group by task condition interaction, groups did not differ in the focal condition, whereas, controls outperformed individuals with depression in the non-focal condition. The results are in line with the multiprocess framework of event-based prospective remembering and the cognitive-initiative account of depression-related cognitive deficits.     

Out of mind,out of heart: Attention affects duration of emotional experience

We tested direct, indirect, and behavioural measures of fear of spiders under neutral instructions, and when participants were asked to fake high and low fear of spiders. Our findings indicate that the Approach Avoidance Task (AAT) was the only measure that could be faked in one of the faking conditions only. We also assessed how easily faked results could be detected on each measure for different diagnostic criteria. The direct and behavioural measures showed good performance for all criteria. The AAT performed comparably only for a conservative criterion, when detecting fakers is less important than correctly labelling non-fakers.     

Inhibition of return is unimpressed by emotional cues

Inhibition of return (IOR) is a phenomenon observed when a target unexpectedly appears in the place of a preceding cue: With long cue–target stimulus onset asynchronies, reaction times are longer than for targets that appear in an alternative location. Cognitive theories of anxiety suppose that the IOR effect diminishes with threatening, biologically relevant cues because these catch and hold attention. To test this hypothesis, we conducted three experiments, in which emotional valence of cues (animals or facial expressions) had no influence on the strength of the IOR effect, neither in an unselected sample of students nor in highly spider-fearful or socially anxious participants. Inhibition of return appears to be a robust effect, blind to cue valence.     

Induction of implicit evaluation biases by approach–avoidance training: A commentary on Vandenbosch and De Houwer (this issue)

Vandenbosch and De Houwer (this issue) reported a series of failures to induce an implicit evaluation bias by means of an approach–avoidance training paradigm. In this commentary, we point out issues raised by Vandenbosch and De Houwer that we interpret differently or that we would like to emphasise more thoroughly. In addition, we report recent results from a replication study from our lab in which we found the effects in question. Finally, we provide an overview of potential future studies needed to replicate and validate the approach–avoidance training effects.     

Importance effects on performance in event‐based prospective memory tasks

In the present study we manipulated the importance of performing two event‐based prospective memory tasks. In Experiment 1, the event‐based task was assumed to rely on relatively automatic processes, whereas in Experiment 2 the event‐based task was assumed to rely on a more demanding monitoring process. In contrast to the first experiment, the second experiment showed that importance had a positive effect on prospective memory performance. In addition, the occurrence of an importance effect on prospective memory performance seemed to be mainly due to the features of the prospective memory task itself, and not to the characteristics of the ongoing tasks that only influenced the size of the importance effect. The results suggest that importance instructions may improve prospective memory if the prospective task requires the strategic allocation of attentional monitoring resources.     

Understanding provoked overt recognition in prosopagnosia

Prosopagnosic patients are unable to recognize overtly the faces of familiar people. However, under specific experimental conditions, overt recognition of faces has been induced in some prosopagnosics. This phenomenon of provoked overt recognition has proved challenging for current theories of face recognition. We first describe clinical demonstrations of provoked overt recognition, before highlighting some critical features that any satisfactory explanation of the phenomenon must accommodate. An account of provoked overt recognition is then put forward, couched within the framework of Burton, Bruce, and Johnston's (1990) IAC model of face recognition. This theory is tested by running computer simulations with the model. Finally, the present explanation of provoked overt recognition is scrutinized to discover whether it has implications for rehabilitation work with prosopagnosic patients.