Anxious attachment as an antecedent of people's aversion towards pattern deviancy

Research suggests that people's aversion towards pattern deviancy—distortions of repeated forms or models—contributes to social phenomena, such as prejudice. Yet, the factors motivating pattern deviancy aversion remain unclear. Potentially, anxious attachment, as it entails hypervigilant detection of and reactivity to social inconsistency and unreliability, heightens pattern deviancy aversion. In Studies 1 (N = 137) and 2 (N = 102), anxious but not avoidant attachment predicted aversion towards broken patterns of geometric shapes. In Studies 3 (N = 310) and 4 (N = 470), experimentally inducing anxious versus avoidant and secure attachment (Study 3), and versus a neutral prime (Study 4), heightened pattern deviancy aversion. Controlling for participants’ aversion towards unbroken patterns, novel objects, and negative stimuli did not change these results. Our findings demonstrate that anxious attachment is one antecedent of pattern deviancy aversion, and suggest that pattern deviancy aversion may underlie links between anxious attachment and certain social phenomena.     

Integrity Testing, Personality, and Design: Interpreting the Personnel Reaction Blank

Companies and organizations use integrity tests to screen job applicants, and the fakability of these tests remains a concern. The present study uses two separate designs to analyze the fakability of the Personnel Reaction Blank (PRB) and the personality constructs related to integrity test scores. The results demonstrate that the PRB can be successfully faked. Moreover, a within-participants design resulted in significantly greater faking than the between-participants design. The personality constructs conscientiousness, agreeableness, and neuroticism were significantly correlated with honest scores on the PRB, and there was a significant negative correlation between conscientiousness and magnitude of faking.

Body image disturbance and relationship satisfaction among college students

Two hundred and eighty-two college undergraduate and graduate students, including 81 males and 201 females, responded to an on-line survey measuring relationship satisfaction, body image distortion and body dissatisfaction, self esteem, and thoughts about weight loss. A modified Kansas Marital Satisfaction Scale (KMSS) queried respondents about their relationship satisfaction as well as their perception of their partner’s satisfaction with the relationship. Respondents checked one of 17 figural drawings indicating their perceived and ideal size as well as judgments of perceived and ideal size of their partner. Females had greater body image size distortion and body dissatisfaction, lower self esteem, and more frequent thoughts about weight loss. Males were more dissatisfied with their partner’s size. Respondent’s body size distortion predicted perceived partner relationship satisfaction, with greater size distortion predicting less perceived partner relationship satisfaction. Greater perceived partner relationship satisfaction predicted increased respondents’ relationship satisfaction. Perceived partner’s dissatisfaction with respondent’s body size only approached significance as a predictor of respondent’s relationship satisfaction. However, the strength of this variable as a predictor warrants further examination of its potential role in relationship satisfaction.     

Overclaiming as a measure of faking

Researchers have recently asserted that popular measures of response distortion (i.e., socially desirable responding scales) lack construct validity (i.e., measure traits rather than test faking) and that applicant faking on personality tests remains a serious concern ( [Griffith and Peterson, 2008] and [Holden, 2008]). Thus, although researchers and human resource (HR) selection specialists have been attempting to find measures which readily capture individual differences in faking that increase personality test validity, to date such attempts have rarely, if ever succeeded. The current study, however, finds that the overclaiming technique captures individual differences in faking and subsequently increases personality test score validity via suppressing unwanted error variance in personality test scores. Implications of this research on the overclaiming technique for improving HR selection decisions are illustrated and discussed.     

Why aggression?2

On the basis of a formalised view of metapsychology, the author briefly considers the problems inherent in the Freudian notion of a death drive or aggressive drive and then goes on to develop a new theoretical conception of aggression. Aggression is understood as an affect, action or affective action and, in relation to these, as an expression of the intensity with which a drive'whether it be the sexual drive with its libidinal cathexes or the self‐preservative drive with its lethic cathexes'seeks to attain its object. In this context the author regards the regulation of closeness and distance with respect to the ‘psychogeometric locus’ of the relevant drive object as being of central importance. She contends that neurotic personalities suffer from specific distortions in the perception of the psychogeometric locus of their drive objects, which may give rise to an intensification of the drive tendencies prevailing in these individuals at any given time so that these tendencies take on an aggressive character. The author presents two clinical vignettes to show how her approach allows aggression and its occurrence to be conceptualised without resorting to the idea of a primary aggressive drive, and draws attention to the resulting technical consequences for interpretation.     

