Testing a model of pain appraisal and coping in children with chronic abdominal pain.

This prospective study of children with recurrent abdominal pain (N=133; ages 8--15 years) used path analysis to examine relations among dispositional pain beliefs and coping styles, cognitions and behavior related to a specific pain episode, and short- and long-term outcomes. Children believing they could not reduce or accept pain appraised their episode-specific coping ability as low and reported passive coping behavior. Dispositional passive coping had direct effects on both episode-specific passive coping and long-term symptoms and disability. Accommodative coping (acceptance and self-encouragement) was associated with reduced episode-specific distress, which itself predicted reduced depressive symptoms 3 months later. Results suggest that coping-skill interventions for children with chronic pain should target reductions in passive coping and consider the potential benefits of accommodative coping strategies.     

Resolving the Tensions Between White People's Active Investment in Racial Inequality and White Ignorance: A Response to Marzia Milazzo

This article responds to Marzia Milazzo's article ‘On white ignorance, white shame, and other pitfalls in critical philosophy of race’ (2017), in which Milazzo argues that the concepts white shame, white guilt, white privilege, white habits, white invisibility and white ignorance are pitfalls in the process of decolonisation. Milazzo contends that the way these concepts are theorised in much critical philosophy of race minimises white people's active interest in reproducing the racial status quo. While I agree with Milazzo's critique of white shame and white guilt, I argue that these affective responses are fundamentally different to the remaining concepts. Drawing on critical whiteness studies and agnotology, I argue that white privilege, white invisibility and white ignorance are valuable conceptual tools for revealing (as opposed to minimising) white people's active investment in maintaining racial inequality. Whereas Milazzo sees a contradiction between white people's active interest in maintaining racial inequality and concepts like white invisibility and white ignorance, I argue that, correctly theorised, these concepts resolve this apparent contradiction. I contest Milazzo's call to reject white privilege, white invisibility and white ignorance, arguing that these concepts are useful tools in the project of decolonisation.     

Intraindividual Variability in Narrative Identity: Complexities,Garden Paths,and Untapped Research Potential

This paper introduces key concepts for studying intraindividual variability in narratives (narrative IIV). Narrative IIV is conceptualized in terms of sources of within-person variation (events and audiences) and dimensions of variation (structural and motivational/affective dimensions of narratives). Possible implications of narrative IIV for well-being and self and social development are outlined. Considering narrative IIV leads to complexity in both theory and method, raising the issue of whether some avenues might be more productive than others. Using previously collected data, we sought to evaluate the research potential of different indices of narrative IIV (n = 106 participants; n = 1272 narratives). All analyses were preregistered: doi: 10.17605/OSF.IO/SXV4W . Findings show that narrative IIV is distinct depending on source and dimension, replicating previous work. However, narrative IIV was largely unrelated to the measures of well-being and self and social development used in the present study. These findings support the practice of aggregating across narratives in existing research, at least for these outcomes and sources of variation, and provide important guidance for investigators who remain interested in the possible insights that narrative IIV may reveal about the person. © 2020 European Association of Personality Psychology     

Are you my mummy? Long-term olfactory memory of mother’s body odour by offspring in the domestic cat

Animal Cognition - Longevity of odour memories, particularly those acquired during early development, has been documented in a wide range of taxa. Here, we report that kittens of the domestic cat...     

Semantic effects in lexical access: Evidence from single-word naming

Cognitive psychologists have not devoted much attention to semantic and emotional effects early in word recognition, assuming instead that such effects are primarily post-perceptual. Some evidence of such early effects does exist, but it relies exclusively on a less-than-ideal experimental task, the lexical decision task. In the current study, participants heard words over headphones and repeated them into a microphone as quickly as possible (single-word naming). The Danger and Usefulness of word referents were significantly related to naming times, independent of effects such as word length, familiarity, onset characteristics, stress, neighbourhood density, and concreteness. Results are discussed in terms of the adaptive benefit of making quick classifications along these dimensions, and against a backdrop of evidence from several widely divergent areas of research.