Inducing an availability heuristic on the Wason selection task overrides the matching bias

A long history of examining reasoning using the Wason selection task has revealed that many respondents are biased towards choices that match the items expressed in the rule. One reason for this particular heuristic may be that no better information is immediately available, and thus matching items win over the competing choice simply via recognition. In two experiments, we sought to examine whether a stronger memory trace could override the matching bias. We created rules from common, easily recognisable nursery rhymes and varied the degree to which the presented rules matched the commonly known rhymes. The components of the remembered rhyme had a strong influence on the participants’ selections, suggesting that a strong memory trace can override the usual matching bias. We provide an interpretation of these results in light of answer fluency, mental models, and probabilistic estimates.     

The development of internal representations of magnitude and their association with Arabic numerals.

Developmental aspects of number concepts were evaluated using participants from the beginning and end of first grade (6-7 years old), third and fifth grades (7-11 years old), and university (22 years old). Participants evaluated the numerical value or physical size of stimuli varying along both dimensions. The numerical distance effect appeared in all groups. In contrast, the size congruity effect started to appear only at the end of first grade. Based on our results, a model of internal representation of magnitude claiming that there are two different representations was propose. At the beginning of first grade children can automatically access only one of these representations and only from the end of first grade can they access both of these representations.     

Social Isolation of Youth at Risk: Conceptualizations and Practical Implications

A literature review led to a conceptualization of social isolation as a major factor in determining how youth are increasingly put at risk for both immediate and lifelong difficulties. Three common and particularly troubling at‐risk situations that counselors face are specifically examined to better understand the origins and implications affecting assessment and interventions: abuse by peers in the form of bullying and harassment, abuse and neglect of youth by adults, and suicide as a form of self‐abuse. The authors present practical implications for how school and mental health counselors can apply this information in practice.     

Does Motivation Impact OCD Symptom Severity? An Exploration of Longitudinal Effects

Understanding the role of patient motivation in OCD treatment is of clinical importance given the requisite autonomous role of patients in Exposure and Response Prevention. The present study investigated state- and trait-like relations between three variables: two previously established motivational constructs, readiness to change (RTC) and committed action (CA), derived from the University of Rhode Island Change Assessment, and OCD symptom severity as measured by the self-report Yale-Brown Obsessive Compulsive Scale (Y-BOCS-SR). Utilizing a random-intercept cross-lagged panel model (RI-CLPM) design, we assessed autoregressive, within-time correlations, and cross-lagged effects of RTC, CA, and Y-BOCS-SR scores at admission, month 1 of treatment, and discharge from an intensive/residential treatment program for OCD. Results revealed significant autoregressive (i.e., state-like) effects for CA and Y-BOCS-SR, negative within-time correlations between state CA and Y-BOCS-SR across all time points, a positive within-time correlation between state CA and RTC at admission, and a cross-lagged effect between state Y-BOCS-SR at month 1 of treatment and state RTC at discharge. Results also demonstrated that the stability of the RTC variable was attributable to trait-like factors in the present sample. This study is novel in its use of RI-CLPM in an OCD sample and represents an important addition to the literature on the longitudinal impacts of dynamic constructs of motivation. Our findings may provide future researchers with strategies to supplement ERP with CA-driven motivational interviewing.     

Emotional display rules in Palestine: Ingroup/outgroup membership,status of interaction partner and gender

This study investigates emotional display rules within the Palestinian context, focusing on the seven basic emotions in a sample of 150 college students from the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. Overall, participants felt that it was more appropriate to express positive emotions (happiness and surprise) than negative powerful (anger, contempt and disgust) or negative powerless (fear and sadness) emotions. They also perceived it to be more appropriate to express positive and negative powerless emotions to ingroup than outgroup members and to express negative powerful emotions to lower status compared to higher status individuals. Gender differences were also found: men endorsed greater expression of both powerful and, surprisingly, powerless emotions than women, but only when interacting with outgroup members. Results are interpreted in terms of the cultural values of individualism–collectivism and power distance as well as cultural differences in emotional expressiveness between collectivistic societies. This study is one of the first to examine emotional display rules in an Arab population, thus expanding our current knowledge base.     

“Hall of Broken Mirrors”—Enactment in an Analytic Group of “Difficult Patients”

This article focuses on the transformation of dissociated self-states as a curative factor in an analytic group of “difficult patients.” Foulkes (1964) referred to the analytic group as a “curative hall of mirrors.” I would like to integrate group analytic theory with relational psychoanalytic concepts. I propose that when dissociated self-states are expressed in a group, this creates a “broken mirrors” experience that is sometimes expressed through enactment. I develop this idea, and argue that the group mirrors to the patient his image—distorted and defective—and forces him to cope with his “not me” states. I demonstrate, through three clinical vignettes, how dissociated states hinder the reflective space and create a “hall of broken mirrors” experience. I would argue that in a safe space, the patients’ “not me” states can be transformed, and the hall of broken mirrors can turn into a curative hall of mirrors.     

Feel good now or regret it later? The respective roles of affective attitudes and anticipated affective reactions for explaining health‐promoting and health risk behavioral intentions

Evidence supporting the incorporation of affective constructs, such as affective attitudes and anticipated regret, into theoretical models of health behavior has been mounting in recent years; however, the role of positive anticipated affective reactions (e.g., pride) has been largely unexplored. The purpose of the present investigation was to assess how affective attitudes and anticipated affective reactions (both pride and regret for performing a behavior or not) may provide distinct utility for understanding intentions to perform health‐promoting and health risk behaviors over and above cognitive attitudes and other established theoretical constructs from the theory of planned behavior (TPB). Participants (N = 210) were recruited via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to complete a one‐time online battery assessing TPB and affective constructs. Self‐reported intentions served as the main outcome measure, and hierarchical linear modeling was used to examine the effects of TPB and affective constructs across behaviors. Controlling for TPB constructs, more positive affective attitudes and greater anticipated regret, but not anticipated pride, predicted intentions to engage in future health behaviors. Anticipated affective reactions contributed explanatory variance for intentions to perform health risk behaviors, but anticipated pride and regret were not associated with intentions to perform health risk behaviors. Contributions made via the inclusion of both positively and negatively valence anticipated affective reactions for both action and inaction (performing a behavior or not) across a range of health promoting and health risk behaviors are discussed, as well as implications for future intervention work.     

External World Skepticism,Confidence and Psychologism about the Problem of Priors

In this paper, I will distinguish two varieties of external world skepticism: belief and confidence skepticism. I will argue that we can defang the intuitive motivations for confidence skepticism (though not a meeker “argument from might,” which got some attention in the twentieth century literature on external world skepticism) by adopting a partially psychologistic answer to the problem of priors. And I will argue that certain recent work in the epistemology of mathematics and logic provides independent support for such psychologism.     

Insights into Men’s Sexual Aggression Toward Women: Dehumanization and Objectification

Sex Roles - Sexual aggression is a global, ongoing problem, and it is most often perpetrated by men against women. In a set of studies, we investigated the role of dehumanization and...