Sexual willingness with same- and other-sex prospective partners: Experimental evidence from the bar scene

Sex is ubiquitous in the media, but only a fraction depicts sexual interactions between same-sex partners. This field study, conducted outside of bars in the Midwestern United States, examined 83 heterosexuals’ sexual willingness with a same- or other-sex partner. Participants viewed a randomly assigned video vignette of a same- or other-sex partner. Alcohol intake, partner attractiveness, and sexual willingness were measured. Using moderated regression analysis, we found that alcohol intake predicted sexual willingness with the male target for both men and women, but not with the female target. The attractiveness of same-sex partners was related to sexual willingness. Sexual willingness was only influenced by alcohol intake and perceived attractiveness of a same-sex prospective partner. Most notably, alcohol intake was related to increased sexual willingness of men with a same-sex partner, suggesting a potential shift in normative casual sexual behavior among heterosexual men.     

Parent management training for conduct problems in children: Enhancing treatment to improve therapeutic changeCapacitación en entrenamiento de padres para problemas de conducta en niños: mejorar el tratamiento para mejorar el cambio terapéutico

Background/Objective: The study evaluated two variations of Parent Management Training (PMT) for children referred to treatment for oppositional, aggressive, and antisocial behavior. The goal was to evaluate the impact of multiple enhancements to optimize common and placebo factors to augment therapeutic change. Method: The families of all children (N=138, 39 girls and 99 boys, ages 6-13) received PMT. One half of the families were assigned to receive an enhanced version with multiple additions designed to increase bonding of the parent to the therapist, professionalism of treatment and setting, credibility of the intervention, and expectancies for therapeutic change. Assessment included multiple treatment outcome measures of the child (problem behaviors, psychiatric symptoms, social competence, and adaptive functioning) and parents (depression, stress, and family relations) showed marked improvements over the course of treatment, and several process measures (therapeutic alliance, credibility of the procedures, expectancy for change). Results: The results indicated that children and parents made marked improvement in all the treatment outcome measures. The vast majority of children fell within the normative range at posttreatment on problem and prosocial behaviors. The two treatment conditions were no different in outcomes for children or parents. Conclusion: PMT led to marked changes in treatment outcome.     

Universal Principles of Human Communication: Preliminary Evidence From a Cross‐cultural Communication Game

The present study points to several potentially universal principles of human communication. Pairs of participants, sampled from culturally and linguistically distinct societies (Western and Japanese, N = 108: 16 Western–Western, 15 Japanese–Japanese and 23 Western–Japanese dyads), played a dyadic communication game in which they tried to communicate a range of experimenter‐specified items to a partner by drawing, but without speaking or using letters or numbers. This paradigm forced participants to create a novel communication system. A range of similar communication behaviors were observed among the within‐culture groups (Western–Western and Japanese–Japanese) and the across‐culture group (Western–Japanese): They (a) used iconic signs to bootstrap successful communication, (b) addressed breakdowns in communication using other‐initiated repairs, (c) simplified their communication behavior over repeated social interactions, and (d) aligned their communication behavior over repeated social interactions. While the across‐culture Western–Japanese dyads found the task more challenging, and cultural differences in communication behavior were observed, the same basic findings applied across all groups. Our findings, which rely on two distinct cultural and linguistic groups, offer preliminary evidence for several universal principles of human communication.     

The meta-ethical significance of experiments about folk moral objectivism

The meta-ethical commitments of folk respondents – specifically their commitment to the objectivity of moral claims – have recently become subject to empirical scrutiny. Experimental findings suggest that people are meta-ethical pluralists: There is both inter- and intrapersonal variation with regard to people’s objectivist commitments. What meta-ethical implications, if any, do these findings have? I point out that current research does not directly address traditional meta-ethical questions: The methods used and distinctions drawn by experimenters do not perfectly match those of meta-ethicists. However, I go on to argue that, in spite of this mismatch, the research findings should be of interest to moral philosophers, including meta-ethicists. Not only do these findings extend the field of moral psychology with new data and hypotheses, but they also provide tentative evidence that touches on the adequacy of theses in moral semantics and moral metaphysics. Specifically, they put pressure on arguments in support of moral realism.     

