When Trust Fails: The Relation Between Children’s Trust Beliefs in Peers and their Peer Interactions in a Natural Setting

One hundred and forty-nine 8–11 year-old children (86 males; M?=?9 years - 4 months and SD?=?7 months) from the UK were administered the Trust Beliefs in Peers scale and were observed in the playground over one school year. Quadratic relations were found between trust beliefs in peers and peer interaction, which varied by gender. Compared to girls with the middle range of trust beliefs, girls with very low beliefs and those with very high beliefs (a) were less accepted/more rejected by the peer group (i.e., lower group interaction, and greater negatively received bids), (b) showed greater indirect aggression (engaged in and received), (c) showed greater non-engagement (i.e., being alone), and (d) showed greater concomitant distress. Compared to children with the middle range of trust beliefs, children with those extreme trust beliefs in peers demonstrated greater direct aggression (engaged in and received) and showed passive behavior (for boys only). The findings supported the conclusion that children, primarily girls, who trust peers too little and those who trust too much are at risk for psychosocial maladjustment.     

“It's Only Other People Who Make Me Feel Black”: Acculturation,Identity, and Agency in a Multicultural Community

This article explores identity work and acculturation work in the lives of British mixed‐heritage children and adults. Children, teenagers, and parents with mixed heritage participated in a community arts project that invited them to deliberate, construct, and reconstruct their cultural identities and cultural relations. We found that acculturation, cultural and raced identities, are constructed through a series of oppositional themes: cultural maintenance versus cultural contact; identity as inclusion versus identity as exclusion; institutionalized ideologies versus agency. The findings point towards an understanding of acculturation as a dynamic, situated, and multifaceted process: acculturation in movement. To investigate this, we argue that acculturation research needs to develop a more dynamic and situated approach to the study of identity, representation, and culture. The article concludes with a discussion on the need for political psychologists to develop methods attuned to the tensions and politics of acculturation that are capable of highlighting the possibilities for resistance and social change.     

FLEXING THE FRAME: CONTEMPLATING THE USE OF MULTIPLE PORTS OF ENTRY IN PARENT–INFANT PSYCHOTHERAPY

Multirelational interventions are well described in the psychoanalytic parent–infant literature. Daniel Stern (1995) originally suggested and described five “ports of entry” that may be employed to access the multiperson parent–infant clinical system. Other authors have elaborated and extended Stern's original list of ports of entry. The impact of using multiple ports of entry on the psychoanalytic frame, however, is largely neglected in the parent–infant psychotherapy literature. Danielle Quinodoz's (1992) four facets of the psychoanalytic setting are used to structure a discussion of how the multiplicities associated with parent–infant psychotherapy may impact the frame. The article argues strongly for a necessary flexing of the psychoanalytic frame to establish therapeutic alliances. A fifth facet, that of psychoanalytic mindfulness, is offered as a counterbalance to the risks associated with excessive flexing of the frame, particularly in relation to Quinodoz's fourth facet of “refraining from ‘doing.’” This article relies on case material to illustrate the issues under discussion. Further engagement and debate are invited.     

Throwing in the dark: improved prediction of action outcomes following motor training without vision of the action

Traditional models of action understanding emphasise the idea that long-term exposure to a wide array of visual patterns of particular actions allows for effective action anticipation or prediction. More recently, a greater emphasis has been placed on the motor system’s role in the perceptual understanding and prediction of action outcomes. There have been attempts to isolate the contributions of visual and motor experience in action prediction, but to date, these studies have relied on comparisons of motor-visual experience to visual-only (observational) experience. We conducted a learning study, where visual experience was directly manipulated during practice. Novice participants practised throwing darts to 3 specific areas of a dartboard. A group trained without vision of their action, only feedback about the final landing position, significantly improved in their ability to predict the landing position of a thrown dart, from temporally occluded video clips. The performance of this ‘no-vision’ group did not differ from a Full-vision group and was significantly more accurate than an observation-only and a no-practice control group (with the latter two groups not improving pre- to post-practice). These results suggest that motor experience specifically modulates the perceptual prediction of action outcomes. This is thought to occur through simulative mechanisms, whereby observed actions are mapped onto the observer’s own motor representations.     

Explicit awareness supports conditional visual search in the retrieval guidance paradigm

In four experiments we explored whether participants would be able to use probabilistic prompts to simplify perceptually demanding visual search in a task we call the retrieval guidance paradigm. On each trial a memory prompt appeared prior to (and during) the search task and the diagnosticity of the prompt(s) was manipulated to provide complete, partial, or non-diagnostic information regarding the target's color on each trial (Experiments 1–3). In Experiment 1 we found that the more diagnostic prompts was associated with faster visual search performance. However, similar visual search behavior was observed in Experiment 2 when the diagnosticity of the prompts was eliminated, suggesting that participants in Experiment 1 were merely relying on base rate information to guide search and were not utilizing the prompts. In Experiment 3 participants were informed of the relationship between the prompts and the color of the target and this was associated with faster search performance relative to Experiment 1, suggesting that the participants were using the prompts to guide search. Additionally, in Experiment 3 a knowledge test was implemented and performance in this task was associated with qualitative differences in search behavior such that participants that were able to name the color(s) most associated with the prompts were faster to find the target than participants who were unable to do so. However, in Experiments 1–3 diagnosticity of the memory prompt was manipulated via base rate information, making it possible that participants were merely relying on base rate information to inform search in Experiment 3. In Experiment 4 we manipulated diagnosticity of the prompts without manipulating base rate information and found a similar pattern of results as Experiment 3. Together, the results emphasize the importance of base rate and diagnosticity information in visual search behavior. In the General discussion section we explore how a recent computational model of hypothesis generation (HyGene; Thomas, Dougherty, Sprenger, & Harbison, 2008), linking attention with long-term and working memory, accounts for the present results and provides a useful framework of cued recall visual search.     

