The effects of attentional training on physiological stress recovery after induced social threat

Social stress has been related to both physiological and psychological responses. The recovery of stress is influenced by the way environmental information is processed, i.e., what information is attended to and how it is interpreted. The present study investigated the effect of attention modification training on physiological stress recovery following induced stress. A group of applicants preparing for a job interview were randomly allocated to an attention training condition versus a control condition. Afterwards, they were asked to give an artificial job interview to a real life jury while being videotaped. Participants in both conditions showed decreased heart rate variability during the job interview, which indicates an overall physiological stress response. However, during a 30-minute follow-up period after the training, indices of heart rate variability showed improved stress recovery only in the attention training condition. Attentional training is proposed as a promising strategy to prevent enduring stress reactions.     

Mind your words: positive and negative items create method effects on the Five Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire

Mindfulness, a construct that entails moment-to-moment effort to be aware of present experiences and positive attitudinal features, has become integrated into the sciences. The Five Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire (FFMQ), one popular measure of mindfulness, exhibits different responses to positively and negatively worded items in nonmeditating groups. The current study employed confirmatory factor analysis with a large undergraduate sample to examine the validity of a hierarchical mindfulness model and whether response patterns related to item wording arose from method effects. Results indicated that a correlated facets model better explained the data and that negative and positive wording constituted substantive method effects. This study suggests that the FFMQ measures components that may relate to, but do not seem to directly reflect, a latent variable of mindfulness. The authors recommend against the use of an FFMQ total score, favoring individual scale scores, and further examination of method effects in mindfulness scales.     

Use of change blindness to measure different abilities to detect relevant changes in natural driving scenes

Drivers have to focus their attention on a danger to become aware of it. Change blindness paradigms are therefore relevant to studying the ability to detect danger. However, research has not yet focused on the role of two essential factors in guiding drivers’ attention: driving experience and the specific needs for performing a manoeuvre. Based on a previous analysis of real accident situations, we used a one-shot paradigm with static scenes to test observers’ ability to detect various changes as a function of their driving experience, the manoeuvre envisaged and the environmental context. The results showed that change detection depends greatly on driving experience when planning to cross a junction or to turn left, while it depends more on the environmental setting and task complexity when seeking a direction. The results were not conclusive, however, in explaining how drivers failed to notice that the vehicle ahead of them was turning when they considered an overtaking manoeuvre. We discuss the contributions of our research in relation to the possibilities of using change blindness as a measurement tool in studies on automobile driving.     

The psychology of social dilemmas: A review

Broadly defined, social dilemmas involve a conflict between immediate self-interest and longer-term collective interests. These are challenging situations because acting in one’s immediate self-interest is tempting to everyone involved, even though everybody benefits from acting in the longer-term collective interest. As such, greater knowledge of social dilemmas should help us understand not only the theoretical puzzles of why people cooperate (or not) but also the ways in which cooperation in groups and organizations can be maintained or promoted. This article reviews different types of social dilemmas, highlights recent developments in the field (especially within psychology), and suggests some new avenues for future research. We illustrate that the field of social dilemma is growing and flourishing in terms of theory, interdisciplinary collaboration, and applicability, producing insights that are novel, replicable, and applicable to many social situations where short-term self-interest is at odds with the long-term interests of teams, organizations, or nations.     

Parenting style and adolescent smoking cognitions and behaviour

Parenting style and smoking-related cognitions have both successfully predicted adolescent smoking behaviour. Data were collected among 482 Dutch adolescents to examine whether effects of parenting styles (authoritative, permissive, authoritarian, rejecting, neglecting, measured by underlying dimensions support, strict control, and psychological control) on adolescent lifetime smoking were mediated by cognitions (pro-smoking attitude, social norm, self-efficacy, intention) and to study the role of gender in this process. Support was not significantly associated with smoking behaviour. The inverse relation between strict control and smoking was partly mediated by attitude and intention, both associated with increased smoking. Psychological control related directly to increased lifetime smoking. Combinations of dimensions creating the specific styles were not associated with cognitions or behaviour. Maternal and paternal parenting were equally associated with smoking cognitions and behaviour; nor were effects moderated by adolescent gender. Interventions to prevent adolescent smoking initiation should aim at increasing strict control and reducing psychological control.     

