Novel attitudes can be faked on the Implicit Association Test

We asked participants to imagine that a researcher would provide them with positive or negative information about fictitious social groups. Half of the participants were asked to act in such a way that they would conform to the expectations of the researcher. The other participants were asked to behave in the manner opposite to what the researcher expected. Participants then completed an IAT designed to measure the newly formed attitudes toward the fictitious social groups. The direction of the IAT effect depended on the faking instructions. The results call for caution when using the IAT to study the development of implicit attitudes.     

The personal myth: A re‐evaluation

This paper presents a re‐evaluation of Kris's personal myth. The notion has been used rather sparingly despite the Delphi Symposium in 1984 on the question of its clinical usefulness. After framing the notion of myth, some difficulties related to the question are identified. A clinical vignette exemplifies some of the ambiguities in its definition but stresses its clinical relevance. A discussion expands on these situations so as to propose three various aspects of personal myths to account for the two variants identified by Kris. The actualization of the underlying fantasy in the character organization is a third form and the technical aspect associated with it is reviewed from a new perspective. The family romance is revisited to reassess its role as the basis of the personal myth in the face of studies favouring an earlier development of the myth.     

Comparing the Functioning of Youth and Adult Partnerships for Health Promotion

Youth partnerships are a promising but understudied strategy for prevention and health promotion. Specifically, little is known about how the functioning of youth partnerships differs from that of adult partnerships. Accordingly, this study compared the functioning of youth partnerships with that of adult partnerships. Several aspects of partnership functioning, including leadership, task focus, cohesion, participation costs and benefits, and community support, were examined. Standardized partnership functioning surveys were administered to participants in three smoke‐free youth coalitions (n = 44; 45 % female; 43 % non‐Hispanic white; mean age = 13) and in 53 Communities That Care adult coalitions (n = 673; 69 % female; 88 % non‐Hispanic white; mean age = 49). Multilevel regression analyses showed that most aspects of partnership functioning did not differ significantly between youth and adult partnerships. These findings are encouraging given the success of the adult partnerships in reducing community‐level rates of substance use and delinquency. Although youth partnership functioning appears to be strong enough to support effective prevention strategies, youth partnerships faced substantially more participation difficulties than adult partnerships. Strategies that youth partnerships can use to manage these challenges, such as creative scheduling and increasing opportunities for youth to help others directly, are discussed.     

The mathematics of sharing / Las matemáticas que realizan los niños al compartir

Abstract

The purpose of sharing is to construct equivalent sets, making it an ideal context for analysing important quantitative concepts such as counting, equivalence and cardinality. Two studies analysed how four- and five-year-olds shared blocks in equal sharing and reciprocity conditions and their number inferences about one set after counting the other. The researcher asked children to share double and single blocks between two characters. They succeeded more in building equivalent shares in an equal sharing than reciprocity condition. Most children who shared correctly also made appropriate number inferences. To examine whether perceptual cues helped children share the blocks, a second study used Canadian $1 and $2 coins. A double block is twice the size of a single, whereas there is no visual cue about the value relation between coins because they are the same size. Unexpectedly, children shared equally well with blocks and coins, and most children made number inferences.     

It is better to smile to women: Gender modifies perception of honesty of smiling individuals across cultures

Social perception studies have revealed that smiling individuals are perceived more favourably on many communion dimensions in comparison to nonsmiling individuals. Research on gender differences in smiling habits showed that women smile more than men. In our study, we investigated this phenomena further and hypothesised that women perceive smiling individuals as more honest than men. An experiment conducted in seven countries (China, Germany, Mexico, Norway, Poland, Republic of South Africa and USA) revealed that gender may influence the perception of honesty in smiling individuals. We compared ratings of honesty made by male and female participants who viewed photos of smiling and nonsmiling people. While men and women did not differ on ratings of honesty in nonsmiling individuals, women assessed smiling individuals as more honest than men did. We discuss these results from a social norms perspective.     

The Face of the Chameleon: The Experience of Facial Mimicry for the Mimicker and the Mimickee

This research addressed three questions concerning facial mimicry: (a) Does the relationship between mimicry and liking characterize all facial expressions, or is it limited to specific expressions? (b) Is the relationship between facial mimicry and liking symmetrical for the mimicker and the mimickee? (c) Does conscious mimicry have consequences for emotion recognition? A paradigm is introduced in which participants interact over a computer setup with a confederate whose prerecorded facial displays of emotion are synchronized with participants’ behavior to create the illusion of social interaction. In Experiment 1, the confederate did or did not mimic participants’ facial displays of various subsets of basic emotions. Mimicry promoted greater liking for the confederate regardless of which emotions were mimicked. Experiment 2 reversed these roles: participants were instructed to mimic or not to mimic the confederate’s facial displays. Mimicry did not affect liking for the confederate but it did impair emotion recognition.     

Some notes on Freud's concept of conversion

Abstract

The author investigates conversion, the process by which psychic contents are transformed into bodily symptoms. The author concludes that this process cannot be explained by libido theory or by assuming the existence of a psychic energy. He argues that although Freud was convinced that “the leap from a mental process to a somatic innervation … can never be fully comprehensible to us,” this process is, nonetheless, comprehensible in terms of Freud's own conceptualisation. To understand this process, one must take the characteristics of the primary process to which the “replacement of external by psychical reality” belongs as radical as his thesis of a hallucinatory wish fulfilment. This thesis includes not only the hallucinatory satisfaction of instinctual wishes, but also the hallucinatory satisfaction of the desire to avoid unpleasure, which is understood as a process by which the internal conditions of this affect are displaced from the presentational world into perceptions via conversion.     

Psychometric Evaluation of a Controlled Social Affiliation Paradigm: Findings From Anxiety,Depressive Disorder,and Healthy Samples

Social impairments are common across many psychiatric conditions. Standardized dyadic assessments intended to elicit social affiliation between unacquainted partners are used to elucidate mechanisms that disrupt relationship formation and inform possible treatment targets; however, the psychometric properties of such paradigms remain poorly understood. This study evaluated the psychometric properties of a controlled social affiliation paradigm intended to induce connectedness between a target participant and trained confederate. Individuals with an anxiety or depressive disorder diagnosis (clinical group; n = 132) and those without (control group; n = 35) interacted face-to-face with a trained confederate; partners took turns answering a series of increasingly intimate questions about themselves. Social connectedness, affect, and affiliative behavior measures were collected during the interaction. Participant symptom and social functioning measures were collected to examine validity. The paradigm elicited escalating social connectedness throughout the task for both participants and confederates. Parallel forms (i.e., different question sets) elicited similar affiliation outcomes. Self-reported (but not behavioral) affiliation differed across some demographic variables (e.g., participant gender, Hispanic ethnicity). Within-task affiliation measures were associated with one another and with global social connectedness and social anxiety symptom measures, but not with somatic anxiety measures. Clinical participants reported lower social affiliation and positive affect reactivity and higher negative affect reactivity than healthy participants. These findings provide initial psychometric support for a standardized and controlled dyadic affiliation paradigm that could be used to reliably probe social disconnection mechanisms across psychopathology.