A high implicit affiliation motive does not always make you happy: A corresponding explicit motive and corresponding behavior are further needed

Satisfaction of the implicit affiliation motive is known to be positively related to emotional well-being, whereas the frustration of the implicit affiliation motive leads to impairment of well-being. In the present research we specified two conditions that are responsible for the satisfaction and frustration of the implicit motive. Referring to research on the congruence of implicit and explicit motives, we assumed that a corresponding explicit affiliation motive leads to satisfaction of the implicit motive. Corresponding affiliation behavior constitutes the second condition. Three studies confirmed the hypothesis that both conditions must be fulfilled in order to positively connect the implicit affiliation motive to emotional well-being. Participants with high implicit and explicit affiliation motives and who additionally showed a large amount of affiliation behavior reported the lowest negative affectivity and the highest life satisfaction compared to participants who lacked one of the conditions.

Amanah and Muslim Identity: Relationships with Religious and Psychological Adjustment in Malaysia

Amanah refers to the accountability of Muslims to their community. In Malaysian Muslim university students (N = 209), an Amanah Scale predicted a stronger sense of identity along with more adaptive religious and psychosocial functioning. Multiple regression analyses identified Accountability to Society as especially influential, but Accountability to Allah exhibited at least some problematic implications. Amanah mediated Identity linkages with some measures of religious and psychological adjustment, but also suppressed Identity relationships with greater self-knowledge and lower anxiety. These data confirmed the importance of communal commitments in Muslim mental health, suggested that accountability may have limited liabilities as well as more obvious psychosocial advantages, and identified possible complexities in the assessment of Accountability to Allah.

     

The more (complex), the better? The influence of epistemic motivation on integrative bargaining in complex negotiation

Negotiating about a larger number of issues is often argued to enhance the potential for integrative bargaining. However, the enhanced complexity may also make negotiators more susceptible to bias, making it less likely for them to reach win–win agreements. We argue that epistemic motivation, the motivation to hold accurate perceptions of the world, provides a key to solve this paradox. In a negotiation experiment we manipulated complexity by having participants negotiate about 6 or 18 issues and we manipulated epistemic motivation by making participants process‐accountable or not. Under low complexity, there was no effect of epistemic motivation on created value. Under high complexity, however, negotiators with high epistemic motivation created more value than negotiators with low epistemic motivation. Thus, negotiating about larger numbers of issues was only beneficial for negotiators if they were motivated to think deeply and thoroughly. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Recollections of Childhood Sexual Abuse: Complexities of Religious Coping and Muslim Religious and Psychological Adjustment in Afghanistan

Journal of Religion and Health - Religious coping is a double-edged sword. Clarification of the psychological benefits for positive religious coping requires statistical controls for negative...     

Are mindful people more risk-averse? Effects of trait and state mindfulness on risk preference in decision-making

The current research investigated whether various aspects of mindfulness were differentially associated with risk preference in decision-making. In Studies 1 and 2, attention and present-focus aspects of trait mindfulness were associated with lower risk preference in making monetary gains. In Study 3, participants completed either a mindfulness training or listened to a comparable control recording. Compared to the control condition, subjects in the mindfulness condition were more risk-averse in making choices for monetary gains. The attention and present-focus aspects of state mindfulness mediated this connection. Study 4 introduced a loss framing, where attention and present-focus no longer associated with lower risk preference, but awareness and acceptance aspects of trait mindfulness associated with higher risk preference in avoiding monetary losses. The results suggest that different aspects of mindfulness have potential for mitigating risk preference, but such potential is limited depending on the framing of a decision context.     

Is object recognition automatic?

A new paradigm is proposed that involves a simple judgment on an object’s perceptual feature that is independent of object identity. Subjects were required to categorize as vertical or horizontal the main axis of elongation of an object picture. Both fake and real-world objects were presented, and a graphical manipulation was applied to their shapes so that the canonical elongation of the real-world objects was incongruent with the elongation of their shapes after the manipulation. The results showed an influence of the identity of the objects on the perceptual task in the form of a cost in judging the elongation of the incongruent real-world objects. The results are taken as evidence for automatic activation of objects’ stored representations. A “horse-race” model of the influence of these representations on the perceptual task is proposed in the final section of the article.     

Random Yoking: An Alternative to Feedback Procedures for Preventing Superstition in the Human “Learned Helplessness” Paradigm

The “learned helplessness” model of human depression requires that humans demonstrate deficits similar to animals following exposure to noncontingent events. However, the feedback procedure usually employed in the triadic instrumental induction phase represents a confound in studies of the interference effect in humans. Matute (1994) concluded that the feedback procedure is necessary for the interference effect, which is thus due to feedback induced failure rather than learned helplessness. As an alternative, we hypothesize that feedback alerts participants to noncontingency, such that subsequent interference is not inconsistent with learned helplessness theory. The present study evaluates these competing claims by incorporating a novel manipulation designed to promote the perception of noncontingency in Matute's (1994) triadic no-feedback-procedure induction. A second noncontingent yoked group received the same tones as the usual direct yoked group, but in random order so as to disrupt the “late trials” distribution of short-latency tones which promotes superstitious responding. As predicted, the random-yoking procedure inhibited superstition. The interference effect was observed in the random-yoked but not the direct-yoked triad. Thus random-yoked participants may have developed the expectation of noncontingency which is critical to learned helplessness. It is concluded that the confounded feedback procedure is not necessary for the interference effect and should be avoided in future research.     

The effects of task requirements on the processing of complex stimuli

In the present study the effects of task requirements were investigated using a same-different paradigm with geometric configurations as stimuli. Two conditions were employed: in the first, the instructions required the subjects to focus upon all dimensions of the stimuli; in the second, instead, the instructions required the subjects to attend only to some of the dimensions. The results show that in the first condition the subjects, in order to reach their decision, used a template- matching strategy, while in the second condition an analytic strategy was employed.     

Reconsideration of the role of competing responses in demonstrations of the interference effect (learned helplessness)

In Experiment 1a, rats trained to escape shock by performing a 2-s inactive response were less impaired on a subsequent 2-way shuttle response than their yoked counterparts that received inescapable shock. In contrast, in Experiment 1b, rats trained to escape shock by performing a longer duration inactive response were more impaired on the subsequent escape task than their inescapably shocked counterparts. In Experiment 2, the results of Experiments 1a and 1b were replicated, and the inactive responses performed during pretreatment by both the escapable and inescapable shock groups were assessed and correlated with test stage 2-way shuttle escape performance. These activity data indicate that inactivity during pretreatment shock in both escapable and inescapable shock groups was a highly reliable predictor of subsequent 2-way shuttle performance, irrespective of the pretreatment shock contingency to which these Ss were exposed.