Thought suppression enhances memory bias for threat material

The current study examined the impact of thought suppression on indices of anxiety, including memory indices (implicit and explicit memory biases) and physiological indices (heart rate). The participants, 81 undergraduates scoring in the top quartile of a self-report measure of trait anxiety, were randomly assigned to one of three experimental groups: thought suppression (TS), thought concentration (TC), and thought wandering (TW). The TC and TW groups were included to control for the effects of effortful processing and exposure to stimuli, respectively. One block of threat words and one block of neutral words were presented under conditions of cognitive load, and participants' physiological responses and memory biases were measured. The thought suppression group exhibited an enhanced overall memory bias for threat words, driven by an elevated explicit memory bias, relative to the other two groups, a result that has implications for ironic processes theory and may inform information-processing models of anxiety.     

Debiasing the hindsight bias: The role of accessibility experiences and (mis)attributions

Two studies tested the role of accessibility experiences and attributions in debiasing the hindsight bias. Participants listed 4 or 12 thoughts about how a college football game, or the 2000 US Presidential election, might have turned out differently. Listing 12 thoughts was experienced as difficult, suggesting to participants that there were few ways in which the event could have turned out otherwise. Hindsight biases increased under this condition, unless participants attributed the difficulty of the thought generation to their own lack of knowledge, which resulted in a trend in the opposite direction. The interplay of accessible content, accessibility experiences and attribution in mental simulation is discussed.     

Criminal attitudes to violence: Development and preliminary validation of a scale for male prisoners

Two studies report on the development and preliminary psychometric properties of a new scale measuring criminal attitudes to violence. In Study 1, the responses of a mixed sample of male prisoners were used to select 20 scale items from a larger pool. The final scale (the Criminal Attitudes to Violence Scale; CAVS) was designed so that it had a single‐factor structure and was uncorrelated with a measure of social desirability bias. It demonstrated high internal reliability, and a strong relationship to a self‐report measure of physical aggression. Significant differences were found in CAVS mean scores for various offence history comparisons, such as whether or not the offender was currently on sentence for a violent conviction. In the second study, most results from the first study were replicated with an independent sample of male prisoners. Further, compared to another scale measuring attitudes to aggression [the EXPAGG Instrumental subscale; Archer and Haigh, 1997b], the CAVS was a better predictor of general attitudes to crime. Mean CAVS scores were again significantly higher for current violent offenders than those on sentence for other types of offences. Lastly, the CAVS was moderately predictive of estimated risk of reconviction and re‐imprisonment. Overall these results suggest that this scale measures the construct of attitudes to criminal violence, which partially overlaps two other constructs: attitudes to aggression and attitudes to crime. Aggr. Behav. 30:484–503, 2004. © 2004 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.     

Effects of verbal information on fear-related reasoning biases in children

The present study made an attempt to induce fear-related reasoning biases by providing children with negative information about a novel stimulus. For this purpose, non-clinical children aged 9-12 years (N = 318) were shown a picture of an unknown animal for which they received either negative, ambiguous, positive, or no information. Then children completed a series of tests for measuring various types of reasoning biases (i.e., confirmation bias and covariation bias) in relation to this animal. Results indicated that children in the negative and, to a lesser extent, the ambiguous information groups displayed higher scores on tests of fear-related reasoning biases than children in the positive and no information groups. Altogether, these results support the idea that learning via negatively tinted information plays a role in the development of fear-related cognitive distortions in youths.     

Between a rock and a hard place: Damned if you do, damned if you don’t

Individuals are frequently forced to make decisions from among undesirable choice-sets. Raise taxes or cut social services? Lay off workers or go bankrupt? Go deep in debt or forgo a college education? The research presented here suggests that in such situations, decision-makers are often evaluated negatively regardless of the choice they make. In Experiment 1, participants read about a judge deciding which of two seemingly unfit parents to award sole custody in a real-life divorce case. In Experiment 2, participants were led to believe that their partner in the experiment was forced to pick one of two unpleasant tasks for the participant to perform. In both cases, the decision and decision-maker were evaluated negatively regardless of the alternative chosen–and regardless of the fact that they were the only options in the choice-set. Discussion focuses on the source, scope, and consequences of this phenomenon.     

