The Effect of Emotional Valence on Auditory Word Recognition Memory in English as a Foreign Language

Journal of Psycholinguistic Research - The present study investigated the effect of emotional valence on auditory word recognition memory in English as a foreign language. Participants included 48...     

A Comparison of MMPI-2 Profiles Between Parental Alienation Cases and Custody Cases

Journal of Child and Family Studies - The present study aimed at understanding the personality features of mothers and fathers engaged in parental alienation—a family dynamic in which one...     

Parental Mediation of COVID-19 News and Children’s Emotion Regulation during Lockdown

Journal of Child and Family Studies - The COVID-19 outbreak resulted in a large amount of emotionally charged messaging that is believed to have a tremendous psychological impact, particularly on...     

Internal representations reveal cultural diversity in expectations of facial expressions of emotion

Facial expressions have long been considered the "universal language of emotion." Yet consistent cultural differences in the recognition of facial expressions contradict such notions (e.g., R. E. Jack, C. Blais, C. Scheepers, P. G. Schyns, & R. Caldara, 2009). Rather, culture--as an intricate system of social concepts and beliefs--could generate different expectations (i.e., internal representations) of facial expression signals. To investigate, they used a powerful psychophysical technique (reverse correlation) to estimate the observer-specific internal representations of the 6 basic facial expressions of emotion (i.e., happy, surprise, fear, disgust, anger, and sad) in two culturally distinct groups (i.e., Western Caucasian [WC] and East Asian [EA]). Using complementary statistical image analyses, cultural specificity was directly revealed in these representations. Specifically, whereas WC internal representations predominantly featured the eyebrows and mouth, EA internal representations showed a preference for expressive information in the eye region. Closer inspection of the EA observer preference revealed a surprising feature: changes of gaze direction, shown primarily among the EA group. For the first time, it is revealed directly that culture can finely shape the internal representations of common facial expressions of emotion, challenging notions of a biologically hardwired "universal language of emotion."     

Culture and the distinctiveness motive: constructing identity in individualistic and collectivistic contexts

The motive to attain a distinctive identity is sometimes thought to be stronger in, or even specific to, those socialized into individualistic cultures. Using data from 4,751 participants in 21 cultural groups (18 nations and 3 regions), we tested this prediction against our alternative view that culture would moderate the ways in which people achieve feelings of distinctiveness, rather than influence the strength of their motivation to do so. We measured the distinctiveness motive using an indirect technique to avoid cultural response biases. Analyses showed that the distinctiveness motive was not weaker-and, if anything, was stronger-in more collectivistic nations. However, individualism-collectivism was found to moderate the ways in which feelings of distinctiveness were constructed: Distinctiveness was associated more closely with difference and separateness in more individualistic cultures and was associated more closely with social position in more collectivistic cultures. Multilevel analysis confirmed that it is the prevailing beliefs and values in an individual's context, rather than the individual's own beliefs and values, that account for these differences.     

Is systemic thinking really extraneous to common sense?

Systemic therapists assume, but have not yet proved that ordinary people: (i) normally do not use triadic thinking and (ii) are able, thanks to therapists' interviewing techniques, to construct triadic explanations. To test these assumptions this study analyses the explanations provided by 400 undergraduates of an unexpected piece of behaviour framed in four stimulus situations where the breadth of the observation field was manipulated. The results show that triadic explanations are unusual and increase with the widening of the field of observation from the monad to the triad. It is the ‘enigmatic’ triadic situation – adding a puzzling discrepancy between the actors' forms of behaviour – that elicits more triadic explanations. This suggests that therapists should explore with clients the contradictions disclosed by the widening of the field of observation and support reframings actively co‐constructed with them instead of ‘pre‐packaged’ ones.     

Policy bundling to overcome loss aversion: A method for improving legislative outcomes

Policies that would create net benefits for society that contain salient costs frequently lack enough support for enactment because losses loom larger than gains. To address this consequence of loss aversion, we propose a policy-bundling technique in which related bills involving both losses and gains are combined to offset separate bills’ costs while preserving their net benefits. We argue this method can transform unpopular individual pieces of legislation, which would lack the support for implementation, into more popular policies. Study 1 confirms that bundling increases support for bills with costs and benefits and that bundled legislation is valued more than the sum of its parts. Study 2 shows this finding stems from a diminished focus on losses and heightened focus on gains. Study 3 extends our findings to policies involving costs and benefits of the same type (e.g., lives) generated by different sources (e.g., food vs. fire safety).     

Resilience in adolescence: Gender differences two years after the earthquake of L’Aquila

The aim of this study was to evaluate the impact of L’Aquila earthquake (Italy) on Resilience and Coping 2 years after the earthquake in a high school sample. Three hundred and twenty-four male and female students exposed to the earthquake and 147 not-exposed have been assessed with the Resilience Scale for Adolescents (READ) and the Brief COPE. The two way ANOVAs for gender by exposure level to the distressing event showed statistically significant interactions with males exposed to the earthquake reporting consistently higher READ factor scores. Problem-focused but not emotion-focused coping strategies showed a similar pattern. These findings are compatible with a resilient ‘protective mechanism’ for males.     

Renting to Owning: An Exploration of the Theory of Planned Behavior in the Homeownership Domain

Psychology researchers often avoid running participants from subject pools at the end of the semester because they are “unmotivated.” We suggest that the end of the semester induces a situational prevention focus (i.e., sensitive to losses) unlike the beginning of the semester, which may induce a situational promotion focus (i.e., sensitive to gains). In two experiments, we presented participants with math problems at the beginning or end of an academic semester. End-of-semester participants performed better minimizing losses as compared to maximizing gains, whereas the opposite was true for beginning-of-semester participants.     

The real relationship between short-term memory and working memory

Storage-oriented memory span tasks with no explicit concurrent processing are usually referred as short-term memory (STM) tasks, whereas tasks involving storage plus concurrent processing requirements are designated as working memory (WM) tasks. The present study explores a question that remains unsolved: Do STM and WM tasks clearly tap distinguishable theoretical constructs? For that purpose, a large sample of 403 participants was tested through 12 diverse memory span tasks. Half of those tasks are widely accepted as measures of STM, whereas the other half measure WM. The results show that STM and WM share largely overlapping underlying capacity limitations, suggesting that all memory span tasks tap essentially the same construct. Some implications are discussed.