Understanding emotional display rules at work and outside of work: The effects of country and gender

This study examined the long-held, but empirically untested assumption that emotional display rules at work are different from more general display rules. We examined whether the effect of context (work vs. non-work) on display rules depended on rater gender, rater country (i.e., Singapore, United States), and discrete emotion (anger, contempt, disgust, fear, sadness, and happiness). Results revealed that display rules at work involved less expressivity of emotion than did display rules outside of work for all six emotions. Further, display rules in Singapore involved less expressivity of anger, sadness, and fear than display rules in the US, with no country differences being observed for the emotions of happiness, contempt, and disgust. These results were qualified by significant country-by-gender interactions for anger, contempt, and disgust, a significant country-by-context interaction for fear, and a three-way interaction (i.e., country-by-gender-by-context) for sadness.     

Parenting Behaviors of Mothers and Fathers of Preschool Age Children with Internalizing Disorders

This study investigated parenting behaviors of mothers and fathers of clinically anxious preschool children (with or without depressive comorbidity) and healthy comparison children. Studies assessing children from early school age onwards have found that parental control, rejection, and inconsistent discipline are associated with the presence of children’s internalizing symptoms/disorders. Despite the scarcity of studies investigating these associations at preschool age, we assumed that findings with older children would also apply to children in this age group. In a cross-sectional study we assessed N = 176 children of preschool age (M = 5; 2 years) and both of their parents. A diagnostic interview (Preschool Age Psychiatric Assessment) was conducted to determine children’s psychiatric diagnoses, yielding the following results: a group of n = 67 children with pure anxiety disorders (AD group), a group of n = 38 children with anxiety disorders with depressive comorbidity (AD/DC group), and a comparison group of n = 71 children without psychiatric disorders. Both parents completed the German extended version of the Alabama Parenting Questionnaire. We evaluated maternal depressive symptoms and children’s temperament as further correlates. All variables that differed significantly between groups were entered into multinomial logistic regression analyses to test which variables predict group membership. When comparing each of the two anxiety groups with the comparison group we obtained the following results: (1) Inconsistent paternal discipline and maternal depressive symptoms increased and children’s positive affectivity decreased the probability of children of being in the AD group rather than in the comparison group. (2) Maternal overinvolvement, maternal depressive symptoms and children’s negative affectivity increased and children’s positive affectivity decreased the probability of children of belonging to the AD/DC group rather than to the comparison group. When comparing the two anxiety groups with each other, we found that inconsistent paternal discipline increased and children’s negative affectivity decreased the probability of children of being in the AD group rather than in the AD/DC group. The results suggest that paternal parenting behaviors show different associations with internalizing disorders at preschool age than maternal parenting behaviors. This underlines the importance of including fathers in the prevention and treatment of internalizing disorders at preschool age.     

Safety Behaviors and Social Anxiety: An Examination of the Social Phobia Safety Behaviours Scale

The Social Phobia Safety Behaviours Scale (SPSBS) is a measure designed to identify and assess safety behavior use. The current study is the first to evaluate the psychometric properties of the English SPSBS. Using four samples (N?=?725), the component structure, validity, and ability of the SPSBS to function as a state measure were examined. The results of the principal component analyses suggest that the SPSBS is a two-component measure, consisting of an inhibitory behavior component and a management of physical symptoms component, and the scale has good internal consistency. The SPSBS also showed good concurrent validity in both clinical and nonclinical samples. Moreover, there was evidence to suggest that the SPSBS is an accurate measure of situational use of safety behaviors as compared to observers’ ratings. The results of this investigation show that the SPSBS is a useful tool for the identification and measurement of safety behaviors.     

From Campers to Counselors: a Resource for Prospective Genetic Counseling Students

When thinking about the future of the genetic counseling field, one place to start is with prospective genetic counseling graduate school applicants. Although resources and mentorship opportunities exist for genetic counselors entering the field, the process of deciding on a career, applying to graduate programs, and being admitted can be daunting. As members of the profession, we should take responsibility for ensuring that individuals have the information and resources necessary to make an educated decision about whether genetic counseling is the correct path for them and to take the initial steps along this path. In this article, we present our Genetic Counseling Boot Camp as a model for other genetic counselors to use in developing their own local programs. This type of program can benefit prospective genetic counselors as they begin their professional journeys and can also provide value for the organizers and presenters who are already seasoned in the field.     

<Literal>flankr</Literal>: An R package implementing computational models of attentional selectivity

The Eriksen flanker task (Eriksen and Eriksen, Perception & Psychophysics, 16, 143–149, 1974) is a classic test in cognitive psychology of visual selective attention. Two recent computational models have formalised the dynamics of the apparent increasing attentional selectivity during stimulus processing, but with very different theoretical underpinnings: The shrinking spotlight (SSP) model (White et al., Cognitive Psychology, 210–238, 2011) assumes attentional selectivity improves in a gradual, continuous manner; the dual stage two phase (DSTP) model (Hübner et al., Psychological Review, 759–784, 2010) assumes attentional selectivity changes from a low- to a high-mode of selectivity at a discrete time-point. This paper presents an R package—flankr—that instantiates both computational models. flankr allows the user to simulate data from both models, and to fit each model to human data. flankr provides statistics of the goodness-of-fit to human data, allowing users to engage in competitive model comparison of the DSTP and the SSP models on their own data. It is hoped that the utility of flankr lies in allowing more researchers to engage in the important issue of the dynamics of attentional selectivity.     

