Fluency and Attitudes

The goal of this article is to review how, when, and why fluency, or processing ease, affects attitudes. The current article first defines fluency and then discusses its direct impact on attitudes, noting that fluency usually makes attitudes more positive and that it does so for a wide array of attitude objects. Mechanisms and moderators of these direct effects are also described. The article then summarizes how fluency can affect attitudes indirectly, through its impact on other judgments (like perceptions of confidence or truth) and on cognitive operations (like information processing). The article ends by highlighting a few areas where additional research is likely to reap impressive benefits.     

Better to Give and to Compete? Prosocial and Competitive Motives as Interactive Predictors of Citizenship Behavior

Research has returned mixed results concerning the relationship between prosocial motivation and citizenship behavior. Building from research suggesting that mixed motives might explain these equivocal findings, we conducted two field studies examining the interaction between prosocial and competitive motives and two types of citizenship behavior. Prosocial motivation, but not competitive motivation, was positively related to citizenship behavior directed at others, though this relationship was weakened when prosocial motives were accompanied by competitive motives. Prosocial motives compensated for weak competitive motives to predict citizenship behavior directed toward the organization. Our studies expand research on prosocial and competitive motivation, mixed-motives, and citizenship behavior. Further, they carry personnel implications given that many organizations seek to hire employees high on both competitive and prosocial motivation.     

Resilience and Coping as Predictors of Well-Being in Adults

Well-being is one of the keys to successful and optimal development across the lifespan. Based on the idea that development involves changes in individuals’ adaptive capacity to meet their needs over time, the changes that occur in the second half of life require effort to adapt to the new reality. This study used a structural model to test the effects of coping strategies and resilience on well-being in a sample of 305 mid-life adults. Several constructs were measured: coping strategies, resilience, and well-being. A final model was obtained with good fit indices; psychological well-being was positively predicted by resilience and negatively by emotional coping. Moreover, positive reappraisal and avoidance form part of both coping strategies (problem-focused and emotion-focused). Considering the characteristics of the model, educational intervention programs could be developed to promote skills that favor good adaptation at this stage in the life cycle and contribute to promoting successful aging.     

Familiarity increases subjective positive affect even in non-affective and non-evaluative contexts

Previous research shows that the experience of familiarity involves the experience of positive affect. In two experiments we clarify and extend this research by showing that the experience of familiarity involves the experience of positive affect even when the nature of the experimental task is non-affective and non-evaluative and even when participants are actively performing other cognitive operations—that the association of familiarity and positive affect is not disrupted by (non-affective and non-evaluative) judgments regardless of whether familiarity does or does not play a role in those judgments. Experiment 1 used a non-affective but evaluative task and Experiment 2 a completely non-evaluative task. Both studies manipulated familiarity through re-exposure and showed that processing familiar stimuli induced a pleasurable subjective experience.     

Family Cohesion and Adaptation in Pediatric Chronic Conditions: The Missing Link of the Family’s Condition Management

The quality of family functioning has been considered an important predictor of adaptation in children with chronic conditions and their parents. Previous research suggests that beyond general family functioning, the specific experience of the family’s condition management is paramount for understanding family members’ adaptation. This study’s first goal was to compare family functioning and parents’ and children’s adaptation outcomes across four chronic conditions: asthma, diabetes, epilepsy, and obesity. Secondly, we explored the mediating role of family life difficulties and parental mutuality, as two potential paths through which family cohesion is linked to family members’ adaptation. A total of 263 parents of children (3–19 years old) with asthma (n = 77), obesity (n = 79), epilepsy (n = 52) and diabetes (n = 55) completed self-report measures of family cohesion, family life difficulty, parental mutuality, anxiety and depressive symptoms, and their children’s health-related quality of life (HrQoL). The results showed that families of children with diabetes, obesity, and epilepsy were at higher risk of experiencing family difficulties and children’s deteriorated HrQoL when compared to families of children with asthma. With regard to the links among study variables, although family cohesion had both a direct and indirect relationship with parental depressive symptoms, its links with parental anxiety symptoms and children’s HrQoL were only indirect, through family life difficulty. These associations were consistent across the four clinical groups. These findings emphasize the relevance of family-centered interventions aimed at promoting family cohesion, parents’ mutuality, and effective coping with the demands of pediatric chronic conditions.