Whaling,Bullfighting, and the Conditional Value of Tradition

Res Publica - The paper develops an account of the value of tradition that completes that of Samuel Scheffler and employs it to discuss whaling and bullfighting. The discussion, however, is...     

Critical consciousness among rural adolescents: the roles of school connection and positive relationships with teachers

Social Psychology of Education - Critical consciousness (CC) has been linked to academic and civic engagement for students from marginalized backgrounds, but little work has examined CC for...     

Psychometric properties of Spanish version of the Mini-Mental Adjustment to Cancer Scale

Background/ObjectiveThe aim of the study was to examine the factor structure and psychometric properties of the Spanish version of the Mini-Mental Adjustment to Cancer Scale (Mini-MAC) in a large sample of patients with non-metastatic, resected cancer.MethodsProspective, observational, multicenter study for which 914 patients were recruited from 15 Spanish hospitals. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses, validity and reliability analyses were conducted.ResultsFactor-analytic results indicated a 4-factor structure of the Spanish version of the Mini-MAC. Three subscales have psychometric properties similar to those of Helplessness, Anxious preoccupation, and Cognitive avoidance of the original the Mini-MAC. The Fighting spirit and the Fatalism subscales were combined on the Positive attitude scale. The four factor-derived scale scores exhibited acceptable accuracy for individual measurement purposes, as well as stability over time in test-retest assessments at 6 months. Validity assessments found meaningful relations between the derived scale scores, and Brief Symptom Inventory depression and anxiety scores and Functional Assessment of Chronic Illness Therapy spiritual well-being scores.ConclusionsThe Spanish version of the Mini-MAC provides reliable and valid measures for patients with non-metastatic, resected cancer, and results corroborate the instrument’s cross-cultural validity.     

Successfully Contesting the Policy Sphere: Examining Through the Press a Case of Local Protests Changing New Ecological Laws

It is crucial to gain better insights into how psychosocial processes can limit the power of the political/legislative sphere for promoting social change through new laws. One form of accomplishing this is by illuminating the arguments and the content and value of social representations at play in cases in which the public sphere succeeds in contesting new laws. In this article, we explore a case of successful resistance to new ecological laws in a Portuguese Natura site. The laws, restricting recreational fishing, were made less stringent after meeting with local opposition. Content analysis of 122 articles published from 2006 to 2014 in regional and national newspapers reveals that protestors (fishermen, local authorities) received higher visibility and support and had more direct voice than the political sphere in both presses. Dialogical analysis of direct quotations of protestors shows how they seek legitimacy by establishing common ground with valued representations, vividly invoking people‐place bonds and tradition, and also how they attempt to undermine the law's legitimacy by linking local and national concerns, avoiding (potentially devalued) “Nimby” (“not in my backyard”) arguments. The discussion highlights what can be learned from using the press to investigate policy struggles that successfully organized their argumentation to contest new laws.     

Social Problems in ADHD: Is it a Skills Acquisition or Performance Problem?

Recent models suggest that social skills training’s inefficacy for children with ADHD may be due to target misspecification, such that their social problems reflect inconsistent performance rather than knowledge/skill gaps. No study to date, however, has disentangled social skills acquisition from performance deficits in children with ADHD. Children ages 8–12 with ADHD (n?=?47) and without ADHD (n?=?23) were assessed using the well-validated social behavioral analysis framework to quantify cross-informant social skills acquisition deficits, performance deficits, and strengths. Results provided support for the construct and predictive validities of this Social Skills Improvement System (SSIS) alternate scoring method, including expected magnitude and valence relations with BASC-2 social skills and ADHD symptoms based on both parent and teacher report. Acquisition deficits were relatively rare and idiosyncratic for both the ADHD and Non-ADHD groups, whereas children with ADHD demonstrated cross-informant social performance deficits (d?= 0.82–0.99) on several specific behaviors involving attention to peer directives, emotion regulation, and social reciprocity. Relative to themselves, children with ADHD were perceived by parents and teachers as exhibiting more social strengths than social acquisition deficits; however, they demonstrated significantly fewer social strengths than the Non-ADHD group (d?=??0.71 to ?0.89). These findings are consistent with recent conceptualizations suggesting that social problems in ADHD primarily reflect inconsistent performance rather than a lack of social knowledge/skills. Implications for refining social skills interventions for ADHD are discussed.     

