Better (or worse) for some than others: Individual differences in the positivity offset and negativity bias

People tend to respond with more positive than negative affect to mildly emotional stimuli (i.e., positivity offset) and respond more strongly to very negative than to matched positive stimuli (i.e., negativity bias). In the current study, the authors examine individual differences in the positivity offset and negativity bias and demonstrate that both are stable over time and generalize across different kinds of stimuli (e.g., pictures, sounds, words, games of chance). Furthermore, the positivity offset and negativity bias are not redundant with traditional personality measures and exhibit differential predictive validity, such that both types of measures predict behavior in meaningful ways. Implications for a comprehensive understanding of affect and emotion and their relationship to physical and mental health are discussed.     

The influence of prior knowledge and repeated questioning on children's long-term retention of the details of a pediatric examination

Children's recall of the details of pediatric examinations was examined over the course of a 6-month interval. Although the 83 4- to 7-year-old participants reported a substantial amount of information at each assessment, performance declined over time, dropping sharply over the course of 3 months but then remaining constant out to the final interview at 6 months. As expected, older children provided more total information than younger children did and reported a greater proportion of the event components in response to general rather than specific questions. However, comparable patterns of remembering and forgetting over time were observed at each age level. In addition, no effects of repeated questioning--in the form of an interview at 3 months for half of the children--were observed on performance at the 6-month assessment. Moreover, children's prior knowledge about routine doctor visits was assessed before the checkup for half of the participants at each age and was associated with initial but not delayed recall. Although knowledge increased with age as expected, it nonetheless affected recall over and above the influence of age.     

Justice and power: when will justice concerns encourage the advantaged to support policies which redistribute economic resources and the disadvantaged to willingly obey the law?

Two studies are presented which test whether justice can motivate support for government policies and authorities even when such support is not in people's obvious personal or group interest. In the first study, White San Francisco Bay area residents' attitudes toward Congressionally-authored affirmative action policies and anti-discrimination laws were investigated. In the second study, African-American San Francisco Bay area residents' feelings of obligation to obey the law were investigated. The results from both studies show a significant relationship between evaluations of social justice and respondents' political attitudes. More importantly, a significant relationship between relational evaluations of Congress and political attitudes is found in both studies. This relationship suggests how justice can motivate policy and government support even if such support does not yield direct personal or group benefits. Finally, the results from both studies indicate when instrumental and relational concerns will be related to political attitudes. If people identified with their particular advantaged or disadvantaged group, instrumental concerns were more strongly related to their political attitudes, but if people identified with a superordinate category that included both potential outgroup members and relevant superordinate authorities, relational concerns were more strongly related to their political attitudes.     

McDowell on Kant: Redrawing the Bounds of Sense

John McDowell's Mind and World is a notable attempt to redirect the interest of analytic philosophers toward certain themes in Kantian and more recent continental thought. Only thus, he believes, can we move beyond the various failed attempts – by Quine, Davidson, Rorty, and others – to achieve a naturalised epistemology that casts off the various residual "dogmas" of old-style logical empiricism. In particular, McDowell suggests that we return to Kant's ideas of "spontaneity" and "receptivity" as the two jointly operative powers of mind which enable thought to transcend the otherwise unbridgeable gulf between sensuous intuitions and concepts of understanding. However, this project miscarries for several reasons. Chief among them is the highly problematical nature of Kant's claims, taken over by McDowell without reference to their later treatment at the hands of subjective and objective idealists. Hence he tends to fall back into different versions of the same mind/world dualism. I then question McDowell's idea that Kant can be "naturalised" by reinterpreting those claims from a more hermeneutic or communitarian standpoint with its sources in Hegel, Wittgenstein, and Gadamer. For the result is to deprive Kant's philosophy of its distinctively critical dimension not only with regard to epistemological issues but also in relation to matters of ethical and sociopolitical judgement.     

