A program for increasing early identification and prevention of mental health problems in infancy

Dealing with mental health in infancy as a specific clinical modality is relatively recent.¹ Preventive programs during infancy were mainly directed to promote cognitive development. Indeed, the review on prevention by Murphy and Frank² indicated that there are scarcely any programs directed specifically to improve mental health in infancy. This paper will describe a preventive program, conducted by the author, aimed specifically towards mental health aspects in infancy. It began in child guidance services in Jerusalem in 1977.     

Mental simulation inflates performance estimates for physical abilities

In five experiments, we examined how mental simulation of physical activities affected estimates of one's ability to perform the same activities. In Experiment 1, participants who simulated lifting aheavy object estimated that they could lift more weight than did participants who did not perform the simulation. In Experiment 2A, the frequency with which participants performed the simulation exercises was manipulated. In Experiments 2B and 2C, we manipulated the amount of weight that people simulated lifting in order to address potential alternative explanations of the inflation effect. In Experiment 3, mental simulations were manipulated within subjects. In all the experiments, the simulated events showed inflated estimates, as compared with nonsimulated events. These results were interpreted in the context of the misattribution-of-familiarity account of imagination inflation.     

Family connectedness and women's sexual risk behaviors: implications for the prevention/intervention of STD/HIV infection

The present study explores the relationship between connectedness with the intergenerational family and women's sexual risk-taking as a guide to the development of family-focused prevention and intervention. Cross-sectional interview data from a pilot study were analyzed for correlations between a number of self-reported, risky sexual practices, the range of extended family members with whom the respondent was in contact, and awareness of stories pertaining to intergenerational family history. Structured interviews were administered by female interviewers to 56 women from two contexts: a STD (sexually transmitted disease) Clinic (N = 26), and an inner-city, Hispanic Community Organization (N = 30). Knowledge of stories about grandparents or great-grandparents was a robust predictor of lower sexual risk-taking in the STD Clinic sample. This relationship persisted, but only at the trend level in the Community Organization sample. In both the total sample and the STD subsample, the number of categories of extended family members with whom a respondent was in at least monthly contact was correlated with less sexual risk-taking. Given the fundamental importance of the family system as the primary social unit, these findings argue for further family theory-based research and for its potential application in the development of health prevention and intervention. Implications for practice and future research are discussed.     

A function of form: terror management and structuring the social world

Drawing on lay epistemology theory, the authors assessed a terror management analysis of the psychological function of structuring social information. Seven studies tested variations of the hypothesis that simple, benign interpretations of social information function, in part, to manage death-related anxiety. In Studies 1-4, mortality salience (MS) exaggerated primacy effects and reliance on representative information, decreased preference for a behaviorally inconsistent target among those high in personal need for structure (PNS), and increased high-PNS participants' preference for interpersonal balance. In Studies 5-7, MS increased high-PNS participants' preference for interpretations that suggest a just world and a benevolent causal order of events in the social world.     

Spatial language and spatial representation: a cross-linguistic comparison

We examined the relationship between spatial language and spatial memory by comparing native English, Japanese, and Korean speakers' naming of spatial locations and their spatial memory for the same set of locations. We focused on two kinds of spatial organization: axial structure of the reference object, and contact/support with respect to its surface. The results of two language (naming) tasks showed similar organization across the three language groups in terms of axial structure, but differences in organization in terms of contact/support. In contrast, the results of two memory tasks were the same across language groups for both axial structure and contact/support. Moreover, the relationship between spatial language and spatial memory in the two sets of tasks did not show a straightforward isomorphism between the two systems. We conclude that spatial language and spatial memory engage the same kinds of spatial properties, suggesting similarity in the foundations of the two systems. However, the two systems appear to be partially independent: the preservation of particular spatial properties was not mandatory across languages, nor across memory tasks, and cross-linguistic differences in spatial language did not lead to differences in the non-linguistic encoding of location. We speculate that the similarity in linguistic and non-linguistic representations of space may emerge as a functional consequence of negotiating the spatial world.     

