Relational Spending in Funerals: Caring for Others Loved and Lost

Funeral rituals perform important social functions for families and communities, but little is known about the motives of people planning funerals. Using mixed methods, we examine funeral planning as end-of-life relational spending. We identify how relational motives drive and manifest in funeral planning, even when the primary recipient of goods and services is dead. Qualitative interviews with consumers who had planned pre-COVID funerals (N = 15) reveal a caring orientation drives funeral decision-making for loved ones and for self-planned funerals. Caring practices manifest in three forms: (a) balancing preferences between the planner, deceased, and surviving family; (b) making personal sacrifices; and (c) spending amount (Study 1). Archival funeral contract data (N = 385) reveal supporting quantitative evidence of caring-driven funeral spending. Planners spend more on funerals for others and underspend on their own funerals (Study 2). Preregistered experiments (N = 1,906) addressing selection bias replicate these results and find generalization across different funding sources (planner-funded, other-funded, and insurance; Studies 3A–3C). The findings elucidate a ubiquitous, emotional, and financially consequential decision process at the end of life.     

Gender differences in implicit gender self‐categorization lead to stronger gender self‐stereotyping by women than by men

It was hypothesized that, in natural group contexts, low‐status in‐group membership would be highly accessible, whereas membership to high‐status groups would not. Therefore, gender group membership was predicted to be more accessible for women than for men. It was further hypothesized that the high accessibility of gender group membership would lead to stronger self‐stereotyping for women than for men. To measure the accessibility of gender group membership, participants performed a Gender Self‐Categorization Implicit Association Test (Studies 1 and 2), measuring the strength of automatic associations between the self and the gender in‐group. Participants also performed a Self‐Stereotyping Implicit Association Test (Study 2), assessing the strength of automatic associations between the self and the stereotypical traits of the in‐group. As expected, implicit gender self‐categorization and implicit gender self‐stereotyping were stronger for women than for men. Importantly, implicit gender self‐categorization mediated the relation between gender and self‐stereotyping. Therefore, implicit gender self‐categorization was the mechanism underlying stronger implicit self‐stereotyping by women. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The question shapes the answer: the neural correlates of task differences reveal dynamic semantic processing

Task effects in semantic processing were investigated by contrasting the neural activation associated with two semantic categorization tasks (SCT) using event-related fMRI. The two SCTs involved different decision categories: is it an animal? vs. is it a concrete thing? Participants completed both tasks and, across participants, the same core set of items were presented in both tasks. Results showed task differences in the neural activation associated with these items: in the animal SCT there was greater activation in a number of frontal and temporal regions, including left superior and middle temporal gyri, while in the concrete SCT there was greater activation in left medial frontal gyrus and bilaterally in the precentral gyri. These results are interpreted as evidence of top-down modulation of semantic processing; participants make adjustments to optimize performance in a given task and these adjustments have consequences for the activation observed.     

Familiarity increases the accuracy of categorizing male sexual orientation

Although individual differences are known to influence numerous aspects of social perception, such as person memory and individuation, little is known about how such variations may affect social categorization. Extending prior research, the present study tested one potential moderator: familiarity with group members. Specifically, straight participants (n = 84) reported their real-life experiences with gay men and categorized faces as gay or straight. Results showed that participants who reported greater familiarity with gay men were significantly more sensitive, or accurate, in judging the sexual orientations of men from their faces. These results are discussed in terms of their theoretical implications for social perception and future research directions are outlined.     

