De‐escalation after repeated negative feedback: emergent expectations of failure

Research on willingness to make marginal investments (e.g., the escalation and sunk cost literatures) has often focused on project completion decisions, such as the “radar‐blank plane.” This paper discusses a fundamentally different type of marginal investment decision, that of couples deciding whether to continue infertility treatment in the face of repeated failures. Two experiments based on this context show that when people face multiple independent chances to achieve a valued goal but are unsure about chances of success, premature quitting or “de‐escalation” is the norm. Repeated negative feedback appears to induce individuals to see each successive failure as more and more diagnostic. As a result, even a short series of failed attempts evokes beliefs that future attempts will also fail. These emergent expectations of failure, generated by causal attribution processes, associative learning, and/or discounting of ambiguous information, appear very compelling and induce people to forgo profitable marginal investments. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

How does preference reversal appear and disappear? Effects of the evaluation mode

Preference reversal is a systematic change in the preference order between options when different response methods are used (e.g., choice vs. judgment). The present study focuses on procedures used to elicit preferences according to an evaluability hypothesis. Two experiments compared joint vs. separate evaluations and explicit vs. non‐explicit joint evaluations. Subjects had to express preferences between high‐variance gambles (HVGs) and low‐variance gambles (LVGs) either by choosing one gamble to play in a lottery or by assigning gambles minimum selling prices. We show that HVGs are preferred in both choice and pricing conditions when gambles are evaluated separately, and LVGs are preferred in both choice and selling conditions when gambles are evaluated in pairs: i.e., when the evaluation mode is held constant, classic preference reversal disappears. These results support the evaluability hypothesis, and suggest that preferences depend on whether subjects are allowed to compare the options they are asked to choose from or judge, independently of the nature of the scale (i.e., attractiveness vs. minimum selling price) they are required to adopt. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Choosing How to Choose: Institutional Pressures Affecting the Adoption of Personnel Selection Procedures

The gap between science and practice in personnel selection is an ongoing concern of human resource management. This paper takes Oliver's framework of organizations' strategic responses to institutional pressures as a basis for outlining the diverse economic and social demands that facilitate or inhibit the application of scientifically recommended selection procedures. Faced with a complex network of multiple requirements, practitioners make more diverse choices in response to any of these pressures than has previously been acknowledged in the scientific literature. Implications for the science‐practitioner gap are discussed.     

Maternal insightfulness and preschoolers' emotion and behavior problems: Reciprocal influences in a therapeutic preschool program

Mothers' insightfulness, which involves understanding the motives underlying the child's behavior in a complete, open, and accepting way, was examined both at the beginning and at the end of a therapeutic preschool program for preschoolers using the Insightfulness Assessment (Oppenheim & Koren‐Karie, 2002). The goal of the study was to examine the links between improvement in mothers' insightfulness and reduction in children's behavior problems. Thirty‐two children referred to a therapeutic preschool program for a range of behavioral and emotional problems and their mothers participated in the study. Results showed that mothers who shifted from noninsightfulness before treatment to insightfulness after treatment had children whose behavior problems decreased whereas mothers who did not make such gains had children whose behavior problems increased. The social skills of all children improved during treatment. The possible mechanisms linking the gains of mothers and children are discussed within the framework of attachment theory.     

AQS security scores: What do they represent? A study in construct validation

In a sample of 129 Dutch 15‐month‐old infants, attachment security was assessed both with the Attachment Q‐Set (AQS; Waters, 1995) and with a short version of Ainsworth, Blehar, Waters, and Wall's (1978) Strange Situation (SSS). Infants classified as secure using the SSS had significantly higher AQS scores than insecure and disorganized infants in particular. At the AQS item level, disorganized infants were described as significantly more noncompliant, fussy, and angry relative to secure infants. When security as assessed using the SSS was controlled, the observed quality of parental interactive behavior, parental ego‐resilience, high levels of infant task orientation and pleasure, and low levels of infant anger proneness were found to explain significant and unique portions of the variance in the AQS security scores. The apparently unfavorable set of characteristics associated with low AQS security scores suggests such scores to predict later developmental problems. ©2004 Michigan Association for Infant Mental Health.     

Ethnic Match and Treatment Outcomes for Child and Adolescent Mental Health Center Clients

This study investigated the effects of client ethnicity and client‐counselor ethnic match on treatment outcomes (i.e., GAF‐difference [from the Global Assessment of Functioning Axis V rating of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, fourth edition, American Psychiatric Association, 1994] and client visitation) of 1,946 child and adolescent community mental health center clients. After controlling for 7 other variables, no differences were observed after adjustment among client ethnicities, age groups, or ethnic match on the GAF‐difference dependent measure. Ethnically matched African American child and adolescent clients had fewer mental health visits than did their nonmatched counterparts. Implications of these findings are discussed.     

Healthy and chronically‐ill children's generalisation of illness to biological and non‐biological categories

Using children's naïve theory of biology as a framework, this study investigated children's developing understanding of illness by examining their generalisation of illness to biological and non‐biological categories. In addition to differences associated with age, the children's health status was investigated for any possible linkwith their understanding. Healthy and chronically‐ill children, aged 4–11 years, were randomly assigned to one of three conditions, according to which exemplar (child, dog or duck) was described as suffering from an imaginary illness. Using a card‐sorting technique, the children assessed whether each entity out of 30 entities (five representatives in each of six categories: humans, mammals, non‐mammals, birds, plants and artifacts) could be afflicted by that illness. The children's generalisations indicated a grasp of the distinctiveness of the various categories, although they seemed less certain about the biological status of plants. Furthermore, the type of exemplar on which the children had been taught influenced their responses. However, the children's reasoning appeared unaffected by their health status and largely unaffected by age or gender. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Hierarchy of interactive functions in father‐mother‐baby three‐way games

In developmental research, the family has mainly been studied through dyadic interaction. Three‐way interactions have received less attention, partly because of their complexity. This difficulty may be overcome by distinguishing between four hierarchically embedded functions in three‐way interactions: (1) participation (inclusion of all participants), (2) organization (partners keeping to their roles), (3) focalization (sharing a common focus) and (4) affective contact (being in tune). We document this hierarchical model on a sample of 80 families observed in the Lausanne Trilogue Play situation across four different sites. Hierarchy between functions was demonstrated by means of Guttman scalability coefficient. Given the importance of the child's development in a threesome, the pertinence of this model for family assessment is discussed. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Are people always more risk averse after disasters? Surveys after a heavy snow‐hit and a major earthquake in China in 2008

China suffered both a heavy snow‐hit and a major earthquake in 2008. To investigate the effects of disasters on risky decision making, opportunity samples were obtained by recruiting residents in both devastated and non‐devastated areas. In a survey (Study 1) conducted shortly after the heavy snow‐hit, we found that people were not always more risk averse after a disaster as previous studies had claimed and that they were inclined to approach an option with ‘low probability associated gain’ and to avoid an option with ‘low probability associated loss’. These findings were replicated in a consecutive survey (Study 2) conducted after the Wenchuan earthquake. It was further found that the popularity of both insurance and lottery, which presumably contributed to overweighing of small probabilities, was detected to have been enhanced with substantial exposure to the earthquake disaster. The implications of these findings for risk education and government policy making were discussed. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.