Core social motives explain responses to collective action issues

Managing collective action issues such as pandemics and climate change requires major social and behavioral change. Dominant approaches to addressing these issues center around information provision and financial incentives to shift behavior, yet, these approaches are rarely effective without integrating insights from psychological research on motivation. By accurately characterizing human motives, social scientists can identify when and why individuals engage, and facilitate behavior change and public engagement. Here, we use the core social motives model to sort social psychological theories into five fundamental social motives: to Belong, Understand, Control, self-Enhance, and Trust. We explain how each motive can improve or worsen collective action issues, and how this framework can be further developed towards a comprehensive social psychological perspective to collective action issues.     

Thomas Verner Moore and the electronic road to the unconscious: A reminiscence

A number of contemporary commentators and observers have urged a rapprochement between customary methods of psychoanalytic treatment and other modalities in order to shorten the traditional duration of “standard” psychoanalysis. In particular, adoption or adaptation of treatment modalities drawn from the repertoire of behavior therapy has been advocated. This note recalls that nearly 50 years ago the remarkable priest-psychologist-psychiatrist Thomas Verner Moore proposed in The Driving Forces of Human Nature and Their Adjustment, his capstone work, an “electronic road” to the unconscious via the psychogalvanometer as an alternate to the “royal road” of dream analysis and free association, attributing its development to von Stauffenberg, who demonstrated the technique in Munich between 1913-1915. By such reckoning, the union between psychoanalysis and the psychogalvanometer may be nearing its 85th anniversary.     

Self‐Determination Theory as a Framework for Understanding Road Rage1

The present study examined relations between motivational orientations, driving anger, and aggressive driving behaviors. It was hypothesized that the tendency to regulate behavior according to contingencies and pressures (controlled orientation), as opposed to interest and choice (autonomy orientation), would be associated with experiencing more driving anger and in turn driving more aggressively. Data from 109 college students were examined. As hypothesized, (a) controlled orientation was associated with feeling more driving anger as a result of other drivers' actions; (b) controlled orientation was associated with more aggressive driving behaviors and more traffic citations; (c) the relation between controlled orientation and aggressive driving was mediated by driving anger; and (d) self‐esteem and social anxiety did not account for the results of motivational orientations.     

Picking up the pace: effects of global temporal context on sensitivity to the tempo of auditory sequences

This article continues a line of research examining factors affecting listeners' auditory tempo sensitivities. Of particular interest is the question of whether listeners are sensitive to the overall (global) pace of their auditory environment and how this sensitivity may affect their perceptions of sequence timing. To address this question, we manipulated the set of sequence tempi (between 300 and 700 msec) that listeners experienced over the course of a 1-h period (i.e., the global temporal context) while they performed a tempo-discrimination task involving standard-comparison pairs of isochronous tone sequences. Overall findings show systematic distortions in perceived tempo that are consistent with the view that listeners adapt to the global pace of their auditory environments. Moreover, general support was found for the hypothesis that increasing the number of equal intervals in a standard sequence produces greater improvements in tempo sensitivity when the standard sequence tempo is different from the global pace than when it is at the global pace. Implications of these findings for models of timing and temporal processing are discussed.     

Emotional scenes elicit more pronounced self-reported emotional experience and greater EPN and LPP modulation when compared to emotional faces

Emotional faces and scenes carry a wealth of overlapping and distinct perceptual information. Despite widespread use in the investigation of emotional perception, expressive face and evocative scene stimuli are rarely assessed in the same experiment. Here, we evaluated self-reports of arousal and pleasantness, as well as early and late event-related potentials (e.g., N170, early posterior negativity [EPN], late positive potential [LPP]) as subjects viewed neutral and emotional faces and scenes, including contents representing anger, fear, and joy. Results demonstrate that emotional scenes were rated as more evocative than emotional faces, as only scenes produced elevated self-reports of arousal. In addition, viewing scenes resulted in more extreme ratings of pleasantness (and unpleasantness) than did faces. EEG results indicate that both expressive faces and emotional scenes evoke enhanced negativity in the N170 component, while the EPN and LPP components show significantly enhanced modulation only by scene, relative to face stimuli. These data suggest that viewing emotional scenes results in a more pronounced emotional experience that is associated with reliable modulation of visual event-related potentials that are implicated in emotional circuits in the brain.     

The motivations for Walter Burley’s theory of the proposition

Walter Burley (born c. 1275; died. c. 1344) claims throughout his career that the mind can make a statement (propositio) out of things. Since things include entities that exist outside of the mind, Burley appears to be claiming that the mind can form a statement out of things that exist outside of it. Most scholars of Burley offer a deflationary reading of this claim, arguing that it confuses two distinct but closely related philosophical issues: the nature of propositional content, on the one hand, and the role of facts in a compelling account of truth, on the other. But I argue that Burley means exactly what he says: that the mind can, quite literally, form statements out of things that exist outside of it. In Burley’s account, statements of this sort function as the propositional contents of our thoughts and written or uttered sentences. This account of propositional content is motivated by three more fundamental theses to which Burley is committed: referentialism, compositionality, and a claim about truth-conditionality I call intellectualism.     

Profiles of Rater Dis/Agreement within Universal Screening in Predicting Distal Outcomes

Journal of Psychopathology and Behavioral Assessment - The success of a comprehensive and integrated school mental health system is dependent on data to inform decision-making. Universal screening...