Cognitive behavioural group therapy for social phobia: evidence of transportability to community clinics

Cognitive Behavioural Group Therapy (CBGT) for social phobia has been shown to be efficacious within research units and effective within a variety of real world clinical settings. However, most effectiveness studies of CBGT for social phobia have (a) used protocols without demonstrated efficacy, (b) not included direct comparison groups, and/or (c) contained features of efficacy trials. This study addressed these limitations by using a benchmarking strategy to compare outcomes from the same CBGT protocol used in both a research unit and a community clinic. Research (N = 71) and community (N = 94) patients completed the same 12-session protocol, which resulted in significant reductions in social anxiety and life interference at post-treatment. Compared to research unit patients, community patients had more severe symptoms and life interference at pre-treatment, and were more likely to be male, use medication, have comorbid disorders, and have lower educational attainment. Importantly, degree of improvement on social anxiety symptoms and life interference did not differ across the treatment settings for either completer or intention-to-treat analyses. There was some evidence that being younger, single, and having a depression diagnosis were associated with dropout. Pre-treatment symptoms and number of diagnoses predicted post-treatment symptoms. Consistent with previous uncontrolled trials, it is concluded that CBGT is effective within community mental health clinics.     

The costs and benefits of memory conformity

We examined the influence of external recommendations on memory attributions. In two experiments, participants were led to believe that they were viewing the responses of two prior students to the same memoranda they were currently judging. However, they were not informed of the reliability of these fictive sources of cues or provided with performance feedback as testing proceeded. Experiment 1 demonstrated improvement in the presence of reliable source cues (75% valid), as compared to uncued recognition, whereas performance was unaltered in the presence of random cues provided by an unreliable source (50% valid). Critically, participants did not ignore the unreliable source, but instead appeared to restrict cue use from both sources to low-confidence trials on which internal evidence was highly unreliable. Experiment 2 demonstrated that participants continued to treat an unreliable source as potentially informative even when it was predominantly incorrect (25% valid), highlighting severe limitations in the ability to adequately discount unreliable or deceptive sources of memory cues. Thus, under anonymous source conditions, observers appear to use a low-confidence outsourcing strategy, wherein they restrict reliance on external cues to situations of low confidence.     

Automatically activated facets of ageism: Masked evaluative priming allows for a differentiation of age‐related prejudice

This study investigated the automatic activation of ageism by using a go/no‐go version of the masked evaluative priming task. Pictures of younger persons, of older persons in everyday contexts, and of older persons depicting age‐related conditions of decline were used as masked primes that preceded positive and negative target adjectives conveying either other‐relevant valence (e.g., just and mean) or possessor‐relevant valence (e.g., serene and lonely). The evaluative priming effect (denoting relative negativity of old‐everyday primes in comparison with younger primes) was significant, as hypothesized, only for possessor‐relevant targets. It was not moderated by explicit ageism. A second priming index (denoting relative negativity of old‐decline primes in comparison with old‐everyday primes) predicted, however, explicit ageism. Again, this result was, as expected, constrained to the index based on possessor‐relevant targets. This study provides further evidence that prejudice in terms of automatic evaluations of social stimuli can be more fine grained beyond a mere one‐dimensional positive–negative differentiation. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Legal Innovation for Social Change: Exploring Change and Resistance to Different Types of Sustainability Laws

In this article I argue that a desirable future direction for political psychology would be to pay more attention to social‐psychological processes involved in the response to innovative laws, in particular those devised with sustainability and environmental protection aims. This involves taking into account the following premises: (1) innovation and change are not unitary phenomena; instead there are different types of innovation; (2) legal and policy innovation is a specific type and is highly central in an era when global challenges are increasingly dealt with by global treaties which are then translated into national laws with a call to transform local practices; (3) offering attention to the reception of such innovation involves developing specific conceptual tools; (4) devising a typology of legal innovation is one step in this direction; (5) furthering our comprehension of how people, groups, and institutions receive—i.e., accept, contest—legal innovation for sustainability is important for helping to push forward sustainability goals, which are legislated but far from attained. The present article outlines theoretical tools for addressing psychosocial processes involved in the reception of legal innovation, drawing mostly on the approach of social representations and the literature of environmental psychology, and offers three criteria for a typology of laws. Finally I present some examples of responses to subtypes of legal innovation from the sustainability domain, taken as an illustrative case, and discuss differences and commonalities in the processes of acceptance and resistance that each mobilizes.