Distinguishing the cognitive and behavioral consequences of attitude importance and certainty: A new approach to testing the common-factor hypothesis

Some published factor analyses have suggested that attitude importance and certainty are distinct psychological constructs, but other factor analytic investigations have suggested they are largely redundant reflections of a more general underlying construct. This latter sort of finding has led investigators to average measures of importance and certainty together into a composite index and then explore its cognitive and behavioral consequences. In this paper, we report three studies gauging the underlying structure of these strength-related attitude attributes by assessing whether they in fact relate in the same ways to information processing and action tendencies. We found that importance and certainty both independently predicted the likelihood that a person attempted to persuade others to adopt his or her attitude. Importance (but not certainty) was associated with the tendency to seek out information that would enable people to use their attitudes in a subsequent judgment and only importance predicted whether or not they turned out to vote in an election to express their attitudes. Certainty (but not importance) was related to the tendency to find more than one political candidate acceptable. And importance and certainty interacted to predict the frequency with which people performed attitude-expressive behaviors. All this suggests that importance and certainty have distinct effects on thinking and behavior and supports the maintenance of conceptual and empirical distinctions between them in social psychological theory building.     

In the Pursuit of Absence: Reimagining Early Loss within the Psychotherapy Relationship

In this paper I examine absence—absence as an internal relationship, absence as an enactment, absences characteristic of psychotherapy, absence as a theory, and absence as something people do to each other, including patients, therapists, families, and societies. To illustrate these ideas, I discuss my work with Gemma. When absence enters our relationship in a very present way, the powerful emotions that absence eludes come alive for us. Forced to confront my own absences, I begin doing a better job of holding her in mind, which ultimately helps her to hold me in mind and make better use of me.     

The development of and interaction among alerting,orienting, and executive attention in children

A sex-balanced sample (N = 96) of children from age 6.5 to age 12.5 completed a modified Attention Network Test. Across these ages, we found evidence for developmental changes to alerting and executive control but stable orienting. Additionally, we found that the youngest members of our sample manifested an interaction between alerting and executive control that is opposite to that typically found in adults; a reversal that diminishes with age to achieve the adult pattern by the older end of the age range of our sample.     

Counselling the community: The contribution of counselling psychologists to the development of primary care

The primary care groups (PCGs) newly introduced to the National Health Service require general practitioners and primary care teams to improve the health of their communities by addressing the health needs of their population, promoting the health of that population and working with other organizations to deliver effective and appropriate care. Community-oriented primary care (COPC) is an internationally tested model for primary health care development which is now being employed within the UK. This paper outlines the COPC model, and demonstrates how the skills and knowledge base of counselling psychologists and primary care counselling can contribute to a community-oriented primary care approach.     

The Calgary semantic decision project: concrete/abstract decision data for 10,000 English words

Psycholinguistic research has been advanced by the development of word recognition megastudies. For instance, the English Lexicon Project (Balota et al., 2007) provides researchers with access to naming and lexical-decision latencies for over 40,000 words. In the present work, we extended the megastudy approach to a task that emphasizes semantic processing. Using a concrete/abstract semantic decision (i.e., does the word refer to something concrete or abstract?), we collected decision latencies and accuracy rates for 10,000 English words. The stimuli were concrete and abstract words selected from Brysbaert, Warriner, and Kuperman’s (2013) comprehensive list of concreteness ratings. In total, 321 participants provided responses to 1,000 words each. Whereas semantic effects tend to be quite modest in naming and lexical decision studies, analyses of the concrete/abstract semantic decision responses show that a substantial proportion of variance can be explained by semantic variables. The item-level and trial-level data will be useful for other researchers interested in the semantic processing of concrete and abstract words.     

Is more always better? Effects of semantic richness on lexical decision, speeded pronunciation, and semantic classification

Evidence from large-scale studies (Pexman, Hargreaves, Siakaluk, Bodner, & Pope, 2008) suggests that semantic richness, a multidimensional construct reflecting the extent of variability in the information associated with a word's meaning, facilitates visual word recognition. Specifically, recognition is better for words that (1) have more semantic neighbors, (2) possess referents with more features, and (3) are associated with more contexts. The present study extends Pexman et al. (2008) by examining how two additional measures of semantic richness, number of senses and number of associates (Pexman, Hargreaves, Edwards, Henry, & Goodyear, 2007), influence lexical decision, speeded pronunciation, and semantic classification performance, after controlling for an array of lexical and semantic variables. We found that number of features and contexts consistently facilitated word recognition but that the effects of semantic neighborhood density and number of associates were less robust. Words with more senses also elicited faster lexical decisions but less accurate semantic classifications. These findings point to how the effects of different semantic dimensions are selectively and adaptively modulated by task-specific demands.     

examining holland's person—environment fit,workplace aggression,interpersonal conflict,and job satisfaction

The researchers examined the impact of person–environment (P‐E) fit, as defined by Holland's (1997) theory, on interpersonal conflict at work (ICAW) and workplace aggression. In addition, previous relationships found in the job satisfaction literature were examined in the present sample of 244 United States employees. Internet‐based surveys were completed by 244 participants in the current research. Results of hierarchical multiple regression and correlational analyses demonstrated a negative relationship between P‐E fit and ICAW. Replication of previous relationships was found between job satisfaction, P‐E fit, and workplace aggression. Implications for P‐E fit and workplace aggression research are discussed.     

Evidence for the activation of sensorimotor information during visual word recognition: the body-object interaction effect

We examined the effects of sensorimotor experience in two visual word recognition tasks. Body-object interaction (BOI) ratings were collected for a large set of words. These ratings assess perceptions of the ease with which a human body can physically interact with a word's referent. A set of high BOI words (e.g., mask) and a set of low BOI words (e.g., ship) were created, matched on imageability and concreteness. Facilitatory BOI effects were observed in lexical decision and phonological lexical decision tasks: responses were faster for high BOI words than for low BOI words. We discuss how our findings may be accounted for by (a) semantic feedback within the visual word recognition system, and (b) an embodied view of cognition (e.g., Barsalou's perceptual symbol systems theory), which proposes that semantic knowledge is grounded in sensorimotor interactions with the environment.