Stigma Consciousness and Subjective Well-Being in Lesbians and Gays

The stigma associated with sexual identity can affect an individual’s well-being. The main goal of this study was to analyse the role of a psychosocial variable, stigma consciousness, on the well-being of lesbian and gay (LG) individuals. For this purpose, a sample of 481 participants completed various questionnaires (M _age = 32.36, SD _age = 9.60). Analysis of these results using structural equations showed two different pathways to cope with the stigma. The first pathway consists of collective action, and the second consists of stigma concealment. Specifically, stigma consciousness positively predicts well-being through group identification and collective action. Stigma concealment, however, negatively predicts well-being through the perception of prejudice. In addition, this work has confirmed that concealment has a direct negative relationship with subjective well-being. These results are interpreted from a psychosocial perspective. Finally, based on our data, we propose future interventions that provide LG individuals with strategies to cope with their perceptions of stigma.     

Effective interactions: Communication and high levels of marital satisfaction

Of all the significant relationships in the lives of human-beings, the marital relationship remains one of the most central and important to their well-being. For this rapid review the authors accessed four online databases (PsycINFO, PsychARTICLES, JSTOR Journals, and ScienceDirect) to examine the evidence on aspects of communication which contribute to high levels of marital satisfaction and to synthesise these findings. The search yielded 103 unique articles, of which 15 were ultimately included. Principal results found the following activities to relate to high marital satisfaction: 1) communication activities such as engaging in small talk and providing verbal and non-verbal messages of affection; 2) “positive” exchanges which include any interactions perceived by both parties as constructive; 3) effective conflict management including the use of responses of recalibration and reaffirmation (R-R response), the use of we-pronouns, and the Listener-Speaker technique; 4) possessing and implementing effective communication skills such as using “I” instead of “you” messages; and 5) using “positive” communication skills such as clarification to elicit “positive” affect such as feeling understood. The evidence suggests that mental health professionals working with married couples should seek to promote quality dyadic communication as part of treatment interventions.     

Analyzing the kinematics of hand movements in catching tasks—An online correction analysis of movement toward the target’s trajectory

Free, 3-D interceptive movements are difficult to visualize and quantify. For ball catching, the endpoint of a movement can be anywhere along the target’s trajectory. Furthermore, the hand may already have begun to move before the subject has estimated the target’s trajectory, and the subject may alter the targeted position during the initial part of the movement. We introduce a method to deal with these difficulties and to quantify three movement phases involved in catching: the initial, non-goal-directed phase; the goal-directed phase, which is smoothly directed toward the target’s trajectory; and the final, interception phase. Therefore, the 3-D movement of the hand was decomposed into a component toward the target’s trajectory (the minimal distance of the hand to the target’s parabolic [MDHP] trajectory) and a component along this trajectory. To identify the goal-directed phase of the MDHP trajectory, we employed the empirical finding that goal-directed trajectories are minimally jerky. The second component, along the target’s trajectory, was used to analyze the interaction of the hand with the ball. The method was applied to two conditions of a ball-catching task. In the manipulated condition, the initial part of the ball’s flight was occluded, so the visibility of the ball was postponed. As expected, the onset of the smooth part of the movement shifted to a later time. This method can be used to quantify anticipatory behavior in interceptive tasks, allowing researchers to gain new insights into movement planning toward the target’s trajectory.     

Pure optic ataxia and visual hemiagnosia – extending the dual visual hypothesis

Goodale and Milner's two visual system hypothesis is an influential model for the understanding of the primate visual system. Lesions of either the ventral (occipito‐temporal) or the dorsal (occipito‐parietal) stream produce distinct and dissociated syndromes in humans: visual agnosia is typical for ventral damage, whereas optic ataxia (OA) for dorsal damage. We studied the case of a 59‐year‐old left‐handed woman with a circumscribed lesion around the left posterior occipital sulcus, extending to the underlying white matter. Initially, she presented with a central visual field OA, which regressed to an OA to the right visual hemifield during the 3 months observation period. In addition, tachistoscopic experiments showed visual hemiagnosia to the right visual hemifield. In line with the findings of the neuropsychological experiments, the analysis of the structural MR data by means of a trackwise hodologic probabilistic approach revealed damage to the left superior longitudinal fasciculus and to the left inferior longitudinal fasciculus, indicating an impairment of both the dorsal and the ventral stream. The combination of OA and visual hemiagnosia in the same patient has never been previously described. The present case study thus provides further insights for the understanding of visual processing.     

