Longing for Ex‐Partners out of Fear of Being Single

This research investigated whether people who fear being single have a more difficult time letting go of ex‐partners following a romantic breakup. Data were collected in a cross‐sectional study (N = 209, 64% women, M_age = 30 years old) as well as a 1‐month daily experience study of individuals who just went through a romantic breakup (N = 117, 44% women, M_age = 27 years old). Findings from both studies revealed that those with stronger fear of being single (Spielmann et al., 2013) reported greater longing for their ex‐partners. Pre‐ to post‐breakup analyses revealed that fear of being single increased after a breakup, regardless of who initiated the breakup. Within‐day analyses revealed that longing for an ex‐partner and attempts to renew the relationship were greater on days with stronger fear of being single. Lagged‐day analyses provided support for the conclusion that fear of being single increased longing and renewal attempts over time, but longing and renewal attempts did not influence fear of being single. These findings suggest that fear of being single is a particularly useful construct for understanding the romantic detachment process.     

Is It a Name or a Fact? Disambiguation of Reference Via Exclusivity and Pragmatic Reasoning

Adults reason by exclusivity to identify the meanings of novel words. However, it is debated whether, like children, they extend this strategy to disambiguate other referential expressions (e.g., facts about objects). To further inform this debate, this study tested 41 adults on four conditions of a disambiguation task: label/label, fact/fact, label/fact, and fact/label (Scofield & Behrend, 2007 ). Participants also provided a verbal explanation for their referent selections to tease apart the underlying processes. Results indicated that adults successfully discerned the target object in the label/label and label/fact condition, yet not the remaining two conditions. Verbal reports indicated that the strategy utilized to disambiguate differed depending upon communicative context. These findings confirm that the tendency to reason by exclusivity becomes restricted to word‐learning situations with growing linguistic and communicative experience.     

The matching relation and situation-specific bias modulation in professional football play selection

The utility of a quantitative model depends on the extent to which its fitted parameters vary systematically with environmental events of interest. Professional football statistics were analyzed to determine whether play selection (passing versus rushing plays) could be accounted for with the generalized matching equation, and in particular whether variations in play selection across game situations would manifest as changes in the equation's fitted parameters. Statistically significant changes in bias were found for each of five types of game situations; no systematic changes in sensitivity were observed. Further analyses suggested relationships between play selection bias and both turnover probability (which can be described in terms of punishment) and yards-gained variance (which can be described in terms of variable-magnitude reinforcement schedules). The present investigation provides a useful demonstration of association between face-valid, situation-specific effects in a domain of everyday interest, and a theoretically important term of a quantitative model of behavior. Such associations, we argue, are an essential focus in translational extensions of quantitative models.     

Multiple Identity Considerations Among African American Christian Men Experiencing Same‐Sex Attraction

The authors explored the experiences of African American men who identified as Christian and experienced same‐sex attraction. Participants completed an online questionnaire addressing experiences of same‐sex attraction; meaning attributed to their attractions; the sharing of their experiences with others; and perceptions regarding the intersection of their faith, race, and sexual identity. Most respondents (61.5%) felt different from their peers for gender‐related reasons, and most (80.8%) had had homoerotic experiences during the teenage years. Over 40% of participants indicated that their primary identity was Christian, and several shared their experience sorting out attributions and meanings associated with same‐sex attraction in light of their racial and/or religious identities.     

Altruism and the Experimental Data on Helping Behavior

Philosophical accounts of altruism that purport to explain helping behavior are vulnerable to empirical falsification. John Campbell argues that the Good Samaritan study adds to a growing body of evidence that helping behavior is not best explained by appeal to altruism, thus jeopardizing those accounts. I propose that philosophical accounts of altruism can be empirically challenged only if it is shown that altruistic motivations are undermined by normative conflict in the agent, and that the relevant studies do not provide this sort of evidence. Non-normative, purely causal, psychological factors would be empirically relevant only if the notion of altruism is broadened to include the requirement that one recognize certain situations as calling for altruism. But even in that case, the relevant studies are not designed in such a way that could threaten philosophical theories of altruism.     

