Betrayal: A psychological analysis

Betrayal is the sense of being harmed by the intentional actions or omissions of a trusted person. The most common forms of betrayal are harmful disclosures of confidential information, disloyalty, infidelity, dishonesty. They can be traumatic and cause considerable distress. The effects of betrayal include shock, loss and grief, morbid pre-occupation, damaged self-esteem, self-doubting, anger. Not infrequently they produce life-altering changes. The effects of a catastrophic betrayal are most relevant for anxiety disorders, and OC D and PTSD in particular.Betrayal can cause mental contamination, and the betrayer commonly becomes a source of contamination. In a series of experiments it was demonstrated that feelings of mental contamination can be aroused by imagining unacceptable non-consensual acts. The magnitude of the mental contamination was boosted by the introduction of betrayal themes. Feelings of mental contamination can also be aroused in some ‘perpetrators’ of non-consensual acts involving betrayal. The psychological significance of acts of betrayal is discussed.     

Comparing one-step M-estimators of location when there are more than two groups

Methods for comparing means are known to be highly nonrobust in terms of Type II errors. The problem is that slight shifts from normal distributions toward heavy-tailed distributions inflate the standard error of the sample mean. In contrast, the standard error of various robust measures of location, such as the one-step M-estimator, are relatively unaffected by heavy tails. Wilcox recently examined a method of comparing the one-step M-estimators of location corresponding to two independent groups which provided good control over the probability of a Type I error even for unequal sample sizes, unequal variances, and different shaped distributions. There is a fairly obvious extension of this procedure to pairwise comparisons of more than two independent groups, but simulations reported here indicate that it is unsatisfactory. A slight modification of the procedure is found to give much better results, although some caution must be taken when there are unequal sample sizes and light-tailed distributions. An omnibus test is examined as well.     

污染效应在消费者行为领域的表现及其心理机制

随着健康问题越来越受到消费者的重视, 学者们对污染效应的研究和兴趣也与日俱增, 特别是在消费者的感知和偏好方面。在消费者行为研究中, 污染效应是指消费者会降低对他人接触过产品的感知价值。本研究主要回顾了在消费行为中污染效应的定义和特性, 然后从接触因素、位置因素、产品因素和社会因素等方面来探讨污染效应的前因, 并进一步归纳了污染效应对消费者行为的消极影响和积极影响。最后, 探讨了污染效应的理论基础和边界条件。在此基础上, 对污染效应在消费者行为领域的未来研究方向进行了展望。     

Mental Contamination in Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder: Associations With Contamination Symptoms and Treatment Response

The most common symptom of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is contamination fear. Feelings of contamination can be provoked through contact with a physical contaminant, referred to as contact contamination (CC), as well as in the absence of one, referred to as mental contamination (MC). Prior research indicates that CC and MC are distinct, and MC may interfere with treatment for CC. However, no study to date has examined how MC may be associated with responses to physical contaminants and treatment response for CC. This study examined the relationships between CC and MC in a sample of individuals with elevated contamination symptoms (N = 88), half of whom met diagnostic criteria for OCD. Participants engaged in three sessions of exposure and response prevention (ERP) for CC and completed self-report measures and behavioral tasks assessing CC and MC at pretreatment, posttreatment, and follow-up. As hypothesized, at pretreatment, MC was positively associated with reactivity to physical contaminants, even after participants washed their hands. ERP for CC was associated with unique changes in CC and MC across self-report and behavioral measures, and greater pretreatment MC predicted greater posttreatment CC, though this effect was evident in only one of two CC measures. Additionally, specificity analyses indicated changes in MC were independent of changes in disgust propensity, a related construct. Pretreatment disgust propensity also predicted treatment outcome, though the addition of pretreatment disgust propensity as a covariate reduced the relationship between pretreatment MC and posttreatment CC to nonsignificance. Results suggest MC plays an important role in the manifestation and treatment of CC symptoms and may represent a manifestation of disgust proneness. Theoretical and clinical implications are discussed.     

Within a hair's breadth of buying the product: The impact of tangible and intangible bodily cues of contamination: The role of disgust and mental imagery

In most retail environments, customers can handle products. However, the downside of this freedom to touch products is product contamination. The objectives of this paper are threefold: (a) to examine the effects of contamination cues (tangible vs. intangible) on consumer responses; (b) to show the mediating role of contamination, disgust, and mental imagery; and (c) to assess the robustness of the results on three product categories for different levels of contact intimacy. Three experimental laboratory studies on different product categories (a book [n = 95], T‐shirt [n = 118], and apple [n = 102]) showed that tangible contamination cues decreased product evaluation and purchase intentions more than intangible contamination cues did. Moreover, contamination, disgust, and mental imagery mediated the effects of contamination cues on product evaluation and purchase intention. The findings provide theoretical and practical insights to help researchers and retailers understand the effect of tangible contamination cues on consumer responses.     

Vulnerability to mental contamination

Mental contamination refers to feelings of contamination that arise without physical contact with a contaminant. Mental contamination has been documented among sexual assault victims, some of whom report feeling dirty and wanting to wash in response to memories of the assault. This study examined variables associated with increased vulnerability to mental contamination. Female undergraduates (n=100) filled out a series of questionnaires and listened to an audiotape that instructed them to imagine experiencing a forced kiss by an undesirable male. Controls (n=20) imagined a consensual kiss by a desirable male. Women in the non-consensual condition reported stronger feelings of dirtiness and urge to wash than those in the consensual condition. Twenty-seven women in the non-consensual condition spontaneously rinsed in order to alleviate physical sensations evoked by the tape. Regression analyses revealed that significant predictors of dirtiness included contact contamination fear and disgust sensitivity, and there was a trend for anxiety sensitivity to predict dirtiness. Contact contamination fear was also a significant predictor of urge to wash. Prior experience with unwanted sexual contact was a significant predictor of rinsing, and there was a trend for fear of negative evaluation to predict rinsing. Discussion focuses on the implications of these findings for our understanding of mental contamination.     

Advances in the Cognitive Behavioural Treatment of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder

The aim of this paper is to highlight key advances in the cognitive-behavioural treatment of obsessive compulsive disorder over the course of Professor Lars Göran Öst's illustrious career. The paper will focus on three specific areas of interest: the treatment of obsessions, compulsive checking, and the fear of contamination. It will also highlight recent advances concerning the broader need to ensure that treatment is acceptable. An increase in acceptability could result in improvements in completion rates so that more patients benefit from the recent improvements in the science and therapy for this disabling disorder.     

Word priming without awareness: A new approach to circumvent explicit memory contamination

A major methodological limitation arising in the experimental study of implicit memory is that tasks that are characterized as implicit memory tests can be seriously contaminated by the use of covert explicit memory strategies. Given the evidence indicating that brief presentation of words (below the awareness threshold of subjects) can produce semantic priming, we wondered whether rapid visual presentation of primed words might provide an avenue to produce word priming without explicit memory contamination. Normal subjects were tested for word priming on a speeded category membership decision task. Explicit or implicit encoding procedures were used in four different experiments. Results demonstrated that brief presentation of words can indeed offer a means of producing word priming in absence of explicit recognition or recall of the primed words presented during the study phase. They also showed that such priming is equivalent in degree to the priming measured when using either a conventional implicit memory design or an explicit encoding procedure prior to the study of the primes.