Happiness: Classic Theory in the Light of Current Research

Happiness is an eternal concern of philosophy and social science. Several classic intuitions about happiness get some support by the results of modern empirical research, not least, expectations about positive effects of technological development and individualization. The data do not confirm dismal predictions about anomic unhappiness. Though social development and transformation is ambivalent, the overall balance seems to be positive in modern societies.     

How the sperm dominates the ovum — objectification by metaphor in the social representation of conception

This investigation is about the use of metaphors in the everyday understanding of conception. It is argued that the analysis of the relationship between source and target domain in a metaphor used as an objectification device can help explain how social representations are acquired collectively and individually. We expect that in popular knowledge of conception the central metaphors and images relate to the subjects' everyday experience as social actors and sexual beings because social and sexual experience is pervasive and well-understood. In an experimental questionnaire study involving 169 subjects, it is shown as hypothesized that subjects prefer to compare the process of fertilization, i.e. the role and behaviour of sperms and ovum, with sexual and sex-role behaviour where the role of men is projected upon sperms and the role of women upon the ovum. This implies that sperms are seen not only as more active, but also as harder, stronger, and more dominant than the ovum. These effects are stronger, the more subjects personally subscribe to a more conservative sex-role orientation. In the discussion it is suggested that it is necessary to analyse the two intricately linked levels of objectification, the cognitive process of selecting specific images and the social process of the diffusion of popular knowledge, if we want to understand how common sense works.     

Children's metamemorial judgments in an event recall task

Two studies were conducted in which two different indicators of metacognitive monitoring were investigated in a complex everyday memory task. In the first phase of each experiment, 8- and 10-year-olds as well as adults were shown a short event (video) and gave judgments of learning, that is, rated their certainty that they would later be able to recall specific details correctly. In the second phase of the experiments, participants underwent a memory interview about the event and in Study 2 also gave confidence judgments, that is, rated their certainty that the provided answers to the memory questions were correct. Results revealed significant influences of memory characteristics on monitoring in that delaying judgments and monitoring judgments concerning irretrievable information affected judgments of learning. From 8 years of age onward, there were relatively appropriate metamemorial monitoring abilities in both indicators. Moderate intraindividual consistency was found across the two measures of metacognitive monitoring, with a tendency toward higher consistency in older age groups. The results are discussed in terms of the adequacy of the underlying theoretical construct.     

Essentialism and attribution of monstrosity in racist discourse: Right‐wing internet postings about Africans and Jews

We investigated a total of 4997 postings on an extreme right‐wing Internet discussion board with regard to the groups and themes mentioned. The most frequently mentioned target groups were Africans, Jews, Muslims, Poles, and Turks; the most prominent themes and contexts were conspiracy, criminality, exploitation, threats to German identity, infiltration, mind control and harassment, procreation, rape, and sex. We analysed in detail postings about Africans/Blacks and Jews, that is target groups that were the most clearly connected to particular themes. The analysis reveals that extreme right‐wing discourse essentializes the target groups of Jews and Africans/Blacks and ascribes them immutable group‐specific attributes that effectively make them ‘natural kinds’. The group of Jews appears as a kind of their own with super‐human powers and influence. Africans and Blacks are despised, firstly because their essential characteristics prohibit them to be categorically mixed with Germans (i.e. to become German by nationality) due to their incompatible essence, and secondly when they procreate with Whites. Such procreation produces ‘bastards’ that are met with disgust. We argue that essentialist thinking about social and ethnic groups explains a good part of their rejection by right‐wing followers. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

How Does Your Doctor Talk with You? Preliminary Validation of a Brief Patient Self-Report Questionnaire on the Quality of Physician–Patient Interaction

The quality of physician–patient interaction is increasingly being recognized as an essential component of effective treatment. The present article reports on the development and validation of a brief patient self-report questionnaire (QQPPI) that assesses the quality of physician–patient interactions. Data were gathered from 147 patients and 19 physicians immediately after consultations in a tertiary care outpatient setting. The QQPPI displayed good psychometric properties, with high internal consistency and good item characteristics. The QQPPI total score showed variability between different physicians and was independent of patients’ gender, age, and education. The QQPPI featured high correlations with other quality-related measures and was not influenced by social desirability, or patients’ clinical characteristics. The QQPPI is a brief patient self-report questionnaire that allows assessment of the quality of physician–patient interactions during routine ambulatory care. It can also be used to evaluate physician communication training programs or for educational purposes.     