Representational momentum in dynamic facial expressions is modulated by the level of expressed pain: Amplitude and direction effects

Humans have developed a specific capacity to rapidly perceive and anticipate other people’s facial expressions so as to get an immediate impression of their emotional state of mind. We carried out two experiments to examine the perceptual and memory dynamics of facial expressions of pain. In the first experiment, we investigated how people estimate other people’s levels of pain based on the perception of various dynamic facial expressions; these differ both in terms of the amount and intensity of activated action units. A second experiment used a representational momentum (RM) paradigm to study the emotional anticipation (memory bias) elicited by the same facial expressions of pain studied in Experiment 1. Our results highlighted the relationship between the level of perceived pain (in Experiment 1) and the direction and magnitude of memory bias (in Experiment 2): When perceived pain increases, the memory bias tends to be reduced (if positive) and ultimately becomes negative. Dynamic facial expressions of pain may reenact an “immediate perceptual history” in the perceiver before leading to an emotional anticipation of the agent’s upcoming state. Thus, a subtle facial expression of pain (i.e., a low contraction around the eyes) that leads to a significant positive anticipation can be considered an adaptive process—one through which we can swiftly and involuntarily detect other people’s pain.     

Multiple layers of information processing in deductive reasoning: combining dual strategy and dual-source approaches to reasoning

The idea that inferential performance cannot be analyzed within a single model has been suggested within two theoretical contexts. The dual strategy model suggests that people reason using different approaches to processing statistical information. The dual-source model suggests that people reason probabilistically using both statistical information and some intuition about logical form. Each model suggests that people have different approaches to processing information while making inferences. The following studies examined whether these different forms of information processing were equally present during reasoning. Participants were given a series of problems designed to distinguish counterexample from statistical reasoners. They were then given a series of MP or AC inferences for which identical statistical information was provided. Results show that MP inferences were considered to be deductively valid more often than equivalent AC inferences. The effect of logical form was independent of reasoning strategy, and of relatively equivalent size for both counterexample and statistical reasoners. The second study examined explicitly probabilistic inferences, and showed smaller effects of logical form and of reasoning strategy, although with a complex set of interactions. These results show that understanding the way that people use information when making inferences requires a multidimensional approach.     

Region-based shielding of visual search from salient distractors: Target detection is impaired with same- but not different-dimension distractors

Shielding visual search against interference from salient distractors becomes more efficient over time for display regions where distractors appear more frequently, rather than only rarely Goschy, Bakos, Müller, & Zehetleitner (Frontiers in Psychology 5: 1195, 2014). We hypothesized that the locus of this learned distractor probability-cueing effect depends on the dimensional relationship of the to-be-inhibited distractor relative to the to-be-attended target. If the distractor and target are defined in different visual dimensions (e.g., a color-defined distractor and orientation-defined target, as in Goschy et al. (Frontiers in Psychology 5: 1195, 2014), distractors may be efficiently suppressed by down-weighting the feature contrast signals in the distractor-defining dimension Zehetleitner, Goschy, & Müller (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 38: 941–957, 2012), with stronger down-weighting being applied to the frequent- than to the rare-distractor region. However, given dimensionally coupled feature contrast signal weighting (cf. Müller J, Heller & Ziegler (Perception & Psychophysics 57:1–17, 1995), this dimension-(down-)weighting strategy would not be effective when the target and the distractors are defined within the same dimension. In this case, suppression may operate differently: by inhibiting the entire frequent-distractor region on the search-guiding master saliency map. The downside of inhibition at this level is that, although it reduces distractor interference in the inhibited (frequent-distractor) region, it also impairs target processing in that region—even when no distractor is actually present in the display. This predicted qualitative difference between same- and different-dimension distractors was confirmed in the present study (with 184 participants), thus furthering our understanding of the functional architecture of search guidance, especially regarding the mechanisms involved in shielding search from the interference of distractors that consistently occur in certain display regions.

     

Rumination, Inhibition and Stress: The Construction of A New Scale for Assessing Emotional Style

Emotional rumination and inhibition were identified in the Emotion Control Questionnaire (ECQ—Roger and Nesshoever 1987; Roger and Najarian 1989) as two relatively independent dimensions of emotional style, and the two measures have subsequently been shown to be important moderator variables in a range of health and forensic settings. Two other dimensions that emerged in the ECQ, labelled aggression control and benign control, have been shown to form part of the extraversion constellation, and the present paper describes the construction and validation of a new scale focusing exclusively on rumination and inhibition. Revised and expanded item pools for the scales were subjected to exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses, which endorsed the two-factor structure. The new scales were validated concurrently against related scales in different samples, and were shown to be systematically related to two independent indices of health status.