The Effects of Nonverbal Immediacy and Verbal Person Centeredness in the Emotional Support Process

This study explores the combined influence of nonverbal immediacy and verbal person centeredness in the emotional support process. Three complementary models were tested in an experiment with 216 participants who disclosed an emotionally upsetting event to a confederate trained to display different levels of nonverbal immediacy and person centeredness. Participants subsequently completed a set of instruments measuring the perceived comforting quality of the confederate. Results suggested that nonverbal immediacy and person centeredness influence perceptions of what makes for good comforting. The data supported 2 of the advanced models but failed to provide support for a nonverbal primacy effect on perceived comforting quality.     

Perceived Risk of AIDS: Assessing the Behavioral and Psychosocial Consequences in a Cohort of Gay Men1

Longitudinal analyses reported here explored the relationship between a perceived sense of being at risk for AIDS and a variety of behavioral, social, and psychological consequences. Data were obtained from a cohort of 637 homosexual men living in Chicago, who are participating in a psychosocial study and have completed two waves of data collection. Their perceptions of risk were quantified using both an absolute and a comparative measure; these were combined into a risk index, scored from one to nine (x?= 3.91; SD= 1.64). Univariate analyses demonstrated that level of risk was related to several measures of subsequent behavioral risk reduction. However, after adjustment for sociodemographic variables, initial behavior, and other components of a model predicting behavior change, this was no longer true. Of the 12 behavioral outcomes assessed, only one was related to risk after appropriate adjustment, and this relationship was negative. Other longitudinal analyses examined the impact of a sense of risk on measures of psychosocial functioning which have been theoretically linked to health behaviors and to measures of psychological/ social distress. These demonstrated a range of potentially adverse consequences for those who perceived themselves to be at greater risk for AIDS, including increased barriers to behavioral change, obsessive/compulsive behavior, social role impairment, and more intrusive worries and concerns about AIDS. Taken together, these results suggest that there is little or no observable benefit to an increased sense of risk, but that such a sense subsequently leads to distress and dysfunction in a variety of realms. The implications of these findings for development of policy concerning antibody testing of at-risk populations is discussed.     

Worldly Reasons: An Ontological Inquiry into Motivating Considerations and Normative Reasons

In this article I advocate a worldly account of normative reasons according to which there is an ontological gap between these and the premises of practical thought, i.e. motivating considerations. While motivating considerations are individuated fine‐grainedly, normative reasons should be classified as coarse‐grained entities, e.g. as states of affairs, in order to explain certain necessary truths about them and to make sense of how we count and weigh them. As I briefly sketch, acting for normative reasons is nonetheless possible if the connection between normative reasons and motivating considerations is a competence‐based correspondence.     

Über das Verhalten farbiger Formen bei Helligkeitsgleichhe von Figur und Grund

Ohne Zusammenfassung Mit 29 Abbildungen im Text.     

Assessing Violence Risk Among Female IPV Perpetrators: An Examination of the B-SAFER

Intimate partner violence (IPV) is a global problem and one in which frontline assessment and management falls primarily to police. Although IPV is often conceptualized as a male-perpetrated crime, evidence substantiates female IPV perpetration and increased arrest rates, raising important issues for police. This article examines police use of the Brief Spousal Assault Form for the Evaluation of Risk (B-SAFER; Kropp, Hart, & Belfrage, 2005, 2010), a violence risk assessment tool for IPV. The B-SAFER was used to assess and manage 52 women arrested for IPV. When compared to Belfrage and Strand (2008), who examined men arrested for IPV in the same sample, women possessed fewer risk factors. Risk factors were related to summary risk judgments, although differences existed between genders and risk judgments were not related to management recommendations. Results suggest that risk factors, in addition to those in the B-SAFER, are required to assess risk for female IPV.     

Working Together with God: Religious Coping,Perceived Discrimination,and Hypertension

This study examined the relationships of perceived discrimination and religious coping with hypertension in a sample of Black and White Seventh-day Adventists. Data come from a community-based sample of 6128 White American, 2253 African American and 927 Caribbean American adults (67% women; mean age = 62.9 years). Results indicate lifetime unfair treatment was significantly associated with hypertension regardless of race/ethnicity. Positive religious coping was associated with lower odds of hypertension and did not interact with unfair treatment. Both positive and negative religious coping were indirectly associated with increased hypertension risk through an increase in perceived discrimination.

