The effect of meaningfulness and integrative processing in expressive writing on positive and negative affect and life satisfaction

Meaningfulness and integrative processing of expressive writing may influence the effect of expressive writing. Participants completed measures of positive affect, negative affect and life satisfaction before and after an expressive writing intervention. Participants were randomly assigned to one of four expressive writing instruction conditions, which combined higher and lower levels of meaning and integrative processing instructions. Meaningfulness and integrative processing instructions had significant effects in increasing positive affect and there was a significant interaction between meaningfulness instructions and integrative processing instructions; participants in the high meaningfulness and high integrative processing instruction condition showed the greatest increase in positive affect. Meaningfulness had a significant effect in decreasing negative affect. The intervention did not influence life satisfaction. Both meaningfulness and integrative processing instructions led to more self-reported personal meaningfulness of the writing and more cognitive, emotional, behavioural and situational changes. More self-reported meaningfulness of the writing and more cognitive, emotional, behavioural and situational changes made as a result of the writing were in turn associated with greater increases in positive affect. The results of the study affirm the importance of meaningfulness and processing in expressive writing and potentially provide information regarding how to increase the effectiveness of expressive writing.     

Affective state and event-based prospective memory

Event-based prospective memory tasks require the realisation of a delayed intention at the occurrence of a specific target event. The present research investigates how performance in this kind of prospective memory task is influenced by the current affective state. By manipulating participants' mood during intention realisation we tested two competing models of mood effects on memory (i.e., a capacity consuming account and a processing style account). Furthermore, we manipulated the valence of the target event to investigate mood-congruency effects in prospective memory. No evidence was found for a mood-congruency effect, but the results showed that prospective memory performance increased with a sad mood. This effect is consistent with recent theories on mood-dependent processing-style regulation, postulating that a sad mood produces a more analytic and detailed processing style whereas a happy mood produces a more global and less detailed processing style.     

Beyond “Empowerment”? Sexuality in a Sexist World

The subject of girls’ sexual empowerment is a fertile area for feminist debate. While most feminists are committed to the promotion of diverse and egalitarian sexual possibilities for girls (and women), we differ in our views on how to hold an aspirational vision alongside paying attention to real world constraints on its unfolding. A specific instance of this tension is posed in considering how relevant claims to individual empowerment are within a broader context that remains broadly sexist and limiting as well as saturated with racist and other forms of discrimination and inequality. In this paper, I join the dialogue opened by Lamb and Peterson (2011) to explore some of these questions. I argue that the concept of sexual empowerment, as taken up in these debates, might be too flexible to do the work we require of it. In particular, I suggest that it is unhelpful to fix our lens on claims of individual empowerment, if and where this involves eliding the broader sociocultural conditions of possibility for “intimate justice” (McClelland 2010) for girls and women; and, where it leads us to over-ride the psychosocial complexity of all individuals in ways that distract us from attending to ambivalence and understanding the “cruel attachments” that can bind us to injustice. Rather than seeking to offer an “‘expert’ view of empowerment,” I argue for the value of reflexive, empathic, and respectful feminist critique of the cultural conditions of possibility for such a thing.     

Evidence for a Needs-Based Model of Organizational-Meeting Leadership

The aim of this study was to investigate whether an association exists between 19 meeting-leader behaviors of the type that tend to meet attendee needs and attendee ratings of satisfaction with the meeting and productivity of the meeting. An observer blind to the ratings of attendees recorded which of 19 needs-related behaviors the leader showed and then collected anonymous meeting-rating data from the attendees. The study included data from 60 organizational meetings and a total of 401 meeting attendees. The results indicate that the overall level of leader behaviors shown, out of 19 different behaviors observed, was significantly associated with attendee ratings of the meeting. Several individual meeting-leader behaviors showed significant associations with ratings of either meeting productivity or satisfaction with the meeting: arriving before the start of the meeting, speaking succinctly, moving the meeting along, encouraging participation, encouraging decision making, paraphrasing someone’s, smiling more than once, saying something positive about the future of the organization, and summarizing the decisions made. The results provide preliminary support for a new needs-based model of organizational-meeting leadership. The results also suggest specific leader behaviors that may contribute to meeting productivity and satisfaction.     

Young children's coordination of motive and outcome in judgements of satisfaction and morality

Three- to seven-year-old children judged a story-character's satisfaction. Their comprehension of the relationship between motives and outcomes of action was tested by presenting them with matching and with mismatching outcomes. For example, one character's motive, depicted in a ‘thinks’ bubble, was to throw a ball to one of two children. In a matching outcome, the intended child caught the ball, whereas in a mismatching outcome, the other child caught it. Even the youngest children judged the character more pleased when the outcome matched his motive than when it did not. This suggests that children from three years old can integrate motive and outcome information. Children under seven years failed to judge satisfaction appropriately when motives and outcomes were bad. Comparisons of children's satisfaction judgements with their moral judgements of the story-characters suggested possible reasons for this failure. The implications of the results for social cognition and information integration are discussed.