The Factor Structure of the Forms of Self-Criticising/Attacking & Self-Reassuring Scale in Thirteen Distinct Populations

There is considerable evidence that self-criticism plays a major role in the vulnerability to and recovery from psychopathology. Methods to measure this process, and its change over time, are therefore important for research in psychopathology and well-being. This study examined the factor structure of a widely used measure, the Forms of Self-Criticising/Attacking & Self-Reassuring Scale in thirteen nonclinical samples (N?=?7510) from twelve different countries: Australia (N?= 319), Canada (N?= 383), Switzerland (N?= 230), Israel (N?=?476), Italy (N?=?389), Japan (N?=?264), the Netherlands (N?=?360), Portugal (N?=?764), Slovakia (N?=?1326), Taiwan (N?=?417), the United Kingdom 1 (N?=?1570), the United Kingdom 2 (N?=?883), and USA (N?=?331). This study used more advanced analyses than prior reports: a bifactor item-response theory model, a two-tier item-response theory model, and a non-parametric item-response theory (Mokken) scale analysis. Although the original three-factor solution for the FSCRS (distinguishing between Inadequate-Self, Hated-Self, and Reassured-Self) had an acceptable fit, two-tier models, with two general factors (Self-criticism and Self-reassurance) demonstrated the best fit across all samples. This study provides preliminary evidence suggesting that this two-factor structure can be used in a range of nonclinical contexts across countries and cultures. Inadequate-Self and Hated-Self might not by distinct factors in nonclinical samples. Future work may benefit from distinguishing between self-correction versus shame-based self-criticism.     

Teenagers’ Perceptions of Volunteering Following the 2010–2011 Canterbury Earthquakes,New Zealand

ABSTRACT

Limited research exists of teenagers’ involvement in the response phase of a natural disaster. There is little, for example on volunteering, and of specifically what motivates teenagers to volunteer and the activities they participate in. Therefore, this study investigated teenagers’ involvement and perceptions of volunteering following the 2010–2011 Canterbury, New Zealand, earthquakes. Six focus groups were conducted with 31 teenagers aged 16–18 who had experienced the earthquakes. The data were analyzed using thematic analysis leading to four themes, namely sense of control, sense of purpose, shift in perspective, and restrictions. Findings emphasize the importance of organizing youth-focused volunteer groups, due to volunteering potentially reducing teenagers’ psychological distress postdisaster.     

Response inhibition and interference control: Effects of schizophrenia,genetic risk,and schizotypy

The ability to inhibit inappropriate responses and suppress irrelevant information is a core feature of executive control. In this study, we provide a detailed analysis of prepotent response inhibition and interference in patients with schizophrenia. To further test the role of genetic factors and subclinical schizophrenia‐like traits, we additionally studied clinically unaffected, first‐degree relatives of schizophrenia patients and assessed dimensions of schizotypy in both relatives and healthy controls. Inhibition and interference control were assessed using a battery comprising the antisaccade, Stroop, stop signal, go/no‐go, flanker, and Simon tasks. Schizophrenia patients differed from both relatives and controls in making more errors on the antisaccade task and having longer response times on the Stroop task, especially the incongruent condition. Patients also had general, that is, condition independent, increases in reaction times on the go/no‐go and flanker tasks and made more errors on the flanker and Simon tasks, suggesting general performance impairments independent of inhibitory demand. Relatives were characterized by hypometric antisaccade amplitude gain despite normal prosaccades, suggesting a selective deficit in non‐standard sensorimotor transformations. Schizotypy was correlated with inhibitory performance across a number of tasks in both relatives and controls. Generally, these effects were independent of verbal intelligence levels. Overall, the findings point to rather selective impairments of inhibitory control in the schizophrenia spectrum and confirm a previously observed deficit in antisaccade spatial accuracy as an endophenotype of schizophrenia.     

How Bion’s Work on Thinking Might Throw Light on the Development of Sexuality

ABSTRACT

In preparing this article, I found I needed to take a step back from the specific topic of castration anxiety to a more general consideration of our contemporary understanding of sexuality. Being from a psychoanalytic tradition (Kleinian/Bionian) that has not foregrounded the place of sexuality, but has produced a deepening understanding of the epistemological instinct, I have explored whether one might draw on the work on thinking to contribute to a more general theory of development, and then track this through to its implications for sexuality.     

The effect of behavioral response on affective evaluation

In the present research we investigated how action influences affective evaluation. In three experiments, participants conducted a sequence of go/no-go tasks, then evaluated the pleasantness of a novel shape. The results of Experiments 1 and 2 show that participants evaluated the shapes that appeared in the go trials more positively than the shapes that appeared in the no-go trials. In Experiment 3, the go/no-go task was conducted without the to-be-evaluated shapes present in the display. The results show that the shape stimuli following the go trials were evaluated more positively than the shape stimuli following the no-go trials, even when the shapes were not directly associated with the go/no-go task. Based on the present study, we suggest that activating or inhibiting a motoric action may play a critical role in modifying one's affective evaluation. Additionally, the present results suggest that effortful and non-default responses can negatively modulate affective evaluation by taxing an individual's cognitive load. Furthermore, we argue that individuals can potentially control their affective states through behavioral activation and inhibition.