Young Offenders’ Emotion Recognition Dysfunction Across Emotion Intensities: Explaining Variation Using Psychopathic Traits,Conduct Disorder and Offense Severity

Antisocial individuals have problems recognizing negative emotions (e.g. Marsh & Blair in Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews 32:454–465, 2009); however, due to issues with sampling and different methods used, previous findings have been varied. Sixty-three male young offenders and 37 age-, IQ- and socio-economic status-matched male controls completed a facial emotion recognition task, which measures recognition of happiness, sadness, fear, anger, disgust, and surprise and neutral expressions across 4 emotional intensities. Conduct disorder (YSR), and psychopathic and callous/unemotional traits (YPI) were measured, and offenders’ offense data were taken from the Youth Offending Service’s case files. Relative to controls, offenders were significantly worse at identifying sadness, low intensity disgust and high intensity fear. A significant interaction for anger was also observed, with offenders showing reduced low- but increased high-intensity anger recognition in comparison with controls. Within the young offenders levels of conduct disorder and psychopathic traits explained variation in sadness and disgust recognition, whereas offense severity explained variation in anger recognition. These results suggest that antisocial youths show specific problems in recognizing negative emotions and support the use of targeted emotion recognition interventions for problematic behavior.     

The regulation of explicit and implicit race bias: the role of motivations to respond without prejudice

Three studies examined the moderating role of motivations to respond without prejudice (e.g., internal and external) in expressions of explicit and implicit race bias. In all studies, participants reported their explicit attitudes toward Blacks. Implicit measures consisted of a sequential priming task (Study 1) and the Implicit Association Test (Studies 2 and 3). Study 3 used a cognitive busyness manipulation to preclude effects of controlled processing on implicit responses. In each study, explicit race bias was moderated by internal motivation to respond without prejudice, whereas implicit race bias was moderated by the interaction of internal and external motivation to respond without prejudice. Specifically, high internal, low external participants exhibited lower levels of implicit race bias than did all other participants. Implications for the development of effective self-regulation of race bias are discussed.     

What Is the Buzz About Iconicity? How Iconicity in Caregiver Speech Supports Children's Word Learning

One cue that may facilitate children's word learning is iconicity, or the correspondence between a word's form and meaning. Some have even proposed that iconicity in the early lexicon may serve to help children learn how to learn words, supporting the acquisition of even noniconic, or arbitrary, word–referent associations. However, this proposal remains untested. Here, we investigate the iconicity of caregivers’ speech to young children during a naturalistic free-play session with novel stimuli and ask whether the iconicity of caregivers’ speech facilitates children's learning of the noniconic novel names of those stimuli. Thirty-four 1.5-2-year-olds (19 girls; half monolingual English learners and half bilingual English-Spanish learners) participated in a naturalistic free-play task with their caregivers followed by a test of word-referent retention. We found that caregivers’ use of iconicity, particularly in utterances in which they named the novel stimuli, was associated with the likelihood that children learned that novel name. This result held even when controlling for other factors associated with word learning, such as the concreteness and frequency of words in caregiver speech. Together, the results demonstrate that iconicity not only can serve to help children identify the referent of novel words (as in previous research) but can also support their ability to retain even noniconic word-referent mappings.     

Moving beyond reflection in a hall of mirrors: developing critical reflective capacity in teachers and teacher educators

Using reflection to merely affirm existing beliefs rather than engaging in confrontation and examination of beliefs is like reflecting in a hall of mirrors. This study explores the process of critical reflective development of practicing teachers through program reflections written to prompts during master’s-level coursework, seeking to understand: How does critical reflective capacity develop and change in practicing teachers enrolled in advanced coursework in an M.Ed. program? Researchers used a three-level reflective practice pyramid as a frame for examining teachers’ reflective writings. Specifically, 103 reflections from 26 PK-12 teachers were available for analysis. Where finding a clear trajectory in teacher’s reflective development was an anticipated outcome in which teachers would progress from the technical to contextual to dialectical levels of reflection, findings did not indicate such linear development for most teachers. As faculty analyzed the data, they engaged in critical reflection, also questioning purposes and program outcomes. This paper reports on both our study’s findings in response to the research question and on the results of faculty reflective engagement. Results reinforce the understanding that reflection is an individual journey for teachers and faculty alike; results also highlight the importance for engagement in critical reflection for both teachers and teacher educators.     

Positive life events and social support and the relationship between life stress and psychological disorder

Conclusion In conclusion, the present research demonstrated the deleterious effects of negative life events. Number of negative events was a significant predictor of psychological disorder even when initial disorder was statistically controlled. The cross-sectional regression findings provided some support for the stress-buffering effects of positive life events, but these effects were nonsignificant when initial disorder was statistically controlled. The cross-sectional and prospective regression findings suggest that received social support, as measured by the ISSB, does not have a direct or stress-buffering effect on psychological disorder. These analyses, however, demonstrated the direct and stress-buffering effects of perceived social support, as measured by the ISEL, and the data suggest that the ISEL is a promising measure of this construct.The authors thank Sheldon Cohen who provided helpful comments on an earlier version of this article.