Anxiety enhances threat processing without competition among multiple inputs: a diffusion model analysis

Enhanced processing of threatening information is a well established phenomenon among high-anxious individuals. This effect is most reliably shown in situations where 2 or more items compete for processing resources, suggesting that input competition is a critical component of the effect. However, it could be that there are small effects in situations without input competition, but the dependent measures typically used are not sensitive enough to detect them. The present study analyzed data from a noncompetition task, single-string lexical decision, with the diffusion model, a decision process model that provides a more direct measure of performance differences than either response times or accuracy alone. The diffusion model analysis showed a consistent processing advantage for threatening words in high-anxious individuals, whereas traditional comparisons showed no significant differences. These results challenge the view that input competition is necessary for enhanced threat processing. Implications for theories of anxiety are discussed.     

Personality Saturation in Structured Interviews

Applied psychologists have long been interested in the relationship between applicant personality and employment interview ratings. Analysis of data from two studies, one using a situational interview and one using a behavioral interview, suggests that the correlations of structured interview ratings with self‐report measures of personality factors are generally rather low. Further, a small meta‐analysis integrates these two studies and the limited previous literature to arrive at a similar conclusion – there is relatively little relationship between structured interviews and self‐reported personality factors.     

Do Strong Group Identities Fuel Intolerance? Evidence From the South African Case

One conventional explanation of intergroup conflict is Social Identity Theory. That theory asserts that strong ingroup sympathies can give rise to outgroup antipathies which in turn fuel intolerance and conflict. While embraced by both macro- and microlevel analysts, this theory actually has not been widely investigated outside a laboratory environment. In this article, I test hypotheses linking group identities with intolerance, based on a 2001 survey in South Africa, a country where group identities have long been politicized. My empirical findings indicate that group identities are not useful predictors of South African intolerance. Indeed, for neither the black majority nor the white minority do ingroup identities activate very much outgroup intolerance. Moreover, group identities are positively, not negatively, correlated with holding a South African national identity. These findings, based on unusually broad indicators of both identity and tolerance, suggest that the causes of group conflict lie elsewhere than in group attachments.     

Working with Fischer and Ravizza’s Account of Moral Responsibility

This paper examines the account of guidance control given in Fischer and Ravizza's book, Responsibility and Control, with the aim of revising it so as to make it a better account of what needs to be added to having alternatives open to yield a specification of the control condition for responsibility that will be acceptable to an adherent of the principle that one is responsible for something only if one could have avoided it.     

Respect as Esteem: The Case of Counselling

To claim that respect is one of the cornerstones of professional ethics is uncontroversial. However, it has become commonplace in the philosophical literature to distinguish between different kinds of respect. This paper considers the distinction between ‘recognition respect,’ said to be owed to persons as such, and ‘appraisal respect,’ said to be owed to those persons whom merit it, in the context of the professional–client relationship. Using the practice of counselling as an example, it is argued that both kinds of respect have a place in the professional–client relationship, which is in turn articulated as a relationship between equally fallible moral agents.