Tracking the trajectory of shame, guilt, and pride across the life span

The authors examined age differences in shame, guilt, and 2 forms of pride (authentic and hubristic) from age 13 years to age 89 years, using cross-sectional data from 2,611 individuals. Shame decreased from adolescence into middle adulthood, reaching a nadir around age 50 years, and then increased in old age. Guilt increased from adolescence into old age, reaching a plateau at about age 70 years. Authentic pride increased from adolescence into old age, whereas hubristic pride decreased from adolescence into middle adulthood, reaching a minimum around age 65 years, and then increased in old age. On average, women reported experiencing more shame and guilt; Blacks reported experiencing less shame and Asians more hubristic pride than other ethnicities. Across the life span, shame and hubristic pride tended to be negatively related to psychological well-being, and shame-free guilt and authentic pride showed positive relations with well-being. Overall, the findings support the maturity principle of personality development and suggest that as people age they become more prone to experiencing psychologically adaptive self-conscious emotions, such as guilt and authentic pride, and less prone to experiencing psychologically maladaptive ones, such as shame and hubristic pride.     

Is Happiness Good for Your Personality? Concurrent and Prospective Relations of the Big Five With Subjective Well‐Being

The present research examined longitudinal relations of the Big Five personality traits with three core aspects of subjective well‐being: life satisfaction, positive affect, and negative affect. Latent growth models and autoregressive models were used to analyze data from a large, nationally representative sample of 16,367 Australian residents. Concurrent and change correlations indicated that higher levels of subjective well‐being were associated with higher levels of Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness, and with lower levels of Neuroticism. Moreover, personality traits prospectively predicted change in well‐being, and well‐being levels prospectively predicted personality change. Specifically, prospective trait effects indicated that individuals who were initially extraverted, agreeable, conscientious, and emotionally stable subsequently increased in well‐being. Prospective well‐being effects indicated that individuals with high initial levels of well‐being subsequently became more agreeable, conscientious, emotionally stable, and introverted. These findings challenge the common assumption that associations of personality traits with subjective well‐being are entirely, or almost entirely, due to trait influences on well‐being. They support the alternative hypothesis that personality traits and well‐being aspects reciprocally influence each other over time.     

Dynamic states in working memory modulate guidance of visual attention: Evidence from an n-back paradigm

Items held in working memory (WM) can automatically bias attention when they reappear in visual displays. Recent evidence, however, suggests that WM biases of attention may be reduced under certain conditions, for example with increasing memory load. We employed a dual task paradigm to investigate how WM biases are affected by dynamic updating of memory contents. 1-back and 2-back versions of a memory task with colour stimuli were interrupted at intervals by an unrelated visual search task. Reappearance in the search display of the item that was currently active in WM guided attention, while suppressed or inactive items did not. We conclude that the rapid updating of memory contents facilitates the shifting of memory representations into different activity states on a moment-to-moment basis. The finding is consistent with models that propose that only one item can be “active” in WM at any one time to guide attention.     

Stressing the mind: the effect of cognitive load and articulatory suppression on attentional guidance from working memory

Four experiments explored the effect of cognitive load on the time course of top-down guidance of attention from working memory (WM). Observers had to search for a target presented among several distractors, with the target and distractor stimuli embedded inside different objects. On half of the trials, one of the distractor objects was cued by a matching item held in WM. When a single item was maintained in memory, search performance was impaired relative to a neutral baseline, where the memory and search displays did not match. These effects of WM on subsequent search were reduced by including a verbal suppression task during the WM and search displays, and by varying the WM load. The degree of competition for resources in WM is a key factor in determining the time course and magnitude of the interaction between WM and visual selection.     

Distinguishing non-spatial from spatial biases in visual selection: neuropsychological evidence

Recently, it has been shown that patients with visual extinction can show enhanced awareness of contralesional stimuli that match the contents of working memory [Soto, D., & Humphreys, G.W. (2006). Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA, 103, 4789–4792]. Here we investigate whether these effects extend to cases where the working memory cue is verbal rather than visual (Study 1), and we show that non-spatial cues can overcome problems in spatial disengagement in patients, and this can affect the first eye movement made in search (Study 2). We discuss the implications of the data for understanding the relations between the cueing of attention from visual and conceptual information held in working memory and the cueing of spatial attention, and for understanding the relations between non-spatial and spatial biases in selection.     