Cognitive and neuropsychological underpinnings of relational and conjunctive working memory binding across age

The ability to form associations (i.e., binding) is critical for memory formation. Recent studies suggest that aging specifically affects relational binding (associating separate features) but not conjunctive binding (integrating features within an object). Possibly, this dissociation may be driven by the spatial nature of the studies so far. Alternatively, relational binding may simply require more attentional resources. We assessed relational and conjunctive binding in three age groups and we included an interfering task (i.e., an articulatory suppression task). Binding was examined in a working memory (WM) task using non-spatial features: shape and colour. Thirty-one young adults (mean age = 22.35), 30 middle-aged adults (mean age = 54.80) and 30 older adults (mean age = 70.27) performed the task. Results show an effect of type of binding and an effect of age but no interaction between type of binding and age. The interaction between type of binding and interference was significant. These results indicate that aging affects relational binding and conjunctive binding similarly. However, relational binding is more susceptible to interference than conjunctive binding, which suggests that relational binding may require more attentional resources. We suggest that a general decline in WM resources associated with frontal dysfunction underlies age-related deficits in WM binding.     

Emotional,behavioral, and cognitive factors that differentiate obsessive-compulsive disorder and other anxiety disorders in youth

Abstract

The current study examined specific emotional, behavioral, and cognitive variables that may distinguish obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) from generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), social phobia (SoP), and separation anxiety disorder (SAD) in youth. Youth with OCD (n=26) and other anxiety disorders (ADs; n=31), aged 7–12 years (56.1% males), and their parents participated. The study compared the two anxious groups on levels of emotional, behavioral, and cognitive functioning, as well as impairment associated with the disorder. Results indicated that in comparison to youth with GAD, SoP, or SAD, youth with OCD were found to have poorer emotion regulation skills, as well as greater oppositionality, cognitive problems/inattention, and parent impairment associated with the disorder. The findings suggest that there are unique characteristics of OCD that may differentiate this disorder from other ADs in youth. Potential clinical implications and directions for future research are discussed.     

When do ratings implicate perception versus judgment? The “overgeneralization test” for top-down effects

ABSTRACT

When looking at an object—say, a banana—we can both directly perceive its visual qualities (e.g., its size) and also make higher-level judgments about its visual and non-visual properties (e.g., not only its size, but also its cost). Suppose you obtain a rating of a property such as size. Does that rating implicate seeing or merely higher-level judgment? The answer often matters a great deal -- e.g., determining whether such ratings imply “top-down” effects of cognition on perception. Too often, however, this distinction is ignored in empirical investigations of such effects. Here we suggest a simple test for when such ratings can be used to implicate perception: whenever the very same experiment “overgeneralizes” to an unambiguously non-perceptual factor, the results cannot be used to draw implications about perception, per se. As a case study, we investigate an empirical report alleging that conservatives perceive Barack Obama as darker skinned than liberals do. Two simple experiments show that the very same effects, measured via the same “representativeness” ratings, obtain with unambiguously non-perceptual and even silly factors (involving bright red horns vs. halos, rather than brightness differences). We suggest that this renders such methods unable to implicate visual processing and we recommend that “overgeneralization tests” of this type always be conducted in such contexts.     

Recognising relations: What can be learned from considering complexity

Analogy is an important cognitive process that has been researched extensively. Functional accounts of it typically involve at least four stages of processing (access, mapping, transfer, and evaluation); however, these accounts take the way in which the base analogue is understood, along with its relational structure, for granted. The goal of this paper is to open up a discussion about how this process (which we will call “relational recognition”) may occur. To this end, this paper describes two experiments that vary the level of relational complexity across exemplars. It was found that relational recognition tasks benefit from increased complexity, while mapping tasks suffer from it.     

Group mate absence,dissimilarity, and individual absence: Another look at “monkey see,monkey do”

In this study, we examined whether the alignment of individual and group absence depended on an individual's similarity or dissimilarity with his or her group mates. The study hypotheses were tested with organizational data, involving 1382 employees from 181 work groups. Our criterion was individual absence frequency, observed over a 12-month period. Dissimilarity indices fororganizational tenure and union affiliation were computed from organizational records. We found that the relation between group mate absence and individual absence was moderated by dissimilarity with respect to union affiliation (but not tenure dissimilarity), such that those with low union dissimilarity scores were more likely to align their absence behaviour with that of their group mates.