Meaning in life and adjustment to daily stressors

People perceive their life as meaningful when they find coherence in the environment. Given that meaning of life is tied to making sense of life events, people who lack meaning would be more threatened by stressful life events than those with a strong sense of meaning in life. Four studies demonstrated links between perceptions of life’s meaningfulness and perceived levels of stress. In Study 1, participants with lower levels of meaning in life reported greater stress than those who reported higher meaning in life. In Study 2 and Study 3, participants whose meaning in life had been threatened experienced greater stress than those whose meaning in life had been left intact. In Study 4, anticipation of future stress caused participants to rate themselves higher on the quest for meaning in life. These findings suggest that perceiving life as meaningful functions as a buffer against stressors.     

One test,five scoring procedures: different ways of approaching the cognitive reflection test

Although the cognitive reflection test (CRT) represents a frequently used instrument within the field of judgement and decision-making, its scope and detailed characteristics are still not well understood. Therefore, the present article discusses 5 different ways of scoring the CRT that include the regular CRT scoring procedure (CRT-Regular), adding up the intuitive answers (CRT-Intuitive), calculating the proportion of intuitive in total incorrect answers (CRT-Proportion Intuitive), scoring only non-intuitive answers irrespective of their correctness (CRT-Reflection) and calculating the proportion of correct in total non-intuitive answers (CRT-Calculation). We conducted 2 studies aimed at investigating the associations among these scoring techniques and their relationships with thinking dispositions, specifically the need for cognition, faith in intuition, superstitious thinking, maximising and post-choice regret. The results indicate that thinking dispositions play a modest role in explaining the performance on the CRT. The specific associations among the investigated dispositions and different CRT scoring techniques are discussed.     

Stupidity in the analytic field: Vicissitudes of the detachment process in adolescence

This paper has the objective of broadening the understanding of technical aspects in working with adolescents who defend themselves against detachment from infantile aspects through defensive organizations. These organizations numb the adolescent toward both triangular reality and narcissistic defenses. The families of such young people may be part of the organization and the analyst can also be recruited to participate in it. But the analyst's perception can become blurry and this fact makes him appear stupid. Aspects of the myths of Narcissus and Oedipus are used here as models for studying stupidity. The analysis of a psychotic teenage girl who is symbiotic in relation to her family shows how the analytical field can be invaded by defensive configurations. Collusions of idealization and domination/submission involve the young person, her family and the analyst but the defensive organizations are only identified after their traumatic breakdown. The expansion of the symbolic network allows symbiotic transgenerational organizations to be identified, while models related to enactments prove helpful for understanding technical ups and downs. The paper ends with imaginative conjectures where Oedipus, as ‘patient’, is compared to the patient discussed here. These conjectures lead to reinterpretations of aspects of the Oedipus myth. The reinterpretations, together with the theoretical and clinical study, may serve as models for understanding the technical ups and downs in working with troubled teens.     

Teaching mands for information using ‘when’ to children with autism

Previous research has evaluated contrived motivating operations to teach mands for information. However, literature evaluating acquisition of the mand when? is comparatively limited. As an extension of Shillingsburg, Bowen, Valentino, & Pierce (2014), we taught three children with autism to engage in mands for information using when under alternating conditions in which a contrived establishing operation was present (EOP ) or absent (EOA ). Following training with a constant prompt delay, all participants acquired the mand for information and demonstrated correct use of the provided information and a decrease in inappropriate attempts to access restricted items.     

Effects of Psychological Distance and Need for Cognitive Closure on Impression Formation

Based on theoretical and empirical similarities between Construal level theory of psychological distance and the Need for cognitive closure (NFC) theory, it could be hypothesized that psychological distance and NFC represent constructs that overlap to some degree. Since both theories describe judgmental behavior in terms of schematic processing, we hypothesized that primacy effect, a schema-driven phenomenon, is strengthened under the heightened NFC and psychological distance. We tested this hypothesis in an impression formation experiment while manipulating psychological distance and measuring NFC. Low NFC and psychological closeness reflect preference for situationally specific, contextually rich information, and therefore their joint effect resulted in reliance on all available information regardless of their position in a sequence. High NFC and psychological distance produced a preference for clear, schematic, stable knowledge, and therefore weighed first information more, which resulted in the primacy effect.     

