Attention to Positive and Negative Social-Evaluative Words: Investigating the Effects of Social Anxiety,Trait Anxiety and Social Threat

The study investigated how attention to negative (threatening) and positive social-evaluative words is affected by social anxiety, trait anxiety and the expectation of social threat. High and low socially anxious individuals carried out a modified dot-probe task either while expecting to give a speech or under non-threatening conditions. High socially anxious individuals showed no significant attentional bias towards or away from social-evaluative words. This result significantly contrasted with an identical design that showed avoidance of emotional faces in high socially anxious participants drawn from the same population (Mansell et al ., 1999). Participants who expected to give a speech showed less attentional avoidance of negative and positive social-evaluative words. High trait anxiety was associated with selective attention to negative relative to positive social-evaluative words, consistent with earlier findings of attention to threat cues in high trait-anxious individuals. Implications for designing attention tasks and attentional bias across different dimensions of anxiety are discussed.     

Business owner-managers' descriptions of entrepreneurship: A content analysis

Abstract

Entrepreneurship is one of the most researched topics in business research. Findings have been mixed regarding the traits of entrepreneurs, and interest has grown in examining the behavioral aspects and business operations elements necessary for effective entrepreneurship, branching out from the focus on personality traits that has dominated the literature. We explored the area of entrepreneurship with the goal of developing a useful framework for viewing this domain. Content analysis was used to build the framework from business owner-managers' observations of entrepreneurial effectiveness. The construct categories and the overall dimensions and their relationships to entrepreneurship are reported. The result is the beginning of a process to describe an entrepreneurship system. Suggestions for future research and the continuation of entrepreneurship model development are offered.     

Discrimination of Visual Patterns as a Function of Motivation and Frequency of Reinforcement

The influence of the content of statements regarding delay and the level of role involvement (free choice of verbalization condition, assignment to verbalization condition, or passive listening to statement) on self-control in 98 preschool boys and girls was investigated in a task in which the child's possession of accumulating candy rewards was made contingent upon the child's stopping further accumulation. Children who chose to verbalize the task-centered utterance waited longer before taking the rewards than did the children in the three conditions involving reward-centered statements. Children who were told to use the task-centered statement or who passively heard it waited longer than did children who were told to use the reward-centered statement or who passively heard it. Children who chose the reward-centered statement waited less than children in the other two reward-centered conditions. Children given no direction regarding what to do during the waiting period delayed less than children in the task-centered conditions and they delayed about the same as children in the reward-centered groups, suggesting that preschoolers spontaneously employed delay plans which did not maximally facilitate self-control.     

Identity Structure,Narrative Accounts,and Commitment to a Volunteer Role

Degree of commitment was explored in relation to core self and role-identity. Thirty-one American emergency medical technicians (EMTs) described themselves in the EMT role (EMT now) and the way they anticipated they would be in the future (EMT future) by selecting items from an adjective checklist. Participants also described “real me,” “ideal me,” and “ought me.” Ratings of commitment and extranormative activity were also obtained. Finally, participants described a positive and a negative episode they had experienced as an EMT in an open-ended question that was coded for task and relational content. Each participant's checklist data set was individually analyzed using HICLAS, a clustering algorithm for binary data (P. DeBoeck, S. Rosenberg, & I. Van Mechelen, 1993). Results indicate that the similarity between EMT now and real me best predicted activity and the similarity between EMT future and real me best predicted commitment (positive correlations in both cases). Older, more experienced EMTs tended to describe positive episodes in relational terms, whereas younger, less experienced EMTs described positive experiences in task-oriented terms.     

