Do Scholarships Help?

Some 897 successful and unsuccessful applicants for support from the Citizens Scholarship Foundation of America were surveyed. Responses from 515 applicants suggest that these relatively small awards do not change the educational plans of the recipients. Students most frequently report that such awards diminish the financial burden placed on student and family; post-secondary educational choices usually are unchanged by the availability or absence of small scholarships. Even if the scholarships were larger, it appears that the effect would be similar. Fewer than one-third of the students report that a larger scholarship would cause a significant change in post-secondary education.     

Can attention be allocated to sensory modalities?

Three experiments examined the effects of attention allocation to the modalities of vision, audition, and touch. The first two experiments utilized a simultaneous-successive comparison. The simultaneous procedure involved simultaneous monitoring of all three sensory modalities for the presence of a near-threshold stimulus. The successive condition allowed S to give his full attention to each sensory modality in turn. There was no advantage for the successive condition, whether the task consisted of detection of a single stimulus (Experiment I) or detection of the absence of one of many stimuli (Experiment II). Experiment III used a different paradigm to extend these results and bridge the gap between these results, those of Eijkman and Vendrik (1965), and those of Moray (1973a, b). We concluded that selective allocation of attention to sensory modalities does not affect the early stages of perceptual processing.     

Children’s Maternal Support-Seeking: Relations to Maternal Emotion Socialization Responses and Children’s Emotion Management

The present study examined children’s support-seeking of mothers (SSM) as a moderator of the association between maternal emotion socialization responses and children’s emotion management. Participants included 119 mother–child dyads (63 boys, M age = 9.61 years, 73.1 % Caucasian). Maternal emotion socialization was assessed via observed mother–child interactions and child report. Analyses indicated several main effects such that child-reported maternal reward responses were associated with stronger child emotion management, whereas perceived maternal punishment and neglect were associated with poorer child emotion management. Regarding the significant interactions, observed maternal general unsupportive socialization responses were negatively associated with emotion management. Additionally, for children low in SSM, child-reported maternal overriding of children’s emotions was positively associated with better emotion management. Support-seeking of mothers may mitigate the risk of some unsupportive maternal socialization responses and may be an adaptive strategy in middle childhood in particular contexts.     

Temporal dynamics of need satisfaction and need frustration. Two sides of the same coin?

We study the dynamics of need satisfaction and need frustration by examining how need satisfaction and need frustration change over time and how these changes relate to changes in motivation. To investigate this, volunteers were assessed daily during a delineated activity, resulting in a total sample of 77 volunteers and 467 completed daily diaries. Bayesian confirmatory factor analysis on the within-person level confirmed a bifactor solution: autonomy, competence, and relatedness were distinguished by three specific factors, but the majority of variance was explained by two strongly correlated (need satisfaction and need frustration) factors. The strong correlation between need satisfaction and need frustration further translated in the development of their relationship over time. That is, Bayesian latent growth curve modelling revealed a simultaneous, yet opposite, growth curve. Contrary to our expectations, neither of them could be related to behavioural internalization or externalization. These results imply that, at the within-person level, momentary need satisfaction and frustration are difficult to distinguish, and affecting one may automatically affect the other. Also, the relationships within the self-determination framework, such as the proposed link between need satisfaction and behavioural internalization may be better reframed with attention to the time-frame in which they occur.     

Self-affirmation and affective forecasting: Affirmation reduces the anticipated impact of negative events

When forecasting how they will feel in the future, people overestimate the impact that imagined negative events will have on their affective states, partly because they underestimate their own psychological resiliency. Because self-affirmation enhances resiliency, two studies examined whether self-affirmation prior to forecasting reduces the extremity of affective forecasts. Participants in self-affirmation conditions completed a values scale or wrote an essay asserting their most important value, whereas participants in the no-affirmation condition asserted a relatively unimportant value. Participants then predicted their affective reactions to a negative or positive imagined event. In both studies, self-affirmation reduced the unpleasant affect expected to result from a negative event, but had no impact on affective forecasts for a positive event. This pattern was mediated by participants’ cognitive appraisals of the imagined event, but not by differential focus on that event. Results are consistent with self-affirmation activating or enhancing psychological resiliency to counteract immune neglect during affective forecasting of a negative event.     

Initial validation of self-reported trajectories in military veterans

Previous research suggests that functioning after potentially traumatic events tends to follow discrete trajectories. This research is limited in that longitudinal data can be difficult to collect. The aim of the current study was to examine self-reported trajectories in military veterans using an online survey. Consistent with longitudinal work, those who reported chronic distress reported higher symptoms of PTSD and Depression, higher negative affect, lower social support, and less satisfaction with life than those on a resilient trajectory. Two change trajectories demonstrated intermediate scores on relevant measures. These results provide support for a retrospective method to assess trajectories of posttrauma functioning.     

God in the World: Lenin,Hegel, and the God‐Builders

This article reassesses a rarely noted aspect of the Russian Revolution: the long interaction between Lenin and Anatoly Lunacharsky, the ‘God‐builder’. It traces the way Lunacharsky first outlined the God‐building position in his Religion and Socialism (1908, 1911), a text virtually lost to scholarship and interpretations of the Russian revolution. It explores Lenin's initial condemnation, for political but above all theoretical reasons, only to find him reassessing his whole argument six years later in light of his re‐engagement with Hegel in 1914. Seeing that his earlier condemnation no longer held, Lenin's response to Lunacharsky's God‐building undergoes a noticeable shift. He now realizes that marginal forms of interaction with religion may sit well with, if not lead to, communism. An examination of Lunacharsky's own perseverance with God‐building after he was appointed Commissar for Enlightenment in the new Soviet state, and of Lenin's awareness and tacit allowance for such expressions, indicate a more complex and ambivalent approach to religion on Lenin's part.