The explicit and implicit dance in psychoanalytic change

How the implicit/non-declarative and explicit/declarative cognitive domains interact is centrally important in the consideration of effecting change within the psychoanalytic arena. Stern et al. (1998) declare that long-lasting change occurs in the domain of implicit relational knowledge. In the view of this author, the implicit and explicit domains are intricately intertwined in an interactive dance within a psychoanalytic process. The author views that a spirit of inquiry (Lichtenberg, Lachmann & Fosshage 2002) serves as the foundation of the psychoanalytic process. Analyst and patient strive to explore, understand and communicate and, thereby, create a 'spirit' of interaction that contributes, through gradual incremental learning, to new implicit relational knowledge. This spirit, as part of the implicit relational interaction, is a cornerstone of the analytic relationship. The 'inquiry' more directly brings explicit/declarative processing to the foreground in the joint attempt to explore and understand. The spirit of inquiry in the psychoanalytic arena highlights both the autobiographical scenarios of the explicit memory system and the mental models of the implicit memory system as each contributes to a sense of self, other, and self with other. This process facilitates the extrication and suspension of the old models, so that new models based on current relational experience can be gradually integrated into both memory systems for lasting change.     

Intra-basolateral amygdala infusions of AP-5 impair or enhance retention of inhibitory avoidance depending on training conditions

Previous evidence has suggested that N-methyl-D-aspartate receptors (NMDARs) in the basolateral amygdala (BLA) are critically involved in the acquisition of aversively based learning tasks. However, the role of NMDARs in the BLA in the consolidation of memory of aversive training has not been well elucidated. In the present study, the NMDAR antagonist AP-5 (1 or 3 microg) was infused into the BLA of male Sprague-Dawley rats immediately before, immediately after, or 6h after training on an inhibitory avoidance task with either a high footshock (HFS; only high dose of AP-5 given) or a low footshock (LFS; both doses of AP-5 given). The 48 h retention of animals given AP-5 (3 microg) immediately before or after HFS training was significantly impaired compared to that of vehicle-controls. In contrast, the retention of rats given AP-5 (3 microg) immediately after LFS training was significantly enhanced compared to that of vehicle-controls. AP-5 (3 microg) infusions administered 6h after training with either an HFS or LFS did not affect retention. These findings suggest that the NMDARs in the BLA are involved in both the acquisition and consolidation of aversive memory. In addition, the AP-5-induced enhancement of memory obtained with LFS training suggests that NMDARs in the BLA are involved in other mechanisms influencing synaptic transmission, in addition to their well-established role in neuroplasticity.     

A holistic account of the own-race effect in face recognition: evidence from a cross-cultural study

A robust finding in the cross-cultural research is that people's memories for faces of their own race are superior to their memories for other-race faces. However, the mechanisms underlying the own-race effect have not been well defined. In this study, a holistic explanation was examined in which Caucasian and Asian participants were asked to recognize features of Caucasian and Asian faces presented in isolation and in the whole face. The main finding was that Caucasian participants recognized own-race faces more holistically than Asian faces whereas Asian participants demonstrated holistic recognition for both own-race and other-race faces. The differences in holistic recognition between Caucasian and Asian participants mirrored differences in their relative experience with own-race and other-race faces. These results suggest that the own-race effect may arise from the holistic recognition of faces from a highly familiar racial group.     

Actions and affordances in syntactic ambiguity resolution

In 2 experiments, eye movements were monitored as participants followed instructions containing temporary syntactic ambiguities (e.g., "Pour the egg in the bowl over the flour"). The authors varied the affordances of task-relevant objects with respect to the action required by the instruction (e.g., whether 1 or both eggs in the visual workspace were in liquid form, allowing them to be poured). The number of candidate objects that could afford the action was found to determine whether listeners initially misinterpreted the ambiguous phrase ("in the bowl") as specifying a location. The findings indicate that syntactic decisions are guided by the listener's situation-specific evaluation of how to achieve the behavioral goal of an utterance.     

Families created through surrogacy arrangements: parent-child relationships in the 1st year of life

Findings are presented of a study of families created through surrogacy arrangements. Forty-two surrogacy families were compared with 51 egg-donation families and 80 natural-conception families on standardized interview and questionnaire measures of the psychological well-being of the parents, the quality of parent-child relationships, and infant temperament. The differences that were identified between the surrogacy families and the other family types indicated greater psychological well-being and adaptation to parenthood by mothers and fathers of children born through surrogacy arrangements than by the natural-conception parents.