Need for Closure and the Social Response to Terrorism

It has been long contended that terrorism is a form of psychological warfare with the aim of advancing political objectives through the spreading of fear. The present set of five studies explored the relation between need for closure and the social response to terrorism. We found support for the notion that reminders of terrorist attacks elevate the need for closure and that the need for closure may enhance ingroup identification; interdependence with others; outgroup derogation; and support for tough and decisive counterterrorism policies and for leaders likely to carry out such policies. The implications of this research for the claims of terrorist ideologues regarding the efficacy of terrorism are discussed.     

Index to Media Psychology Volume 8

This study suggests that diversity of media diet mediates the relation between cognitive needs and accurate perception of public opinion. It was hypothesized that people with high need for cognition will expose themselves to various media outlets that support and that oppose their views; as a result, they will develop a more accurate perception of public opinion. In contrast, people with high need to evaluate will show preferences to like-minded media outlets and, consequently, will perceive their opinion to be more popular than it actually is. The hypotheses were tested using a survey conducted with a sample of 450 Israeli participants. The results confirmed the hypotheses regarding need for cognition, but the results regarding need to evaluate pointed to cognitive biases other than selective exposure.     

Chicken soup really is good for the soul: "comfort food" fulfills the need to belong

Theories of social surrogacy and embodied cognition assume that cognitive associations with nonhuman stimuli can be affectively charged. In the current research, we examined whether the "comfort" of comfort foods comes from affective associations with relationships. Two experiments support the hypotheses that comfort foods are associated with relationships and alleviate loneliness. Experiment 1 found that the consumption of comfort foods automatically activates relationship-related concepts. Experiment 2 found that comfort foods buffer against belongingness threats in people who already have positive associations with relationships (i.e., are secure in attachment style). Implications for social surrogacy, need to belong, embodied cognition, and eating behavior are discussed.     

The Interconnected Self: The Social Individual is More Than Just Social + Individual

Although decades of research provide consistent evidence supporting the perspective that the self is divided into social and personal components each with unique and predictable motivational associations, the current paper argues that something important has been overlooked. Specifically, what has been lost is the acknowledgment that although different components of self can be activated, and can have important implications, the two aspects of self are highly interconnected. Specifically in this paper, it is argued that (i) the independent self is affected by social motivations and (ii) the social self is affected by independent motivations. Two studies are presented in support of these hypotheses. We conclude by comparing our perspective with existing theories of the self and by discussing implications for the study of the self.     

Age differences in visual statistical learning

Recent work has shown that older adults' lessened inhibitory control leads them to inadvertently bind co-occurring targets and distractors. Although this hyper-binding effect may lead to the formation of more superfluous associations, and thus greater interference at retrieval for older adults, it may also lead to a greater knowledge of information contained within the periphery of awareness. On the basis of evidence that younger adults only show learning for statistical regularities contained within attended information, we asked whether older adults may also show learning for regularities contained within to-be-ignored information. Older and younger adults viewed a series of red and green pictures and performed a 1-back task on one of the colors. Unbeknownst to participants, both color streams were organized into triplets that occurred sequentially. Implicit memory for the triplets from both the attended and ignored streams was tested using a speeded detection task. Replicating previous work, younger adults demonstrated more learning for the attended triplets than the unattended triplets. Older adults, however, demonstrated similar learning for both the attended and ignored triplets, suggesting that contrary to popular belief, they may actually know more than younger adults about the world around them, including how seemingly irrelevant events co-occur. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved).     

Determinants and Predictive Value of Clinician Assessment of Short‐Term Suicide Risk

We examine the interrelations among clinicians' judgment of patients' suicide risk, clinicians' emotional responses, and standard risk factors in the short‐term prediction of suicidal thoughts and behaviors. Psychiatric outpatients (n = 153) with a lifetime history of suicide ideation/attempt and their treating clinicians (n = 67) were evaluated at intake. Clinicians completed a standard suicide risk instrument (modified SAD PERSONS scale), a 10‐point Likert scale assessment of judgment of patient suicide risk (Clinician Prediction Scale), and a measure of their emotional responses to the patient (Therapist Response Questionnaire‐Suicide Form). The Columbia Suicide Severity Rating Scale and the Beck Scale for Suicide Ideation were administered at a one‐month follow‐up assessment (n = 114, 74.5%). Clinician judgment of risk significantly predicted suicidal thoughts and behaviors at follow‐up. Both the standard suicide risk instrument and clinician emotional responses contributed independently to the clinician assessment of risk, which, in turn, mediated their relationships with suicidal thoughts and behaviors. Our findings validate the importance of clinical judgment in assessing suicide risk. Clinical judgment appears to be informed both by concrete risk factors and clinicians' emotional responses to suicidal patients, highlighting emotional awareness as a promising area for research and training.     

Conditionals and inferential connections: toward a new semantics*

Abstract

In previous published research (“Conditionals and Inferential Connections: A Hypothetical Inferential Theory,” Cognitive Psychology, 2018), we investigated experimentally what role the presence and strength of an inferential connection between a conditional’s antecedent and consequent plays in how people process that conditional. Our analysis showed the strength of that connection to be strongly predictive of whether participants evaluated the conditional as true, false, or neither true nor false. In this article, we re-analyse the data from our previous research, now focussing on the semantics of conditionals rather than on how they are processed. Specifically, we use those data to compare the main extant semantics with each other and with inferentialism, a semantics according to which the truth of a conditional requires the presence of an inferential connection between the conditional’s component parts.