What Is the Optimal Way to Deliver a Positive Activity Intervention? The Case of Writing About One’s Best Possible Selves

A 4-week-long experiment examined the effects of a positive activity intervention in which students wrote about their “best possible selves” (BPS) once a week. We manipulated two factors that might affect the success of the happiness-increasing activity—whether the positive activity was administered online versus in-person and whether the participant read a persuasive peer testimonial before completing the activity. Our results indicated that the BPS activity significantly boosted positive affect and flow and marginally increased feelings of relatedness. No differences were found between participants who completed the positive activity online versus in-person. However, students who read a testimonial extolling the virtues of the BPS activity showed larger gains in well-being than those who read neutral information or completed a control task. The results lend legitimacy to online self-administered happiness-increasing activities and highlight the importance of participants’ beliefs in the efficacy of such activities for optimum results.     

Gutachtenleitfaden

The article presents an operationalized and manualized approach for the assessment of the capability of performance. This manual has been conceptualized and tested empirically by a multicentric and interdisciplinary workgroup. It is basically oriented to the “International Classification of Functioning” (ICF; WHO), which is well accepted for assessing the course of chronic diseases and the consequences for the individual. It is especially widely applied in the context of rehabilitation. The different diagnostic levels of the manual and their operationalization are outlined. Furthermore, the first results concerning reliability, content validity, applicability and practicability are described and questions on the areas of application of the instrument are discussed.     

Stability of Religious Orientation and Academic Dishonesty

This study examines the probable influence of individual religiosity on academic cheating among a group of Seventh-day Adventist youth, grades 6 through 12. A multiple-regression analysis was used to determine the relationship between academic beliefs or behaviors and academic dishonesty. The following research questions were investigated: (1) Is there a relationship between students' religious experience or religious activities and academic honesty? (2) What religious variables influence academic honesty? and (3) What is the correlation between the stability of religious orientation and academic honesty? Although the final model proved to be statistically significant, the findings suggest no direct impact on academic honesty. The implications of this study and the influential factors are discussed.     

ERPs reveal comparable syntactic sentence processing in native and non-native readers of English

L2 syntactic processing has been primarily investigated in the context of syntactic anomaly detection, but only sparsely with syntactic ambiguity. In the field of event-related potentials (ERPs) syntactic anomaly detection and syntactic ambiguity resolution is linked to the P600. The current ERP experiment examined L2 syntactic processing in highly proficient L1 Spanish-L2 English readers who had acquired English informally around the age of 5 years. Temporary syntactic ambiguity (induced by verb subcategorization information) was tested as a language-specific phenomenon of L2, while syntactic anomaly resulted from phrase structure constraints that are similar in L1 and L2. Participants judged whether a sentence was syntactically acceptable or not. Native readers of English showed a P600 in the temporary syntactically ambiguous and syntactically anomalous sentences. A comparable picture emerged in the non-native readers of English. Both critical syntactic conditions elicited a P600, however, the distribution and latency of the P600 varied in the syntactic anomaly condition. The results clearly show that early acquisition of L2 syntactic knowledge leads to comparable online sensitivity towards temporal syntactic ambiguity and syntactic anomaly in early and highly proficient non-native readers of English and native readers of English.     

Truth-Tracking by Belief Revision

Studia Logica - We study the learning power of iterated belief revision methods. Successful learning is understood as convergence to correct, i.e., true, beliefs. We focus on the issue of...     

The Psychological Dimension of Informed Consent: Dissonance Processes in Genetic Testing

This paper discusses the issue of the psychological dimension of informed consent. In this paper, the author proposes that informed consent is a continuous variable rather than a dichotomous one. When clients better understand their motives and actual, rather than just perceived degree of choice in pursuing a particular option in a medical setting, their level of informed consent is greater. Findings from existing literature in the field of genetic testing are examined in terms of dissonance theory. These findings suggest that testing candidates sometimes overestimate their coping skills and minimize the threat to psychological integrity that a particular genetic result may pose. Counseling directed towards realistic appraisal of degree of choice in pursuing testing is examined as an aspect of supporting informed consent and possibly reducing the potential for adverse psychological outcome in the longer term.     

Psycholinguistic evidence for the underspecification of morphosyntactic features

This paper investigates the paradigmatic relations between inflected word forms (or their affixes) and the feature specifications of these elements. In two sentence-matching experiments German speakers had to decide whether sentence pairs involving inflected adjectives or determiners were identical or not. In both experiments, there was a delay when an inflected form contained positive feature specifications for grammatical features that did not match the feature specifications of the grammatical context in which it appeared. No delay, however, occurred when an incorrectly inflected form had mismatching negative specifications, whereas its positively specified features matched the respective positive features of the context. This result provides evidence for a different status of positively and negatively specified morphosyntactic features. It supports the idea of radical underspecification according to which only positive feature specifications are part of the representations of morphologically complex forms or affixes, whereas negative feature specifications are assigned on the basis of paradigmatic contrasts.