Literal meaning and psychological theory

This paper evaluates the psychological status of literal meaning. Most linguistic and philosophical theories assume that sentences have well-specified literal meanings which represent the meaning of a sentence independent of context. Recent debate on this issue has centered on whether literal meaning can be equated with context-free meaning, or whether a sentence's literal meaning is determined only given a set of background assumptions. Neither of these positions meet the demands of a psychological theory of language understanding. Sentences do not have well-defined literal meanings, regardless of whether these are determined in light of a set of background assumptions. Moreover, the putative literal meanings of sentences do not contribute in systematic ways toward the understanding of speakers' utterance meanings. These observations suggest that the distinctions between literal and metaphoric meanings, and between semantics and pragmatics, have little psychological validity.     

Experimental psychopathology, clinical science, and practice: An irrelevant or indispensable alliance?

Psychopathology research is the scientific foundation for legitimate and credible forms of clinical practice and the ethical delivery of mental health services. Experimental psychopathology is a subfield of psychopathology research; its aims are to elucidate variables and processes that contribute, either in whole or in part, to the etiology, exacerbation, or maintenance of abnormal behavior. To date, experimental psychopathology has been poorly understood with regard to its identity, aims, history, and relevance for clinical practice. In this article, we critically review and address the role of experimental psychopathology in the contemporary field of clinical science and practice. Overall, we suggest that experimental psychopathology can maintain its important contributions to the field, and perhaps more important, adapt to the current health care context to have an even larger impact on directing conceptual and empirical analyses of core psychopathology processes.     

What Does “Mind-Wandering” Mean to the Folk? An Empirical Investigation

Although mind-wandering research is rapidly progressing, stark disagreements are emerging about what the term “mind-wandering” means. Four prominent views define mind-wandering as (a) task-unrelated thought, (b) stimulus-independent thought, (c) unintentional thought, or (d) dynamically unguided thought. Although theorists claim to capture the ordinary understanding of mind-wandering, no systematic studies have assessed these claims. Two large factorial studies present participants (N = 545) with vignettes that describe someone's thoughts and ask whether her mind was wandering, while systematically manipulating features relevant to the four major accounts of mind-wandering. Dynamics explains between four and 40 times more variance in participants' mind-wandering judgments than other features. Our third study (N = 153) tests and supports a unique prediction of the dynamic framework—obsessive rumination contrasts with mind-wandering. Our final study (N = 277) used vignettes that resemble mind-wandering experiments. Dynamics had significant and large effects, while task-unrelatedness was nonsignificant. These results strongly suggest that the central feature of mind-wandering is its dynamics.     

The moral behavior of ethics professors: A replication-extension in German-speaking countries

What is the relation between ethical reflection and moral behavior? Does professional reflection on ethical issues positively impact moral behaviors? To address these questions, Schwitzgebel and Rust empirically investigated if philosophy professors engaged with ethics on a professional basis behave any morally better or, at least, more consistently with their expressed values than do non-ethicist professors. Findings from their original US-based sample indicated that neither is the case, suggesting that there is no positive influence of ethical reflection on moral action. In the study at hand, we attempted to cross-validate this pattern of results in the German-speaking countries and surveyed 417 professors using a replication-extension research design. Our results indicate a successful replication of the original effect that ethicists do not behave any morally better compared to other academics across the vast majority of normative issues. Yet, unlike the original study, we found mixed results on normative attitudes generally. On some issues, ethicists and philosophers even expressed more lenient attitudes. However, one issue on which ethicists not only held stronger normative attitudes but also reported better corresponding moral behaviors was vegetarianism.