Unwanted Sexual Experiences in University Settings: Survivors’ Perspectives on Effective Prevention and Intervention Strategies

Unwanted sexual incidents on university campuses pose significant public health and safety risks for students. This study explored survivors’ perspectives on secondary prevention of campus sexual assault and effective strategies for intervention programs for unwanted sexual incidents in university settings. Twenty-seven student survivors of unwanted sexual experiences participated in semi-structured in-depth interviews. Data were analyzed using thematic analysis and a constructionist perspective. The findings were contextualized using the ecological model. Barriers to reporting included concerns about one’s story not being believed, personal minimization of the incident, belief that no action will be taken after reporting, confidentiality concerns, and other perceived costs of reporting. Survivors provided valuable insight on potentially effective prevention and intervention strategies to address the problem of unwanted sexual incidents on university campuses. These findings may be useful for prevention and intervention policies and programs in university settings and for providers who assist survivors of unwanted sexual experiences.     

Comprehension of Sexual Consent as a Key Factor in the Perpetration of Sexual Aggression Among College Men

The comprehension of sexual consent is a crucial factor in healthy sexual relationships. This study examined the connection between the understanding of sexual consent and perpetration of sexual aggression. We surveyed 217 heterosexual male college students (M age = 20.9 years) using measures of sexual aggression, comprehension of sexual consent, rape myth acceptance, conformity to masculine norms, peer support of abuse, and attachment to abusive peers. We tested models examining factors related to comprehension of consent and the extent to which comprehension of consent was related to perpetration of sexual aggression. Rape myth acceptance, peer support of abuse, and conformity to masculine norms were found to predict comprehension of consent, which mediated the relationship between the social and cognitive variables and sexual aggression.     

Beginning adult L2 learners' sensitivity to morphosyntactic violations: A self-paced reading study

This study investigated beginning adult second language (L2) learners' sensitivity to L2 morphosyntactic violations as a function of cross-language similarity. Online sensitivity was indexed by self-paced reading times at: (1) the critical word at which the violation could first be detected, (2) the post-critical word, and (3) the sentence-final word. In conditions in which morphosyntactic marking systems were similar or different in L1 and L2, reading times on the critical word were slower when it cued a violation than when it did not; however, this sensitivity was not apparent in a construction unique to L2. Slower reading times to violations spilled over onto the post-critical word. Cross-language similarity also influenced sentence-final word reading times. Despite this online sensitivity, post-sentence grammaticality judgements were generally poor. However, these judgements were influenced by morphosyntactic markings on words after the critical word, suggesting that learners can make use of this information.     

A preliminary study of autobiographical memory in remitted bipolar and unipolar depression and the role of imagery in the specificity of memory

Autobiographical memory was investigated in a sample of 19 individuals with remitted bipolar affective disorder and a community sample of 16 individuals with remitted unipolar depression who had similar low levels of current symptoms. Each participant was prompted to recall one positive memory and one negative memory, to rate it on several scales, and to describe it in detail. Relative to the remitted unipolar group, the remitted bipolar group reported more general than specific negative memories and more frequent recollections of the negative memory during their everyday life. Across the sample, 95% of all specific memories involved a mental image, whereas only 56% of all general memories involved a mental image, suggesting a role of imagery in the retrieval of a specific memory. Characteristic examples of memories are provided. These results are preliminary yet they suggest that patients with bipolar disorder in remission may show memory characteristics that are often associated with symptomatic unipolar depression.     

Not “just” a coincidence: Frontal‐striatal interactions in working memory and interval timing

The frontal cortex and basal ganglia play central roles in working memory and in the ability to time brief intervals. We outline recent theoretical and empirical work to suggest that working memory and interval timing rely not only on the same anatomic structures, but also on the same neural representation of a specific stimulus. Specifically, cortical neurons may fire in an oscillatory fashion to form representations of stimuli, and the striatum (a basal ganglia structure) may detect those patterns of cortical firing that occur co‐incident to important events. Information about stimulus identity can be extracted from which cortical neurons are involved in the representation, and information about duration can be extracted from their relative phase. The principles derived from these biologically based models also fit well with a family of behaviourally based models that emphasise the importance of time in many working memory phenomena.