Cognitive reappraisal in the context of oppression: implications for psychological functioning

Research on emotion regulation has shown cognitive reappraisal to be positively correlated with better psychological functioning. Prior research has failed to account for contextual influences on this important relationship. We examined how this relationship plays out across two United States ethnic groups that represent different contexts of oppression: Puerto Ricans, experiencing distal oppression (societal level) but not proximal oppression (immediate environment), and Latino Americans, experiencing both. We also captured individual beliefs regarding oppression of one's group and implications of that oppression by measuring oppressed minority ideology (OMI). Results confirmed our hypothesis that the relationship between reappraisal and psychological functioning would be moderated by the context of oppression (as measured by ethnic group membership and OMI). For Latino Americans high on OMI, reappraisal was negatively associated with psychological functioning. For Puerto Ricans, regardless of OMI, this relationship remained positive, suggesting a possible benefit for minorities in being surrounded by in-group members.     

Religiosity and social welfare: competing influences of cultural conservatism and prosocial value orientation

This research examines the hypothesis that religiosity has two competing psychological influences on the social welfare attitudes of contemporary Americans. On the one hand, religiosity promotes a culturally based conservative identity, which in turn promotes opposition to federal social welfare provision. On the other hand, religiosity promotes a prosocial value orientation, which in turn promotes support of federal social welfare provision. Across two national samples (Ns = 1,513 and 320) and one sample of business employees (N = 710), reliable support for this competing pathways model was obtained. We argue that research testing influences of nonpolitical individual differences on political preferences should consider the possibility of competing influences that are rooted in a combination of personality processes and contextual-discursive surroundings.     

Prevention of Postpartum Depression in Low-Income Women: Development of the Mamás y Bebés/Mothers and Babies Course

A prenatal intervention designed to prevent the onset of major depressive episodes (MDEs) during pregnancy and postpartum was pilot tested at a public sector women’s clinic. The Mamás y Bebés/Mothers and Babies Course is an intervention developed in Spanish and English that uses a cognitive-behavioral mood management framework, and incorporates social learning concepts, attachment theory, and socio-cultural issues. The four goals of this project were to develop the intervention, assess its acceptability, test the feasibility of conducting a randomized trial with public sector patients, and obtain estimates of its effect size. Forty-one pregnant women at high risk for developing MDEs were randomized to the Mothers and Babies Course (n = 21) or a comparison condition (n = 20). Assessments occurred during pregnancy and at 1, 3, 6, and 12 months postpartum. Differences in terms of depression symptom levels or incidence of MDEs between the two groups did not reach statistical significance in this pilot trial. However, the MDE incidence rates of 14% for the intervention condition versus 25% for the comparison condition represent a small effect size (h = 0.28) that will be further examined in a larger scale study. The intervention was well received by the participants and implementation of a randomized trial appeared quite feasible as indicated by our follow-up rate of 91% at 12 months. Implications for the continuing development of preventive interventions for perinatal depression are discussed.     

Emergentism by default: A view from the bench

For the last 50 years the dominant stance in experimental biology has been reductionism in general, and genetic reductionism in particular. Philosophers were the first to realize that the belief that the Mendelian genes were reduced to DNA molecules was questionable. Soon, experimental data confirmed these misgivings. The optimism of molecular biologists, fueled by early success in tackling relatively simple problems has now been tempered by the difficulties encountered when applying the same simple ideas to complex problems. We analyze three examples taken from experimental data that illustrate the shortcomings of this sort of reductionism. In the first, alterations in the expression of a large number of genes coexist with normal phenotypes at supra-cellular levels of organization; in the second, the supposed intrinsic specificity of hormonal signals is negated; in the third, the notion that cancer is a cellular problem caused by mutated genes is challenged by data gathered both from the reductionist viewpoint and the alternative view proposing that carcinogenesis is development gone awry. As an alternative to reductionism, we propose that the organicist view is a good starting point from which to explore these phenomena. However, new theoretical concepts are needed to grapple with the apparent circular causality of complex biological phenomena.