Reflecting on Participatory,Action‐Oriented Research Methods in Community Psychology: Progress,Problems, and Paths Forward

This paper provides a critical reflection on participatory action research (PAR) methods as they pertain to community psychology. Following a brief review of the fundamental aspects of PAR, key developments in the field are examined. These developments include the redefinition of the research enterprise among groups such as Indigenous and consumer/survivor communities, challenges that attend the “project” framing of PAR, academic and practice context challenges, and important domains in which PAR methods need to become more engaged (e.g., social media and disenfranchised youth). Three illustrative case studies of programs of work in the areas of youth homelessness, consumer/survivor engagement, and Indigenous research are provided to illustrate these contemporary challenges and opportunities in the field. The authors make the argument that without an effort to reconsider and redefine PAR, moving away from the stereotypical PAR “project” frame, these methods will continue to be poorly represented and underutilized in community psychology.     

Animal Mindreading and the Principle of Conservatism

Skeptics about nonlinguistic mindreading often use an inferential rule of thumb—the principle of conservatism—to cast doubt on purported empirical evidence of mindreading abilities in nonlinguistic creatures. This principle, if warranted, would seem to count generally against explanatory hypotheses that posit nonlinguistic mindreading, instead favoring mere behavior‐reading hypotheses. Using a test case from research with chimpanzees, I show that this principle is best understood as an appeal to parsimony; that, regardless of how one conceives of parsimony, the principle is unwarranted; and that, once we put the principle aside, the prospects for nonlinguistic mindreading are brighter than traditionally thought.     

Negativity bias in false memory: moderation by neuroticism after a delay

The negativity bias is the tendency for individuals to give greater weight, and often exhibit more rapid and extreme responses, to negative than positive information. Using the Deese-Roediger-McDermott illusory memory paradigm, the current study sought to examine how the negativity bias might affect both correct recognition for negative and positive words and false recognition for associated critical lures, as well as how trait neuroticism might moderate these effects. In two experiments, participants studied lists of words composed of semantic associates of an unpresented word (the critical lure). Half of the lists were comprised of positive words and half were comprised of negative words. As expected, individuals remembered negative list words better than positive list words, consistent with a negativity bias in correct recognition. When tested immediately (Experiment 1), individuals also exhibited greater false memory for negative versus positive critical lures. When tested after a 24-hr delay (Experiment 2), individuals higher in neuroticism maintained greater false memory for negative versus positive critical lures, but those lower in neuroticism showed no difference in false memory between negative and positive critical lures. Possible mechanisms and implications for mental health disorders are discussed.     

Functional magnetic resonance imaging activation in response to prompts of romantically disillusioning events

To differentiate romantic disillusionment from similar constructs of dissatisfaction and regret, functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) data obtained when romantically involved individuals (N = 39) were reminded of relationship events representing these emotions were analyzed. Whole‐brain activations suggested disillusionment‐linked processes not observed for dissatisfaction or regret. Compared to dissatisfying events, disillusioning ones showed greater activity in regions pertaining to evaluation, reflection, and reconciling conflicting information (e.g., anterior cingulate cortex). No regions showed significantly more activation for dissatisfying than disillusioning events. Compared to regret‐inducing events, disillusioning events showed greater activation in areas thought pertinent to detail processing and decision making (occipital fusiform and lingual gyrus). Regret‐inducing events activated regions suggesting the planning and thoughts of how one could have acted differently (e.g., prefrontal cortex).     

A Public Atonement: The Public Nature of Sin and Salvation in the American Moral Governmental Theory of the Atonement

The American moral governmental theory of the atonement was distinct from other Protestant views in several ways, but truly unique in one. Its definition of forgiveness as a pardon instead of a debt paid, its insistence that Christ died for the good of the moral universe, and its rejection of the distributive understanding of penal substitution all stemmed from its relentless commitment to view both God and humanity in terms of public life. It is the purpose of this article to demonstrate that the most foundational element in the American moral governmental theory of the atonement was the idea of publicity, namely the public nature it ascribed to sin, salvation and the glory of God.