Spirituality in Clinical Practice: The Perspective of Brazilian Medical Students

Journal of Religion and Health - The purpose of this study was to evaluate the beliefs, opinions, and experiences of medical students from a Catholic confessional university concerning spirituality...     

The Greta Thunberg Effect: Familiarity with Greta Thunberg predicts intentions to engage in climate activism in the United States

Despite Greta Thunberg's popularity, research has yet to investigate her impact on the public's willingness to take collective action on climate change. Using cross-sectional data from a nationally representative survey of U.S. adults (N = 1,303), we investigate the “Greta Thunberg Effect,” or whether exposure to Greta Thunberg predicts collective efficacy and intentions to engage in collective action. We find that those who are more familiar with Greta Thunberg have higher intentions of taking collective actions to reduce global warming and that stronger collective efficacy beliefs mediate this relationship. This association between familiarity with Greta Thunberg, collective efficacy beliefs, and collective action intentions is present even after accounting for respondents’ overall support for climate activism. Moderated mediation models testing age and political ideology as moderators of the “Greta Thunberg Effect” indicate that although the indirect effect of familiarity with Greta Thunberg via collective efficacy is present across all age-groups, and across the political spectrum, it may be stronger among those who identify as more liberal (than conservative). Our findings suggest that young public figures like Greta Thunberg may motivate collective action across the U.S. public, but their effect may be stronger among those with a shared political ideology. Implications for future research and for broadening climate activists’ appeals across the political spectrum are discussed.     

Positive Personality Traits as Predictors of Psychotherapy Progress

Journal of Contemporary Psychotherapy - The objectives of this paper were to study if the traits of the Positive Personality Model (PPM; de la Iglesia and Castro Solano, in Front Psychol 9:2025,...     

Some recommendations for doing high‐impact research in social psychological science

In this article, I reflect upon my own career to distil some general recommendations for doing high‐impact social psychological research in the midst of a worldwide pandemic. My suggestions include (a) testing and deriving theories that can help explain real‐world human judgment and behaviour (answering questions that people care about), (b) preaching beyond the choir (communicating your research to audiences outside of social psychology), and (c) birds of a feather are stronger together (maximizing impact through strategic collaborations).     

Action representation deficits in adolescents with developmental dyslexia

Developmental dyslexia (DD), a severe and frequent disorder of reading acquisition, is characterized by a diversity of cognitive and motor deficits whose interactions still remain under debate. Although deficits in the automatization of sensorimotor control have been highlighted, internal action representation allowing prediction has never before been investigated. In this study, we considered action representation of 18 adolescents with pure DD and 18 age-matched typical readers. Participants actually and mentally performed a visually guided pointing task involving strong spatiotemporal constraints (speed/accuracy trade-off paradigm). While actual and mental movement times of typical readers were isochronous and both conformed to Fitts’ law, the movement times of dyslexics differed between conditions, and only the actual movement times conformed to Fitts’ law. Furthermore, the quality of motor imagery correlated with word reading abilities. This suggests that the process of action representation is impaired in pure DD and supports the sensorimotor perspective of DD. Theoretical implications are discussed.     

Temperamental Factors in the Execution of Interrupted Editing Tasks

The question investigated in this study is how the temperament traits of strength of excitation (SE), strength of inhibition (SI), and mobility (MO) affect behaviour during the execution of computer tasks and tasks interrupting them. Several hypotheses, partly derived from the regulative theory of temperament, were tested in an experiment in which the natural environment and the types of task commonly performed by secretaries were simulated. The sample consisted of 39 female secretaries (21–64 years old). It was found that individuals high on SE and MO needed less time to resume tasks after an interruption than individuals low on these temperament traits. Interruptions similar to the main task resulted in longer resumption times for low-SE individuals. MO was negatively related to the time needed to perform the main task. A model describing the relationship between the frequency of switches between tasks and the speed of task performance in low-MO and high-MO individuals is presented.     

Anger and aggression in women: Influence of sports choice and testosterone administration

We report on two studies of anger and aggression in women. One study concerns an experimental study of anger induction in aggressive and non-aggressive sportswomen. It was found that sports choice in itself, contrary to expectation, does not predict anger arousal and aggressive behavior in the laboratory. However, at an individual level the anger proneness of the subject, as measured by a questionnaire we developed, was related to the intensity of aggressive behavior and subjectively reported anger. The second study concerns the activating effects of androgens on aggression and anger proneness. In a group of 22 female-to-male transsexuals, a battery of anger proneness and aggression questionnaires was administered twice: shortly before and 3 months after the start of androgen treatment. Administration of androgens was clearly associated with an increaese in anger proneness, although there were no changes in several aspects of overt aggressive behavior. © 1994 Wiley-Liss, Inc.     

Is the news making us unhappy? The influence of daily news exposure on emotional states

There is evidence that exposure to negative news is making people feel bad, but not much is known about why this only affects some people or whether this also applies to everyday news exposure. This study examined the direct and indirect effects of daily news exposure on people's affective states. Using ecological momentary assessment (EMA), 63 respondents (24 men and 39 women) reported their news exposure and affective states five times a day for 10 days. In addition, personal relevance of the news and personality characteristics, neuroticism and extraversion, were assessed. Results showed that negative news perceptions were related to more negative affect and less positive affect, and these effects were moderated by personal relevance, but not personality characteristics. The implications of these outcomes are discussed.     

A comparison of isolated and synthesized contingencies in functional analyses

Recently, researchers have compared the utility of isolated versus synthesized contingencies in functional analysis (FA) methodology (e.g., Fisher et al., 2016; Slaton et al., 2017). A limitation of these studies is that there were other differences across FA methodologies (e.g., design, contingency) that did not allow for isolation of the influence of isolated versus synthesized contingencies. Therefore, the current study compared outcomes of FAs that involved isolated versus synthesized contingencies for problem behavior of 5 children while controlling for these other differences across FAs (Experiment 1). Next, the current study compared the effects of interventions based on the functions identified in the isolated and synthesized contingencies for each participant (Experiment 2). Results indicated isolated contingency FAs produced differentiated responding for 1 or both functions for all 5 participants, and there were little to no differences between treatments informed by isolated and synthesized contingency FAs.