Probability matching in choice under uncertainty: Intuition versus deliberation

Gaissmaier and Schooler (2008) [Gaissmaier, W., & Schooler, L. J. (2008). The smart potential behind probability matching. Cognition, 109, 416-422] argue that probability matching, which has traditionally been viewed as a decision making error, may instead reflect an adaptive response to environments in which outcomes potentially follow predictable patterns. In choices involving monetary stakes, we find that probability matching persists even when it is not possible to identify or exploit outcome patterns and that many “probability matchers” rate an alternative strategy (maximizing) as superior when it is described to them. Probability matching appears to reflect a mistaken intuition that can be, but often is not, overridden by deliberate consideration of alternative choice strategies.     

On the genesis of inflated (and deflated) judgments of responsibility

Prior research has found that people tend to overestimate their relative contribution to joint tasks [e.g., Ross, M., & Sicoly, F. (1979). Egocentric biases in availability and attribution. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,37, 322–336]. The present research investigates one source of this bias, and in doing so, identifies an important moderator of the effect. Three studies demonstrate that when people estimate their relative contribution to collective endeavors they focus on their own contribution and give less consideration to the contribution of their collaborators. This can cause overestimation for tasks in which total contributions are plentiful, but underestimation for tasks in which total contributions are few—despite the fact that both tasks reflect positively on the person who performs them. These results extend Ross and Sicoly’s (1979) original analysis of bias in responsibility judgments, but also suggest that the tendency to overestimate one’s relative contribution to collaborations is not as ubiquitous as once thought.     

Contingent reliance on the affect heuristic as a function of regulatory focus

Results from four studies show that the reliance on affect as a heuristic of judgment and decision making is more pronounced under a promotion focus than under a prevention focus. Two different manifestations of this phenomenon were observed. Studies 1–3 show that different types of affective inputs are weighted more heavily under promotion than under prevention in person-impression formation, product evaluations, and social recommendations. Study 4 additionally shows that valuations performed under promotion are more scope-insensitive—a characteristic of affect-based valuations—than valuations performed under prevention. The greater reliance on affect as a heuristic under promotion seems to arise because promotion-focused individuals tend to find affective inputs more diagnostic, not because promotion increases the reliance on peripheral information per se.     

共同方法偏差的统计检验与控制方法

共同方法偏差是心理学研究中一个越来越被关注的课题,但国内心理学界对其的介绍、研究还比较少,导致研究中对共同方法偏差的控制还有所欠缺。共同方法偏差的控制方法分为程序控制和统计控制,该文介绍了共同方法偏差的多种统计控制法,如因素分析法、偏相关法、潜在的误差变量控制法、结构方程模型法等,分析了其各自的优缺点,并提出了如何选择采用这些方法的建议.     

Externalizing and personalizing biases in persecutory delusions: the relationship with poor insight and theory-of-mind

The presence of externalizing bias (EB) for negative events together with personalizing bias (PB) (a bias to blame others rather than circumstances) may jointly constitute a vulnerability to develop persecutory delusions (PDs). Whereas EB purportedly serves to defend a vulnerable self-concept by avoiding negative self-attributions and might therefore exacerbate poor insight, PB may reflect cognitive deficits, including theory-of-mind impairment. We investigated these proposals in 34 schizophrenic patients with a history of PDs and 21 healthy controls. Patients with moderate- to severe-PDs and patients without a current PD showed excessive EB which was, surprisingly, absent in patients with mild persecutory delusions (mild-PDs). That EB might wax and wane with fluctuating delusional intensity was interpreted in accord with a new dynamic model of attribution self-representation cycles. As predicted, EB exacerbated poor insight. However, counter to predictions, theory-of-mind impairment did not increase PB, which was marked in all participants, whether clinical or non-clinical; instead, theory-of-mind impairment was also correlated with poor insight. Our findings indicate multiple pathways to poor insight, one of which is a theory-of-mind difficulty, impairing the capacity to simulate other perspectives for the purpose of critically evaluating one's own beliefs and circumstances.