Attentional consequences of pregoal and postgoal positive affects

Decades of research have suggested that all positive affective states broaden attention. Recent studies have found that positive affects high in approach motivation narrow attention, whereas positive affects low in approach motivation broaden attention. However, these studies were limited because they used only affective pictures to manipulate positive affect. The pictures, rather than the affective states created by them, may have caused individuals to focus on the emotional details of the picture, and this attentional focus may have caused the narrowing of attentional scope. Moreover, no experiment has yet to examine both low and high approach-motivated positive affect within the same individuals in the same study. The current experiments manipulated pregoal (high approach) and postgoal (low approach) positive states by giving participants the opportunity to win money on a game. Results revealed that pregoal positive affect caused a narrowing of attention, whereas postgoal positive affect caused a broadening of attention.     

Are we on the Right Course? Lessons Learned about Current FBA/BIP Practices in Schools

Schools across the nation have been charged with the task of conducting functional behavioral assessments (FBAs) to aid in the development of behavior intervention plans (BIPs) to address the challenging behavior of students with special education needs. In response, schools have initiated efforts to provide the various members of their student services and individualized education program (IEP) teams with the knowledge and training to insure compliance with the federal mandate. The current study examines the FBAs and BIPs developed by school teams across one state with regards to best practices and the requirements identified in recent litigation. Following a state-wide training effort, service team members from school districts across Wisconsin were encouraged to submit completed FBA/BIPs for a critical review (whether or not they had participated in the training). Findings suggest that the majority of the FBAs submitted displayed serious flaws. The most common problem resulted from a lack of clarity in the identification and operational definition of the target behavior or behaviors under investigation. There was a general failure to identify any effort taken by the team members to verify the hypothesized function of the behavior before attempting intervention. Perhaps most alarmingly, a significant number of the teams did not appear to take the function of the behavior identified in the FBA into consideration when developing the BIP. Teams that included members who had completed two or more days of intensive in-service education related to FBA/BIP development were found to produce better results. Readers are provided a simplified checklist for use in reviewing their own FBA/BIPs.     

Giving up and giving in: the costs and benefits of daily sacrifice in intimate relationships

This research provided the first empirical investigation of how approach and avoidance motives for sacrifice in intimate relationships are associated with personal well-being and relationship quality. In Study 1, the nature of everyday sacrifices made by dating partners was examined, and a measure of approach and avoidance motives for sacrifice was developed. In Study 2, which was a 2-week daily experience study of college students in dating relationships, specific predictions from the theoretical model were tested and both longitudinal and dyadic components were included. Whereas approach motives for sacrifice were positively associated with personal well-being and relationship quality, avoidance motives for sacrifice were negatively associated with personal well-being and relationship quality. Sacrificing for avoidance motives was particularly detrimental to the maintenance of relationships over time. Perceptions of a partner's motives for sacrifice were also associated with well-being and relationship quality. Implications for the conceptualization of relationship maintenance processes along these 2 dimensions are discussed.     

The Normative Resources of Kierkegaard's Subjectivity Principle

Kierkegaard's subjectivity principle is a critique of modern epistemology that remains normative. These norms result from analysis of subjectivity in terms of its reflexive and constitutional elements. Kierkegaard's epistemology is intrinsically theological and explicates human subjectivity in terms of Christian doctrinal concepts such as revelation, sin and atonement. Here the superiority of Christianity is located not in its propositions as such, but in a way of being that effectuates a certain propositional understanding of the world as it establishes the ground for human subjectivity.     

From individual to group impressions: Availability heuristics in stereotype formation

When subjects are presented with information about the attributes of individuals and are then asked to make judgments about the characteristics of the group composed of those individuals, the group impression may depend on the way in which data on individuals are organized in memory. Experiment 1 demonstrated that under conditions of low memory load (16 instances of person-trait pairings), subjects organize their perceptions of a group around the characteristics of its individual members, whereas under high memory load (64 instances of person-trait pairings), subjects organize trait information in an undifferentiated way around the group as a whole. Under low memory load, subjects distinguish between repeated occurrences of a trait in the same individual and comparable repeated occurrences of that trait in different individuals; under high memory load, subjects do not make such a differentiation. Subjects' judgments about the frequency of categories of traits were related to the ease of recall of category instances, as predicted by an availability heuristic. Experiments 2 and 3 demonstrated that group members who are most available in memory will be disproportionately represented in the group impression. Specifically, the proportion of extreme individuals in a group was retro-spectively overestimated; this was true for both physical stimuli (height) and social stimuli (criminal acts).     

Risky choice: An examination of information acquisition behavior

The monitoring of information acquisition behavior, along with other process tracing measures such as response times, was used to examine how individuals process information about gambles into a decision. Subjects indicated preferences among specially constructed three-outcome gambles. The number of alternatives available was varied across the sets of gambles. A majority of the subjects processed information about the gambles in ways inconsistent with compensatory models of risky decision making, such as information integration (Anderson & Shanteau, 1970). Furthermore, the inconsistency between observed information acquisition behavior and such compensatory rules increased as the choice task became more complex. Alternative explanations of risky choice behavior are considered.     

Modernization and sex roles: The status of women in the Thai bureaucracy

Modernization is conceptualized as a change in socially sanctioned roles. This study investigates the repatterning of sex and occupational roles in the modernizing bureaucracy of Thailand. Although Thai women have traditionally participated actively in family and economic life, such freedom and equality with males has not been carried over into modern occupations. Female Thai civil servants have lower positions and are paid less than their male counterparts with comparable preparation and accomplishments; and the females make greater sacrifices in family roles. Yet women express greater satisfaction with their civil service jobs than men. Explanations for these findings are suggested.     

Recovery of 3-D shape from binocular disparity and structure from motion

Four experiments were conducted to examine the integration of depth information from binocular stereopsis and structure from motion (SFM), using stereograms simulating transparent cylindrical objects. We found that the judged depth increased when either rotational or translational motion was added to a display, but the increase was greater for rotating (SFM) displays. Judged depth decreased as texture element density increased for static and translating stereo displays, but it stayed relatively constant for rotating displays. This result indicates that SFM may facilitate stereo processing by helping to resolve the stereo correspondence problem. Overall, the results from these experiments provide evidence for a cooperative relationship between. SFM and binocular disparity in the recovery of 3-D relationships from 2-D images. These findings indicate that the processing of depth information from SFM and binocular disparity is not strictly modular, and thus theories of combining visual information that assume strong modularity-or-independence cannot accurately characterize all instances of depth perception from multiple sources.