Altering the balance of recollection and familiarity influences the revelation effect

The revelation effect occurs when recognition test probes are more likely to be called "old" if they are preceded by a verbal processing task. Two experiments examined the role of familiarity and recollection in producing this effect. Each experiment tested the hypothesis that decreasing recollection would heighten the magnitude of the revelation effect. In Experiment 1, the revelation effect increased by delaying the recognition test. In Experiment 2, the revelation effect increased when the presentation rate of the study words was reduced. These results are discussed in terms of the variables that produce the revelation effect in episodic and nonepisodic memory judgments.     

Voluntary and involuntary attention vary as a function of impulsivity

In the present study we examined, first, whether voluntary and involuntary attention manifest differently in people who differ in impulsivity (measured with the Barratt Impulsivity Scale). For Experiment 1, we used the spatial cueing task with informative and noninformative spatial cues to probe voluntary and involuntary attention, respectively. We found that participants with high impulsivity scores exhibited larger involuntary attention effects, whereas participants with low impulsivity scores exhibited larger voluntary attention effects. For Experiment 2, we used the correlated-flanker task to determine whether the differences between groups in Experiment 1 were due to high-impulsive participants being less sensitive to the display contingencies or to high-impulsive participants having a greater spread of spatial attention. Surprisingly, high-impulsive participants showed a greater sensitivity to contingencies in the environment (correlated-flanker effect). Our results illustrate one situation in which involuntary attention associated with high impulsivity can play a useful role.     

Attachment to objects as compensation for close others' perceived unreliability

Attachment theory posits that close interpersonal relationships provide people with psychological security across the lifespan. Research shows that when people perceive that close others are unreliable, they may seek alternative, non-social sources of security (e.g., deities). Building on this work, the authors hypothesized that attachment to objects compensates for threatened attachment security when close others are unreliable. Participants primed with close others', but not strangers', unreliability reported increased attachment to belongings (Study 1), and this effect was mediated by feelings of attachment anxiety (concern over close others' availability), but not attachment avoidance (avoiding emotional dependence; Study 2), suggesting that object attachment compensates for the perception that close others are unreliable rather than consistently rejecting. In Study 3, when a valued belonging was removed, participants primed with uncertainty about their relationships showed increased separation anxiety and motivation to reunite with the belonging, regardless of the belonging's perceived importance for facilitating relationships.     

Learning new meanings for old words: effects of semantic relatedness

Changes to our everyday activities mean that adult language users need to learn new meanings for previously unambiguous words. For example, we need to learn that a "tweet" is not only the sound a bird makes, but also a short message on a social networking site. In these experiments, adult participants learned new fictional meanings for words with a single dominant meaning (e.g., "ant") by reading paragraphs that described these novel meanings. Explicit recall of these meanings was significantly better when there was a strong semantic relationship between the novel meaning and the existing meaning. This relatedness effect emerged after relatively brief exposure to the meanings (Experiment 1), but it persisted when training was extended across 7?days (Experiment 2) and when semantically demanding tasks were used during this extended training (Experiment 3). A lexical decision task was used to assess the impact of learning on online recognition. In Experiment 3, participants responded more quickly to words whose new meaning was semantically related than to those with an unrelated meaning. This result is consistent with earlier studies showing an effect of meaning relatedness on lexical decision, and it indicates that these newly acquired meanings become integrated with participants' preexisting knowledge about the meanings of words.     

By the numbers: Structure-seeking individuals prefer quantitative over qualitative representations of personal value to compensate for the threat of unclear performance contingencies

What combination of dispositional and situational factors leads people to represent their personal value in quantitative terms (e.g., salary) rather than qualitative terms (e.g., virtue)? Integrating research on quantitative information seeking, dispositional epistemic motivation, and learned helplessness, the current article hypothesized that individuals high, but not low, in uncertainty avoidance (measured with the Personal Need for Structure Scale [PNS]) would prefer quantitative (over qualitative) value representations to compensate for the diminished self-esteem certainty caused by exposure to unclear performance contingencies. Accordingly, in Study 1 high-PNS participants exposed to unclear (vs. clear) performance contingencies in one domain (visual intelligence) preferred a quantitative value representation in another domain (verbal intelligence). Study 2 showed that this effect is mediated by self-esteem certainty, not self-esteem level. Study 3 included a failure feedback condition to further isolate the role of epistemic motivation, as distinct from self-enhancement motivation, in driving the tendency to quantify personal value.