Seeing the world through GREEN‐tinted glasses: Green consumption values and responses to environmentally friendly products

The primary goal of this research is to conceptualize and develop a scale of green consumption values, which we define as the tendency to express the value of environmental protection through one's purchases and consumption behaviors. Across six studies, we demonstrate that the six-item measure we develop (i.e., the GREEN scale) can be used to capture green consumption values in a reliable, valid, and parsimonious manner. We further theorize and empirically demonstrate that green consumption values are part of a larger nomological network associated with conservation of not just environmental resources but also personal financial and physical resources. Finally, we demonstrate that the GREEN scale predicts consumer preference for environmentally friendly products. In doing so, we demonstrate that stronger green consumption values increase preference for environmentally friendly products through more favorable evaluations of the non-environmental attributes of these products. These results have important implications for consumer responses to the growing number of environmentally friendly products.     

When Does Sexuality‐Based Discrimination Motivate Political Participation?

The established consensus in political behavior research is that discrimination by political institutions motivates marginalized groups to vote and protest their conditions. However, existing studies miss a comparison between states with high and low levels of political discrimination, and they miss a comparison between states before and after the development of opportunities for groups to mobilize. In particular, a growing body of research shows that sexual‐minority groups face discrimination to varying degrees across Europe. Sexual minorities in states with high levels of discrimination lack the support of other minority‐group members, which encourages political participation. The analysis is based on surveys of 30 European countries, conducted before and after the 2004 European Union enlargement, which provided a stronger political‐opportunity structure for sexual minorities in Eastern Europe. Eastern Europe and Western Europe provided contexts with relatively high and low levels of sexuality‐based discrimination, respectively. In Western Europe, those who report sexuality‐based discrimination exhibited higher levels of participation, in comparison to those who did not report discrimination. In Eastern Europe, those who report sexuality‐based discrimination exhibited lower levels of participation before the 2004 enlargement, but they did not exhibit these lower levels after the 2004 enlargement.     

Learning nonwords: the Hebb repetition effect as a model of word learning

Page and Norris [(2008). Is there a common mechanism underlying word-form learning and the Hebb repetition effect? Experimental data and a modelling framework. In A. Thorn &; M. P. A. Page (Eds.), Interactions between short-term and long-term memory in the verbal domain; (2009). A model linking immediate serial recall, the Hebb repetition effect and the learning of phonological word forms. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 364(1536), 3737–3753. doi:10.1098/rstb.2009.0173] have suggested that the Hebb [(1961). Distinctive features of learning in the higher animal. In J. F. Delafresnaye (Ed.), Brain mechanisms and learning (pp. 37–46). Oxford: Blackwell] repetition paradigm can be considered as a laboratory analogue of word learning. In Hebb learning experiments, the lists of items to be learned are presented as discrete sequences. In contrast, novel words are, by definition, always heard as a single coarticulated whole. Might this undermine the claim that Hebb learning can shed light on word learning? Here we report an experiment comparing learning sequences of isolated syllables with learning the same sequences spoken as a single coarticulated nonword. The pattern of learning was similar in the two cases, suggesting that the Hebb repetition paradigm can indeed provide valuable insights into the way novel word forms are learned.     

ERP evidence of visualization at early stages of visual processing

Recent neuroimaging research suggests that early visual processing circuits are activated similarly during visualization and perception but have not demonstrated that the cortical activity is similar in character. We found functional equivalency in cortical activity by recording evoked potentials while color and luminance patterns were viewed and while they were visualized with the eyes closed. Cortical responses were found to be different when imagining a color pattern vs. imagining a checkerboard luminance pattern, but the same when imagining a color pattern (or checkerboard pattern) vs. seeing the same pattern. This suggests that early visual processing stages may play a dynamic role in internal image generation, and further implies that visual imagery may modulate perception.     

Latent growth curve analysis of fear during a speech task before and after treatment for social phobia

Models of social phobia highlight the importance of anticipatory anxiety in the experience of fear during a social situation. Anticipatory anxiety has been shown to be highly correlated with performance anxiety for a variety of social situations. A few studies show that average ratings of anxiety during the anticipation and performance phases of a social situation decline following treatment. Evidence also suggests that the point of confrontation with the feared stimulus is the peak level of fear. No study to date has evaluated the pattern of anxious responding across the anticipation, confrontation, and performance phases before and after treatment, which is the focus of the current study. Socially phobic individuals (N = 51) completed a behavioral avoidance task before and after two types of manualized cognitive behavioral therapy, and gave ratings of fear during the anticipation and performance phases.Results from latent growth curve analysis were the same for the two treatments and suggested that before treatment, anxiety sharply increased during the anticipation phase, was highly elevated at the confrontation, and gradually increased during the performance phase. After treatment, anxiety increased during the anticipation phase, although at a much slower rate than at pretreatment, peaked at confrontation, and declined during the performance phase. The findings suggest that anticipatory experiences are critical to the experience of fear for public speaking and should be incorporated into exposures.     

Impact of Interpersonal Conflict on Individuals High in Unmitigated Communion1

The current study examined the impact of interpersonal conflict on mood and physical symptoms for individuals who scored high on a personality characteristic called unmitigated communion (UC), as compared to individuals who did not score high in UC. UC is defined as a focus on others to the exclusion of the self. Forty‐one undergraduate students participated in 7 consecutive nightly interviews. Participants described their social interactions, indicated whether the interaction involved interpersonal conflict, and indicated their distress and physical symptoms at the end of the day. Multilevel modeling analysis demonstrated that conflict adversely affected UC and non‐UC individuals similarly on the same day, but had a more negative impact for UC individuals on the following day.     

Not wallowing in misery – retractions of negative misinformation are effective in depressive rumination

People often continue to rely on misinformation in their reasoning after they have acknowledged a retraction; this phenomenon is known as the continued-influence effect. Retractions can be particularly ineffective when the retracted misinformation is consistent with a pre-existing worldview. We investigated this effect in the context of depressive rumination. Given the prevalence of depressotypic worldviews in depressive rumination, we hypothesised that depressive rumination may affect the processing of retractions of valenced misinformation; specifically, we predicted that the retraction of negative misinformation might be less effective in depressive ruminators. In two experiments, we found evidence against this hypothesis: in depressive ruminators, retractions of negative misinformation were at least as effective as they were in control participants, and more effective than retractions of positive misinformation. Findings are interpreted in terms of an attentional bias that may enhance the salience of negative misinformation and may thus facilitate its updating in depressive rumination.     

Screening for developmental and behavioral problems

Early detection of developmental and behavioral/mental health problems is greatly facilitated when quality instruments are deployed. This article describes how to identify accurate measures and presents standards for screening tests. Included is a table delineating accurate tools for primary care: typically those relying on information from parents (e.g., PEDS, ASQ, PSC, etc.) as well as measures useful in settings where providers have more time and skill at eliciting behaviors from children (e.g., Brigance screens). Screening measures should be used in the context of developmental surveillance; the longitudinal process of incorporating professional observations into decision-making about children's developmental needs.