Who Knows? Knowledge Activation,Belief in Certainty of Knowledge,Maximization Tendencies and Need for Cognition in Answerability Judgments

In this study, investigating answerability judgments, 123 participants judged whether each of 46 general knowledge questions could currently be answered by themselves, by someone else, or by no one. There were 26 consensus questions (high expected consensus about their answerability) and 20 non-consensus questions. Before each question, half of the participants rated the extent of their knowledge related to the question. Results showed that answering consensus questions compared with non-consensus led to a lower proportion of “No one knows” answers. Moreover, in the knowledge rating condition compared with the control condition, participants choose “No one knows” proportionally less. Participants’ ratings of belief in certainty of knowledge were associated with more “Someone else knows” for the non-consensus questions. Moreover, tendency to maximization led to a higher proportion of “Someone else knows” options for the non-consensus questions. Finally, high need for cognition was associated with fewer choices of “Someone else knows.”     

Stereotype-based faultlines and out-group derogation in diverse teams: The moderating roles of task stereotypicality and need for cognition

Alignment of individuals on more than one diversity attribute (i.e., faultlines) may lead to intergroup biases in teams, disrupting the efficiency expectancies. Research has yet to examine if this can be a consequence of a stereotypical consistency between social and information attributes of diversity. The present study tests the hypothesis that, in a team with a stereotype-based faultline (a stereotypical consistency between gender and skills), there is increased out-group derogation compared to a team with a stereotype-inconsistent faultline. Furthermore, the study proposes that tasks can activate stereotypes, and the need for cognition dictates whether stereotypes are applied. The findings confirm the hypothesis and additionally provide evidence that tasks that activate gender stereotypes emphasize out-group derogation, especially for team members with low need for cognition.     

Thinking About a Word—Love,for Example

What is it we do when we philosophize about a word? How are we to act as we ask the philosophical question par excellence, “What is … ?” These questions are addressed here with particular focus on Troy Jollimore's Love's Vision and contemporary theories of love. Jollimore's rationalist account of love, based on a specific understanding of “reasons for love,” illustrates a particular philosophical mistake: When we think about a word, we are prone to believe that even though “the sense of the word” that we investigate may be up for grabs, the other words we use when we do these investigations are not. Jollimore's exploration of love is guided by specific conceptions of “reasons” and “rationality” that remain unquestioned. The article argues that we may have to rethink a great number of words as we embark on the task of uncovering the sense of one word.     

Moral Philosophers as Ethical Engineers: Limits of Moral Philosophy and a Pragmatist Alternative

Ever since Kant, moral philosophers have been more or less animated by the mission of discovering inescapable law‐like rules that would provide a binding justification for morality. Recently, however, many have started to question (a) whether this is possible and (b) what, after all, this project could achieve. An alternative vision of the task of moral philosophy starts from the pragmatist idea that philosophizing begins and ends in human experiencing. It leads to a view where morality is seen as a “social technology” that aims to make living together possible, and strengthens people's capability to live a good life within a society. The role of moral philosophy is, accordingly, to develop our moral tools further. Moral philosophers become ethical engineers who use their expertise in ethical topics to criticize existing “moral technology” and construct new concepts, tools, and theories that better answer the current challenges for living a good life.     

Prosocial thinkers and the social transmission of justice

Feeling the sting of another's injustice is a common human experience. We adopt a motivated information processing approach and explore how individual differences in social motives (e.g., high vs. low collectivism) and epistemic motives (e.g., high vs. low need for closure) drive individuals' evaluative and behavioral reactions to the just and unjust treatment of others. In two studies, one in the laboratory (N = 78) and one in the field (N = 163), we find that the justice treatment of others has a more profound influence on the attitudes and behaviors of prosocial thinkers, people who are chronically higher (vs. lower) in collectivism and lower (vs. higher) in the need for closure. In all, our results suggest that chronically higher collectivism and a lower need for closure work in concert to make another's justice relevant to personal judgment and behavior.