Attitude Importance: Understanding the Causes and Consequences of Passionately Held Views

People care passionately about some attitudes and consider them deeply important, and they accord no particular significance to other attitudes. In the current paper, we review the state of the psychological literature on attitude importance. We consider the factors that cause people to attach importance to some attitudes but not to others, and we review the cognitive, affective, and behavioral consequences of attaching importance to an attitude. Finally, we explore several open questions regarding attitude importance, charting a course for future research in this area.     

Explorations of the effectiveness of a voluntary sector psychodynamic counselling service

This paper reports two studies of individual psychodynamic counselling provided by a voluntary sector service. The first study examines evidence of the effectiveness of counselling, as evaluated by the General Health Questionnaire and Personal Opinion Survey. Measures of the process of counselling indicated the improvements that clients attributed to counselling, the changes that occurred during it, and the factors that were most beneficial, as well as the approaches used by counsellors. The second study, using the CORE Outcome Measure and ratings of problem severity, found counselling to be equally effective with disadvantaged and non‐disadvantaged clients, as defined by British Department of Health criteria, but these clients differed somewhat in their perceptions of helpful aspects of counselling. Both studies also indicated predictors of positive outcome of counselling. The studies are used to illustrate some of the methodological issues around research in this area.     

A Prime Example of the Maluma/Takete Effect? Testing for Sound Symbolic Priming

Certain nonwords, like maluma and takete, are associated with roundness and sharpness, respectively. However, this has typically been demonstrated using explicit tasks. We investigated whether this association would be detectable using a more implicit measure—a sequential priming task. We began with a replication of the standard Maluma/Takete effect (Experiments 1a and 1b) before examining whether round and sharp nonword primes facilitated the categorization of congruent shapes (Experiment 2). We found modest evidence of a priming effect in response accuracy. We next examined whether nonword primes affected categorization of ambiguous shapes, using visual (Experiment 3) and auditory primes (Experiment 4). We found that ambiguous shapes were categorized as round (sharp) more often following the presentation of a round (sharp) nonword. This suggests that phonemes may activate related shape information which then affects the processing of shapes, and that this association emerges even when participants are not explicitly searching for it.     

Clinicians' Experiences of Shared Trauma After the Shootings at Virginia Tech

This phenomenological study was designed to describe the shared trauma perspectives of 8 counselors who experienced the shootings at Virginia Tech and responded to community mental health needs. Shared trauma, vicarious traumatization, compassion fatigue, vicarious resilience, and posttraumatic growth were examined. Themes derived from interviews included changed perceptions of those who experienced shared trauma and the influence of the experiences on clinicians' work. Implications for practitioners and for counselor training are presented.     

Virtual reality in the rehabilitation of people with intellectual disabilities: review.

Virtual reality (VR) possesses many qualities that give it rehabilitative potential for people with intellectual disabilities, both as an intervention and an assessment. It can provide a safe setting in which to practice skills that might carry too many risks in the real world. Unlike human tutors, computers are infinitely patient and consistent. Virtual worlds can be manipulated in ways the real world cannot be and can convey concepts without the use of language or other symbol systems. Published applications for this client group have all been as rehabilitative interventions. These are described in three groups: promoting skills for independent living, enhancing cognitive performance, and improving social skills. Five groups of studies are reviewed that utilize virtual technology to promote skills for independent living: grocery shopping, preparing food, orientation, road safety, and manufacturing skills. Fears that skills or habits learnt in a virtual setting would not transfer to the real world setting have not been supported by the available evidence, apart from those studies with people with autistic spectrum disorders. Future directions are in the development of more applications for independent living skills, exploring interventions for promoting motor and cognitive skills, and the developments of ecologically valid forms of assessment.     

Long-Term Patterns and Predictors of Successful Stressor Resolution in Later Life

At 1 year, 4 years, and 10 years after baseline, late-middle-aged adults reported whether they had successfully resolved their most important stressor of the past year. Compared to individuals who never resolved focal stressors over the 10-year interval, those who always did consistently showed less negative stressor appraisal, less reliance on avoidance coping, and less use of exploratory relative to directed coping responses, independent of type and severity of focal stressor. Less use of exploratory relative to directed coping and having more social resources, fewer health problems, and fewer depressive symptoms at baseline predicted more stressor resolution over the next 10 years. These predictors are promising foci for prospective efforts to optimize ways in which aging adults manage late-life stressors.     

Ambiguity and synonymy effects in lexical decision,naming, and semantic categorization tasks: interactions between orthography,phonology, and semantics

In this article, ambiguity and synonymy effects were examined in lexical decision, naming, and semantic categorization tasks. Whereas the typical ambiguity advantage was observed in lexical decision and naming, an ambiguity disadvantage was observed in semantic categorization. In addition, a synonymy effect (slower latencies for words with many synonyms than for words with few synonyms) was observed in lexical decision and naming but not in semantic categorization. These results suggest that (a) an ambiguity disadvantage arises only when a task requires semantic processing, (b) the ambiguity advantage and the synonymy disadvantage in lexical decision and naming are due to semantic feedback, and (c) these effects are determined by the nature of the feedback relationships from semantics to orthography and phonology.     

Phonological effects in visual word recognition: investigating the impact of feedback activation

P. M. Pexman, S. J. Lupker, and D. Jared (2001) reported longer response latencies in lexical decision tasks (LDTs) for homophones (e.g., maid) than for nonhomophones, and attributed this homophone effect to orthographic competition created by feedback activation from phonology. In the current study, two predictions of this feedback account were tested: (a) In LDT, observe homophone effects should be observed but not regularity or homograph effects because most exception words (e.g., pint) and homographs (e.g., wind) have different feedback characteristics than homophones do, and (b) in a phonological LDT ("does it sound like a word?"), regularity and homograph effects should be observed but not homophone effects. Both predictions were confirmed. These results support the claim that feedback activation from phonology plays a significant role in visual word recognition.