Further Support for a Hierarchical Model of Affect: Reply to Green and Salovey

Green and Salovey agree with us that happiness and sadness are strongly bipolar, and that Positive and Negative Activation are not. However, Green and Salovey subscribe to the two-dimensional circumplex, a model we find wanting. Actually, the problems they discuss arise from the limitations of the circumplex rather than from issues fundamental to affective structure. And they do not consider the evidence, reported in our target article, that supports an alternative to the circumplex: a three-level hierarchical model. In this reply, we take a closer look at the empirical findings supporting this model, and we emphasize its heuristic promise.     

Enhanced Cognitive Behavior Therapy: A Single Treatment for All Eating Disorders

Eating disorders are serious mental illnesses affecting a significant proportion of women and a smaller number of men. Approximately half of those with an eating disorder (ED) will not meet the criteria for anorexia or bulimia nervosa, and will be diagnosed with an eating disorder not otherwise specified (EDNOS). Until recently, there were no recommended treatments for EDNOS. This article provides an overview of enhanced cognitive behavior therapy, a validated treatment for all forms of EDs.     

Negative triangles: simple geometric shapes convey emotional valence

It has been suggested that downward pointing triangles convey negative valence, perhaps because they mimic an underlying primitive feature present in negative facial expressions (Larson, Aronoff, and Stearns, 2007). Here, we test this proposition using a flanker interference paradigm in which participants indicated the valence of a central face target, presented between two adjacent distracters. Experiment 1 showed that, compared with face flankers, downward pointing triangles had little influence on responses to face targets. However, in Experiment 2, when attentional competition was increased between target and flankers, downward pointing triangles slowed responses to positively valenced face targets, and speeded them to negatively valenced targets, consistent with valence-based flanker compatibility effects. These findings provide converging evidence that simple geometric shapes may convey emotional valence.     

Religious Problem Solving and the Complexity of Religious Rationality Within an Iranian Muslim Ideological Surround

Comparative rationality analysis formally examines the incommensurable social rationalities that theoretically exist within religions and the social sciences according to the ideological surround model (ISM) of the psychology of religion. This study extended these procedures to a new cultural context: 220 Iranian university students responded to the Religious Problem‐Solving Scales developed by Pargament et al. (1988). As hypothesized, the Collaborative Problem‐Solving Style was consistent, and the Self‐Directing Style inconsistent, with Iranian Muslim religious and psychological adjustment. The Deferring Style had ambiguous implications. Comparative rationality analysis demonstrated that sample interpretations of these styles explained greater variance in adjustment than did the original scales. These procedures also yielded the unexpected discovery that the Deferring Style included a secular as well as a religious form of Iranian rationality. These data most importantly support the ISM claim that “future objectivity” requires empirical analyses of the incommensurable rationalities operating within the psychology of religion.     

Examining process constructs of narrative career counselling: an exploratory case study

The present article examines how the five process constructs of reflection, connectedness, meaning making, learning and agency are operationalised in a constructivist approach to career counselling, specifically a storytelling approach. This article reports on an exploratory case study of a Black South African female university student. The case study provides examples of how a career counsellor enacts these constructs and facilitates their development in a client, as well as examples of how they are evident in client dialogue and action. Insight into the process of a storytelling approach to narrative career counselling is demonstrated, from which tentative suggestions are made about how to facilitate the process constructs of reflection, connectedness, meaning making, learning and agency.     

Flexible feature-based inhibition in visual search mediates magnified impairments of selection: evidence from carry-over effects under dynamic preview-search conditions

Evidence for inhibitory processes in visual search comes from studies using preview conditions, where responses to new targets are delayed if they carry a featural attribute belonging to the old distractor items that are currently being ignored-the negative carry-over effect (Braithwaite, Humphreys, & Hodsoll, 2003). We examined whether inhibition was applied in the same manner across different types of displays or whether the inhibitory weighting applied to different features varied with their utility for the search task. To test this, we present the first empirical investigation of negative carry-over effects under the ecologically valid conditions of dynamic visual search. Experiment 1 investigated preview search using dynamic moving and static displays. Detection was very poor when new targets carried the color of the old distractors, and this negative carry-over effect was significantly exaggerated with moving, compared with static, displays. Experiments 2a and 2b demonstrated that this effect could not be attributed to an increased role of preattentive grouping between new and old items for dynamic displays. Collectively, the findings suggest that feature-based inhibition contributes strongly to preview search through dynamic displays, and this leads to an amplified attentional blindness to new targets. The data specifically indicate that inhibitory processes in search differentially weight color and location in moving and static displays, and that feature-based inhibition may underlie many instances of sustained inattentional blindness in everyday life.