A test of the relations between avoidance of panic-related situations and substance use, substance dependence, and depression among subclinical panickers

The hypotheses that among subclinical panickers, avoidance of panic-related situations would be associated with elevated substance use levels and increased likelihood of lifetime diagnoses of substance dependence and major depressive disorder (MDD) were tested. Findings confirmed that panic-related avoidance was associated with an elevated likelihood of lifetime diagnoses of nicotine and alcohol dependence as well as MDD, but not drug dependence. Panic avoidance was also related to relatively greater daily levels of cigarette and alcohol use.     

Money Imbued With Essence: How We Preserve,Invest, and Spend Inherited Money

The unique nature of inherited money is reflected in financial decisions concerning such bequests. A legacy originates in somber circumstances and bears the distinctive characteristics of the deceased. In four experiments and a survey among inheritors we found that people tended to preserve the inheritance; participants were reluctant to spend the legacy on hedonic goods or risk it by investing in the stock market. Inheritors with a close relationship with the deceased were more likely to seek uses congenial to the personality and the values of the departed. The results are discussed in terms of magical thinking and coping with bereavement.     

Proximal and distal effects of mortality salience on willingness to engage in health promoting behavior along the life span

The current studies examine proximal and distal mortality salience effects on the willingness to engage in health-promoting activities and explore the roles of age and self-esteem. In Study 1, 164 participants completed a self-esteem scale, were assigned to a mortality salience or a neutral condition, and then completed a scale, tapping their willingness to engage in health promoting activities. Findings revealed that in the proximal mode, mortality salience led the young and middle-aged adults to report higher willingness to promote health behaviors, whereas older adults tended to show a lower willingness to promote their health compared to the control condition. In Study 2, a total of 251 participants completed the same series of questionnaires, including a distracting task immediately after the mortality salience manipulation. Findings revealed that, in the distal mode, whereas death reminders did not affect young adults, mortality salience led middle-aged participants to express higher willingness to conduct health-promoting behaviors than in a control condition. The mortality salience induction did not affect older adults with high self-esteem, but led low self-esteem individuals to report higher willingness to promote their health. The differences between the reactions of the different age groups in both the defense modes are discussed in view of the terror management theory.     

The Role of Probability and Intentionality in Preschoolers' Causal Generalizations

Three experiments examined whether preschoolers recognize that the causal properties of objects generalize to new members of the same set given either deterministic or probabilistic data. Experiment 1 found that 3- and 4-year-olds were able to make such a generalization given deterministic data but were at chance when they observed probabilistic information. Five-year-olds reliably generalized in both situations. Experiment 2 found that 4-year-olds could make some probabilistic inferences, particularly when comparing sets that had no efficacy with sets in which some members had efficacy. Children had some difficulty discriminating between completely effective sets and stochastic ones. Experiment 3 examined whether 3- and 4-year-olds could reason about probabilistic data when provided with information about the experimenter's beliefs about causal outcomes. Children who were more successful on standard false-belief measures were more likely to respond as if the data were deterministic. These data suggest that children's probabilistic inferences develop into early elementary school, but preschoolers might have some understanding of probability when reasoning about causal generalization.     

The Blicket Within: Preschoolers' Inferences About Insides and Causes

Four experiments examined children's inferences about the relation between objects' internal parts and their causal properties. In Experiment 1, 4-year-olds recognized that objects with different internal parts had different causal properties, and those causal properties transferred if the internal part moved to another object. In Experiment 2, 4-year-olds made inferences from an object's internal parts to its causal properties without being given verbal labels for objects or being shown that insides and causal properties covaried. Experiment 3 found that 4-year-olds chose an object with the same internal part over one with the same external property when asked which object had the same causal property as the target (which had both the internal part and external property). Finally, Experiment 4 demonstrated that 4-year-olds made similar inferences from causal properties to internal parts, but 3-year-olds relied more on objects' external perceptual appearance. These results suggest that by the age of 4, children have developed an understanding of a relation between an artifact's internal parts and its causal properties.     

Personal and Environmental Factors Predict Participation of Children With and Without Mild Developmental Disabilities

Enhancing participation in age-related activities is a key goal in the education and rehabilitation of children with diverse disabilities. The aim of this study was to explore a multidimensional and ecological model of participation for young children. Seventy eight children with mild developmental disabilities (MDD, such as motor and visual-motor difficulties), and 110 children without disabilities, between the ages 4 and 6 years old, participated in the study together with their parents. Data were collected using standardized assessments for child capacities and newly developed questionnaires for child participation and for human and physical environmental factors. Associations were found between personal and environmental factors and the participation dimensions amongst young children, thus supporting the validity of the proposed model of participation. Moreover, the study results outline different pathways for the participation of children with and without MDD. Child factors (e.g. process skills) were found to be crucial predictors of participation particularly for children with MDD, whereas human environmental factor (e.g. maternal self-efficacy beliefs) was associated with higher participation scores especially for children without disabilities. These findings may facilitate the development of effective intervention programs which focus on environmental factors as well as on child factors.     

Attention to distinguishing features in object recognition

This study advances the hypothesis that, in the course of object recognition, attention is directed to distinguishing features: visual information that is diagnostic of object identity in a specific context. In five experiments, observers performed an object categorization task involving drawings of fish (Experiments 1–4) and photographs of natural sea animals (Experiment 5). Allocation of attention to distinguishing and non-distinguishing features was examined using primed-matching (Experiment 1) and visual probe (Experiments 2, 4, 5) methods, and manipulated by spatial precuing (Experiment 3). Converging results indicated that in performing the object categorization task, attention was allocated to the distinguishing features in a context-dependent manner, and that such allocation facilitated performance. Based on the view that object recognition, like categorization, is essentially a process of discrimination between probable alternatives, the implications of the findings for the role of attention to distinguishing features in object recognition are discussed.     

Reasonable reasons for waiting

Recent decision‐making research claims to establish that, in violation of Savage's normative sure‐thing principle, individuals often wait to acquire noninstrumental information and subsequently base their decisions upon this information. The current research suggests that characterizing individuals as pursuing noninstrumental or useless information may be overstated. Through a series of experiments we establish, first, that many people choose to wait, even when waiting provides no additional information at all. Second, the longer people are allowed to wait before having to decide, the more people prefer to wait rather than decide immediately. Third, those individuals who choose to wait are the ones less confident about committing themselves to a decision. For them, the benefit from waiting may be especially valuable by allowing them to come to terms with a less‐than‐ideal decision. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.