The Cognitive Costs of the Counter-Stereotypic: Gender,Emotion, and Social Presence

We explored the concurrent and subsequent cognitive consequences of the experience of gender counter-stereotypic emotions. Participants experiencing gender counter-stereotypic emotions were expected to display less emotional expression and demonstrate poorer cognitive performance when in the public condition than when in the private condition. Seventy-one women and 66 men completed an anger- or sadness-inducing task privately or publicly. Participants completed two cognitive tasks: one during and one after the emotion-induction task. Participants exhibited poorer performance during and following gender counter-stereotypic emotions only in the public condition. Direct evidence for greater suppression of gender counter-stereotypic emotions in the public conditions was not obtained. These results suggest that the same public emotional events may be differentially cognitively depleting depending on one’s gender, potentially contributing to the perpetuation of stereotypes.     

No evidence for directional biases in inhibition of return

The phenomenon of “inhibition of return” (IOR) has been the subject of considerable research interest for nearly 30 years. Two reports claiming directional biases in IOR (Spalek & Hammad, Perception & Psychophysics 66:219–233, 2004, Psychological Science 16:15–18, 2005) were examined more closely, as such findings challenge the theoretical role attributed to IOR and imply that this purported mechanism for the facilitation of visual search would bias search in systematic ways. The data from two new experiments, as well as reanalysis of the original data, showed the reports to result from an unconventional method of calculating IOR that confounded visual field with target location. Although we found significant differences in target detection response times between the visual fields, directional biases were absent from all of the examined data when the conventional method of computing IOR was applied.     

The CORE‐10: A short measure of psychological distress for routine use in the psychological therapies

Background: There is a need for a generic, short, and easy‐to‐use assessment measure for common presentations of psychological distress in UK primary care mental health settings. This paper sets out the development of the CORE‐10 in response to this need. Method: Items were drawn from the CORE‐OM and 10 items were selected according to a combination of usefulness, coverage of item clusters, and statistical procedures. Three CORE‐OM datasets were employed in the development phase: (1) a primary care sample, (2) a sample from an MRC platform trial of enhanced collaborative care of depression in primary care, and (3) a general population sample derived from the Office of National Statistics Psychiatric Morbidity Follow‐up survey. A fourth dataset comprising a sample from an occupational health setting was used to evaluate the CORE‐10 in its standalone format. Results: The internal reliability (alpha) of the CORE‐10 was .90 and the score for the CORE‐10 correlated with the CORE‐OM at .94 in a clinical sample and .92 in a non‐clinical sample. The clinical cut‐off score for general psychological distress was 11.0 with a reliable change index (90% CI) of 6. For depression, the cut‐off score for the CORE‐10 was 13 and yielded sensitivity and specificity values of .92 (CI=.83–1.0) and 0.72 (CI=.60–.83) respectively. Conclusion: The CORE‐10 is an acceptable and feasible instrument that has good psychometric properties and is practical to use with people presenting with common mental health problems in primary care settings.     

Reading Intervention in Middle and High Schools: Implementation Fidelity,Teacher Efficacy,and Student Achievement

This study investigated teachers’ efficacy and implementation in the context of a supplemental intervention for struggling adolescent readers. It examined teachers’ efficacy at the start of their intervention training and investigated relationships among teachers’ efficacy, implementation, and students’ reading progress. The efficacy and implementation of 9 sixth-grade teachers and 11 ninth-grade teachers were compared, and student achievement gains were explored. Sixth-grade teachers had higher levels of efficacy, while ninth-grade teachers had higher levels of implementation. Findings indicated teacher efficacy was positively related to students’ reading comprehension and overall reading achievement. Implementation was positively related to students’ growth in vocabulary.     

The psychological costs of knowledge specialization in groups: Unique expertise leaves you out of the loop

Knowledge specialization, such as that present in cross-functional teams, produces both positive and negative outcomes. Our research investigated how unique expertise can lead to feelings of ostracism in the form of being out of the loop. Compared to group members with shared expertise, members with unique expertise felt out of the loop and experienced decreased fulfillment of fundamental needs, particularly when their expertise was to be given less weight in the group’s decision. Possessing unique expertise did not inhibit leadership emergence, even when that expertise should not have been used in the decision-making process. So, although knowledge specialization can have positive consequences for teams and task performance, it also has some negative psychological consequences that need to be understood.     

Portrait of a creatively gifted child facing cancer

Creativity can be demonstrated in various ways. The following case study describes how one creatively gifted boy applied creative skills from one dimension of his life to a totally new one. When cancer halted his musical career, he chose to channel his abilities into a new challenge: controlling pain and writing. The results demonstrated a heroism that opens new avenues to our consideration of what constitutes creativity in human lives.     

Book review

Protestantism and Politics in Eastern Europe and Russia: the Communist and Post‐Communist Eras, edited by Sabrina Petra Ramet. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1992. x + 441pp.