Coping with dental treatment correlates of dispositional and domain specific monitoring and blunting

Abstract

Relations between coping style and several variables on an intermediary level were studied in a group of dentally anxious patients (N = 68) awaiting dental treatment. Monitoring was found to be positively related to the need of information: General dispositional monitoring was the best predictor of the need of information in case of more distant threat, whereas domain specific monitoring was the best predictor in case of imminent threat. Furthermore. dental trait anxiety was strongly related to early anticipatory tension, degree of anticipatory tension at several moments in time, and tension during treatment as perceived by the dentist, thereby overshadowing the weaker effects of coping style. Domain specific blunting was negatively related to desires for informational adaptations in the waiting room, and to question proneness as perceived by the dentist during treatment. It is concluded that, in order to study further effects of coping style, a sample homogeneous with respect to domain specific anxiety is needed.     

Emotional competence and quality of life of children with asthma: The mediating effect of coping strategies

This study explored the mediating effect of coping strategies on the relationship between emotional competence (EC) and quality of life (QOL) among children with asthma. Participants were 87 children (M age?=?11.72, SD?=?2.58) with controlled and partially controlled asthma, undergoing everyday treatment. They filled in questionnaires assessing EC, coping strategies and QOL. Results showed that the association between some ECs and the QOL of children with asthma was fully mediated by two maladaptive cognitive coping strategies. Among children with asthma, a greater ability to differentiate their emotions, a reduced attention to bodily signals of emotions and a reduced analysis of their current emotional state were related to decreased engagement in two coping strategies (‘Ignoring Asthma’ and ‘Worrying about Asthma’), which in turn increased their QOL. These findings show that EC has an indirect effect on QOL through very specific coping strategies. They also emphasise the importance of screening EC in children with asthma and the importance of developing and using multidisciplinary interventions for them.     

An Examination of Irigaray's Commitment to Transcendental Phenomenology in The Forgetting of Air and The Way of Love

Although sexual difference is widely regarded as the concept that lies at the center of Luce Irigaray's thought, its meaning and significance is highly contested. This dissensus, however, attests to more than merely the existence of a recalcitrant conceptual ambiguity. That is, Irigaray's discussion of sexual difference remains fraught not because she leaves this concept undefined but because the centrality of sexual difference in fact marks a complex and unstable nexus of phenomena that shift throughout her work. Consequently, if Irigaray is indeed the preeminent thinker of sexual difference, this is not in virtue of her recurrent appeal to a monolithic, readily digestible concept but rather somehow despite the absence of precisely this gesture. In this paper, I will attempt to elucidate the peculiar preeminence of sexual difference in Irigaray's work by identifying her persistent, though largely unexamined, commitment to transcendental phenomenology. Indeed, I attempt to show that the complex of phenomena of sexual difference emerges in L'oubli de l'air and The Way of Love as a modulation of Heidegger's own revision of transcendental phenomenology. In this sense, the peculiar preeminence of sexual difference does not mark the centrality of a concept but Irigaray's amplification of this Heideggerian gesture.     

Convergent,Discriminant, and Incremental Validity of the Pictorial Attitude Implicit Association Test and the Picture Story Exercise as Measures of the Implicit Power Motive

The Pictorial Attitude Implicit Association Test (PA‐IAT) has recently been proposed as new measure of implicit motives. We report a study that provides the first evidence for the convergent validity of the PA‐IAT by showing that the PA‐IAT correlates significantly with a standard measure of implicit motives [i.e. the Picture Story Exercise (PSE)]. Discriminant validity of the PA‐IAT was verified in the sense that the PA‐IAT shared virtually no common variance with explicit motive measures. Our analyses revealed that the PA‐IAT and PSE can best be conceived as related but distinct measures. We further showed that the PA‐IAT had incremental validity in predicting performance on a memory recall task over and above the PSE. In general, our results confirm that the PA‐IAT is a valid measure of implicit motives and can serve as valid alternative to the PSE. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.