The role of rapport in satisfying one’s basic psychological needs

Psychological need satisfaction is essential for daily human functioning and one of its sources is high quality interactions. Rapport is essential to high quality interactions and may be one way that various relationships types can provide the nutriments of healthy functioning. We hypothesized that when people perceive interactions to be higher in rapport, they will experience greater satisfaction of their needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness. We also explored whether this would be a basic process that would be altered by the relationship between interactants, testing this with multiple operationalizations. We conducted an event-contingent diary study in which participants (n_participants?=?124) responded to items at baseline, each time they experienced an interaction (n_interaction?=?1293), and at two-week follow-up. Supporting hypotheses, rapport in interactions was positively associated with need satisfaction within-persons, between-persons, cross-sectionally, and when examining temporal change. Moreover, rapport tended to predict the satisfaction of one’s needs for competence, autonomy, and relatedness independently. Finally, relationships between interactants did not moderate these associations.

     

DISCRIMINATION OF LATERALLY DISPLAYED HANDWRITING AND HANDWRITTEN WORDS*

Four highly discriminable words each written in four highly discriminable natural kinds of handwriting were paired and laterally displayed for 180 msec. Thirty-two normal females made same/different judgments for the words and for handwriting; there were 136 trials in each condition. Accuracy and manual reaction times of correct responses were recorded. The usual right-field (left cerebral hemisphere) superiority was observed for word comparisons, but no clear asymmetry emerged for handwriting comparisons. An interference of the words in the comparisons of handwriting was observed mainly in the right field, and interference of the handwriting in the judgments on words occurred equally in both fields.     

A motivation-enhancing treatment to sustain goal engagement during life course transitions

Although theory-driven control striving treatments may sustain motivation for individuals navigating life course transitions, their efficacy during these challenging junctures remains unexamined. In a pre-post randomized field study (n = 316), a novel control striving treatment based on Heckhausen et al.’s (Psychol Rev 117:32–60, 2010) motivational theory of life-span development was administered to young adults making the landmark transition to university. For students who faced obstacles to goal attainment, the motivation-enhancing selective secondary control (SSC) striving treatment (vs. no-treatment) increased performance by 8 % in a two-semester course (74.85 % vs. 66.68 %). Consistent with theory, the SSC treatment-performance linkage was mediated by selective secondary and selective primary control in a hypothesized causal sequence. Findings advance the literature by showing control striving treatments can improve performance for some young adults in transition by promoting adaptive changes in theoretically-derived psychological process variables.     

The Development of Prosocial Behaviors in Young Children: A Prospective Population-Based Cohort Study

Researchers know relatively little about the normative development of children's behaviors aimed at alleviating distress or discomfort in others. In this article, the authors aim to describe the continuity and discontinuity in the degree to which young children in the general population are reported to exhibit specific prosocial behaviors. Data came from the Québec Longitudinal Study of Child Development. Consistent with Hay's model of prosocial development, the results show that there were about as many children who stopped exhibiting prosocial behaviors between 29 and 41 months of age as there were children who started doing so during this period. Further, gender differences (girls > boys) in prosocial behaviors are either emerging or at least increasing in magnitude, with girls being more likely to start and boys being more likely to stop exhibiting these behaviors between 29 and 41 months of age. Consistent with the early-onset hypothesis, children who exhibit prosocial behaviors at 17 months of age are less likely to stop exhibiting the same behaviors between 29 and 41 months of age. Otherwise, if they did not exhibit prosocial behaviors at 29 months of age, they are also more likely to start doing so in the following year.     

Counting the stitches that count: Preventive intervention promises and public health

Continued public support for the design, implementation, and dissemination of preventive interventions depends on achievement of four major criteria: (a) Reductions in the incidence or prevalence rates of diagnosable emotional and behavioral disorders, (b) reductions in the need for mental health services through effective primary and secondary interventions, (c) enhancement of the effectiveness of obtained services as screening and early detection efforts are implemented, and (d) reductions in the nation's health care costs associated with emotional and behavioral dysfunctions. Strategies including risk reduction, risk avoidance, health promotion, empowerment, and resource development are preventive insofar as they contribute to achievement of the aforementioned outcomes.     

Prefrontal and hippocampal contributions to encoding and retrieval of spatial memory

The prefrontal cortex is thought to be critical for goal-directed action and the hippocampus is known to be importantly involved in spatial memory. Several studies have been suggestive of a role for the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) in spatial navigation. However, the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) receives projections directly from the intermediate CA1 (iCA1) region of hippocampus and this link may be critical for spatial navigation. The purpose of the present investigation was to test the performance of rats receiving bilateral or disconnection infusions of lidocaine into OFC, mPFC, or iCA1 to determine the contribution of these structures to encoding and retrieval of spatial memory using the Hebb–Williams maze. A total of 92 male Long-Evans rats received chronic bilateral, contralateral, or ipsilateral implantation of cannulas into OFC, mPFC, or iCA1. Prior to testing on day 1 or day 2, subjects received central infusions of saline or lidocaine. The number of errors committed on the first five trials compared to the second five trials of day 1 was used to determine encoding, whereas retrieval was determined by comparing the second five trials of day 1 with the first five trials of day 2. The present findings suggest that mPFC and iCA1 are necessary and interact during encoding and retrieval; however, the OFC does not appear to be essential for either process. While the nature of the interaction between mPFC and iCA1 during encoding and retrieval is unclear, it may be supported by the integration of goals and spatial cues or strategy switching.     

Parafoveal and foveal processing of abbreviations during eye fixations in reading: making a case for case

The processing of abbreviations in reading was examined with an eye movement experiment. Abbreviations were of 2 distinct types: acronyms (abbreviations that can be read with the normal grapheme-phoneme correspondence [GPC] rules, such as NASA) and initialisms (abbreviations in which the GPCs are letter names, such as NCAA). Parafoveal and foveal processing of these abbreviations was assessed with the use of the boundary change paradigm (K. Rayner, 1975). Using this paradigm, previews of the abbreviations were either identical to the abbreviation (NASA or NCAA), orthographically legal (NUSO or NOBA), or illegal (NRSB or NRBA). The abbreviations were presented as capital letter strings within normal, predominantly lowercase sentences and also sentences in all capital letters such that the abbreviations would not be visually distinct. The results indicate that acronyms and initialisms undergo different processing during reading and that readers can modulate their processing based on low-level visual cues (distinct capitalization) in parafoveal vision. In particular, readers may be biased to process capitalized letter strings as initialisms in parafoveal vision when the rest of the sentence is normal, lowercase letters.