     

The communality-bonus effect for male transformational leaders – leadership style,gender, and promotability

Women have made considerable inroads into the workforce but remain underrepresented in leadership positions. Even though studies show that men and women hardly differ in their leadership behaviours, we argue that male and female leaders are evaluated differentially contingent on the gender-congruence of their leadership style. Drawing arguments from expectancy violation theory, we investigate evaluations of men and women who show transformational leadership (a style consisting of communal behaviours in line with stereotypes about women) and autocratic leadership (a style consisting of agentic behaviours in line with stereotypes about men). We employed a three-study research design combining two experimental studies and a two-wave field study with business leaders (overall N = 344). Overall transformational leadership resulted in higher evaluations of promotability due to higher perceptions of leaders’ communality and leadership effectiveness. Importantly, these effects were stronger for men, and men showing transformational leadership were evaluated to be more promotable than women. This implies a communality-bonus effect for male transformational leaders. There was no difference in promotability evaluations for women versus men showing autocratic leadership. This effect was mediated by agency and effectiveness perceptions for women but not for men. Implications are discussed.     

Episodic retrieval processes take place automatically in auditory negative priming

Episodic retrieval processes involved in negative priming have been argued to be susceptible to the proportion of attended repetition trials. The more trials with the same prime and probe response, the more beneficial should it be to retrieve the prime episode, particularly its response. Retrieval of the prime episode, however, is task-inappropriate for ignored repetition trials, leading to negative priming. Correspondingly, visual negative priming increases with the proportion of attended repetition trials. We tested whether the same is true for the auditory modality. Three attended repetition proportion groups (0–25–50%) showed the same amount of negative priming. All groups committed more prime response errors in ignored repetition than in control trials, implying that prime response retrieval took place. Thus, retrieval processes in auditory negative priming appear to be automatic and cannot be influenced as easily as in the visual domain. In Experiment 2, the proportion of ignored repetition trials was manipulated (25–50–75%) to test whether auditory negative priming can be strategically manipulated at all. Similar to the visual modality negative priming was reduced with increasing proportion of ignored repetition trials. Differences between visual and auditory short-term memory are discussed to account for the results.     

Neurocognitive impairment does not predict treatment outcome in obsessive-compulsive disorder

There is conflicting evidence pertaining to whether or not neurocognitive task performance at baseline predicts treatment response in obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). In the present study, we administered a set of executive neurocognitive tests with a putative sensitivity for treatment outcome to a sample of 138 OCD patients. Additionally, subjective neurocognitive dysfunction was determined via a questionnaire. All patients participated in a cognitive-behavioural treatment program (CBT). Results showed that responders (n = 73) did not differ from non-responders (n = 65) on any of the parameters except for decreased performance on the delayed alternation test (p < .1, effect size: .61). A subsidiary analysis revealed that slowing on the Trail-Making Test A and an enhanced rate of perserveration errors on the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test predicted poor outcome for the treatment of compulsions. It is concluded that neurocognitive impairment does not represent a reliable early warning sign for non-response to CBT.     

Working memory and attention are still impaired after three years in patients with stress‐related exhaustion

Cognitive impairment is one of the most pronounced symptoms reported by patients with stress‐related mental health problems. Impairments related to executive function and to some extent speed and attention are therefore common in patients with stress‐related burnout/exhaustion. In this paper we present a follow‐up of cognitive performance in patients with stress‐related exhaustion several years after they initially sought medical care. Thirty patients and 27 healthy controls, mean age 49 years (SD 6.5) and 55 years (SD 6.7) respectively, were included, all of whom had undergone baseline measurements of neuropsychological functioning. The mean follow‐up time was three years. Half of the patients still reported mental health problems at follow‐up and over time no major changes in cognitive performance were noted. The patients still performed significantly poorer than controls with regard to cognitive functions, mainly related to speed, attention and memory function. Long‐lasting impairment of cognitive functions related to speed, attention and memory function noted in patients with stress‐related exhaustion should be acknowledged and taken into consideration during treatment and when discussing a return to work. Follow‐up periods longer than three years are needed to explore the persistence of the cognitive impairment.