Laws, Ceteris Paribus Conditions, and the Dynamics of Belief

The characteristic difference between laws and accidental generalizations lies in our epistemic or inductive attitude towards them. This idea has taken various forms and dominated the discussion about lawlikeness in the last decades. Likewise, the issue about ceteris paribus conditions is essentially about how we epistemically deal with exceptions. Hence, ranking theory with its resources of defeasible reasoning seems ideally suited to explicate these points in a formal way. This is what the paper attempts to do. Thus it will turn out that a law is simply the deterministic analogue of a sequence of independent, identically distributed random variables. This entails that de Finetti's representation theorems can be directly transformed into an account of confirmation of laws thus conceived. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Varying the response code in the blindness to response-compatible stimuli

Previous work has indicated that action-control processes can specifically influence perceptual processes. The identification of a left- or right-pointing arrow is impaired when it appears during the preparation and execution of a compatible left-right keypress (Müsseler & Hommel, 1997a, b). The present study examines the role of the response-specifying cue in order to manipulate the coding of the action-control processes. Experiment 1 shows that the size of the perceptual impairment is not affected by whether the cue has high or little feature overlap with the to-be-performed response. Cues were omitted in Experiment 2 and participants generated their responses endogenously, but the perceptual impairment still occurred. Experiment 3 examines in more detail which feature of the response contributes to the effect. The results show that it needs both an intended action goal and a corresponding motor activity to bring about the perceptual impairment.     

Social motives and strategic misrepresentation in social decision making

In 4 experiments, the authors studied the influence of social motives on deception and strategic misrepresentation. In a newly developed information provision game, individuals faced a decision maker whose decision would affect both own and other's outcomes. By withholding information or by giving (in)accurate information about payoffs, participants could try to influence other's decision making. Less accurate and more inaccurate information was given when the decision maker was competitive rather than cooperative (Experiment 1), especially when participants had a prosocial rather than selfish value orientation (Experiments 3 and 4). Accurate information was withheld because of fear of exploitation and greed, and inaccurate information was given because of greed (Experiment 2). Finally, participants engaged in strategic misrepresentation that may trick competitive others into damaging their own and increasing the participant's outcomes.     

Eye movements and behavioral responses to threatening and nonthreatening stimuli during visual search in phobic and nonphobic subjects

Spider-phobic and nonphobic subjects searched for a feared/fear-relevant (spider) or neutral target (mushroom) presented in visual matrices of neutral objects (flowers). In half of the displays, the mushroom target was paired with a spider distractor, or a spider target was paired with a mushroom distractor. Although all subjects responded faster to the neutral target than to the feared/fear-relevant target, phobics were slower to respond than nonphobics when a mushroom target was presented with a spider distractor. Their eyes appeared to be drawn to the feared distractor before fixating neutral targets. A further experiment indicated no group differences when subjects merely judged the homogeneity of matrices. Thus, threat seems to capture the attention of phobics only when it is part of a background that subjects are explicitly instructed to ignore.     

Attention bias towards personally relevant stimuli: the individual emotional Stroop task

The emotional Stroop task is a widely used method for investigating attentional bias towards stimuli due to mood or affect. In general, standardized stimuli are used, which might not be appropriate when investigating individual contextual frameworks. It was investigated whether words chosen to be related to individuals' personal life events would produce more pronounced Stroop interference (as an indicator of attentional bias) than stimuli without any personal relevance. Twenty-six nonclinical subjects, 20 female and 6 male, participated in the study. Mean age was 36.1 yr. (SD = 18.1). All were recruited by means of local advertising. Stimulus material consisted of four word types: personal words related to negative life events with and without current personal relevance, and negative and neutral words without any personal relevance. Words were presented in three blocks. Analysis of variance showed main effects for word type and blocks, with slower reactions in the personally relevant conditions than in the negative, or neutral conditions, and in response to the first blocks as opposed to the last. These findings indicate that regardless of the word valence, personally relevant stimuli evoke more pronounced Stroop interference than do stimuli without personal relevance.