Are observer memories (accurate) memories? Insights from experimental philosophy

A striking feature of our memories of the personal past is that they involve different visual perspectives: one sometimes recalls past events from one’s original point of view (a field perspective), but one sometimes recalls them from an external point of view (an observer perspective). In philosophy, observer memories are often seen as being less than fully genuine and as being necessarily false or distorted. This paper looks at whether laypeople share the standard philosophical view by applying the methods of experimental philosophy. We report the results of five studies suggesting that, while participants clearly categorize both field and observer memories as memories, they tend to judge that observer memories are slightly less accurate than field memories. Our results suggest, however, that in lay thought, the difference between field and observer memories is not nearly as clear-cut as philosophers have generally taken it to be.     

Benefiting From Disagreement: Counterarguing Reduces Prechoice Bias in Information Evaluation

Confirmatory information processing (i.e., information distortion) is a robust phenomenon with no known mitigation. This research proposes that information distortion might be mitigated by disrupting its driver, namely, the need for cognitive consistency. Priming a counterarguing mindset should induce people to refute their emerging preferences, thereby disrupting the operation of cognitive consistency. Five studies confirm this prediction. Study 1 demonstrates that priming a counterarguing mindset decreases information distortion. Studies 2 and 3 replicate Study 1 and further show that the influence of a head start on choice diminishes when counterarguing is primed. Study 4 shows that priming counterarguing inhibits consistency‐related concepts. Finally, Study 5 demonstrates that counterarguing not only reduces distortion but also yields reduced commitment to the preferred alternative.     

EVOLUTION OF RELIGIOUS CAPACITY IN THE GENUS HOMO: ORIGINS AND BUILDING BLOCKS

The large, ancient ape population of the Miocene reached across Eurasia and down into Africa. From this genetically diverse group, the chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and humans evolved from populations of successively reduced size. Using the findings of genomics, population genetics, cognitive science, neuroscience, and archaeology, the authors construct a theoretical framework of evolutionary innovations without which religious capacity could not have emerged as it did. They begin with primate sociality and strength from a basic ape model, and then explore how the human line came to be the most adaptive and flexible of all, while coming from populations with reduced genetic variability. Their analysis then delves into the importance of neurological plasticity and a lengthening developmental trajectory, and points to their following article and the last building block: the expansion of the parietal areas, which allowed visuospatial reckoning, and imagined spaces and beings essential to human theologies. Approximate times for the major cognitive building blocks of religious capacity are given.     

The Causal Structure of Evolutionary Theory

One contentious debate in the philosophy of biology is that between the statisticalists and causalists. The former understand core evolutionary concepts like fitness and selection to be mere statistical summaries of underlying causal processes. In this view, evolutionary changes cannot be causally explained by selection or fitness. The causalist side, on the other hand, holds that populations can change in response to selection—one can cite fitness differences or driftability in causal explanations of evolutionary change. But, on the causalist side, it is often not clear how, precisely, one should understand these causes. Thus, much more could be said about what sort of causes fitness and driftability are. In this paper, I borrow Dretske's distinction between structuring and triggering causes and I suggest that fitness and driftability are structuring causes of evolution.     

Empirical evaluation of a model of global psychophysical judgments: IV. Forms for the weighting function

Understanding the psychological interpretation of numerals is of both practical and theoretical interest. In classical magnitude estimation, respondents match numerals to sensations and in magnitude production they select sensations that stand in a prescribed numerical ratio to a given standard. The present work focusses on evaluating several possible, and related, forms for the function W formulating the distortion of numerals. The main form, of which a power function is a special case, is the Prelec exponential/power representation. Behavioral equivalents to power and to Prelec functions are formulated, tested, and rejected. It is argued that either the mathematical form or the assumption W(1)=1 is wrong. Whereas, the axiomatic literature has focussed exclusively on the former inference, we explore the alternate that W(1)≠1. Behavioral axioms are formulated in each case and experimentally tested. We conclude that most respondents satisfy a general power function and that those who do not, satisfy the general Prelec function.