Connecting the dots from a distance: Does mentally traveling through space and time increase searching for life’s meaning?

As humans, we have the ability to travel beyond the present moment by considering past and future times as well as locations that are distant from oneself. An interesting possibility is that such mental travel to far-away times and places (vs. focusing on times and places closer to the present) may increase people’s desire to search for their lives’ meaning. Since searching for meaning involves the integration of separate life events into a coherent life story, mentally traveling farther away from the present may make people aware that their life stories include more than what is happening at this very minute. Such awareness, then, may increase their desire to ‘connect the dots’ between their life events by searching for some underlying meaning. Three experiments (N = 838) tested this prediction and found that greater (vs. lower) mental travel through space or time increased the search for life’s meaning.     

Frequency of finger looking during finger counting is related to children's working memory capacities

Finger counting can be useful in solving arithmetic problems, noticeably because it reduces the working memory demand of mental calculations. However, proprioceptive information might not be sufficient to keep track of the number of fingers raised during problem solving, and visual input may play an important role in this process. The present study was designed to address this question and shows that 8-year-old children look at their fingers in 60% of the trials during finger counting when solving additive problems. Moreover, our results reveal that the frequency of finger looking is negatively correlated with working memory capacities and is higher for more difficult problems. These findings suggest that finger looking is recruited in managing the cognitive demand of the arithmetic task, probably by providing additional external cues to monitor the number of steps that have to be incremented during finger counting.     

In which direction to move? Facilitative and interference effects of gestures on problem solver's thinking

Recent research shows that co-speech gestures can influence gesturers’ thought. This line of research suggests that the influence of gestures is so strong, that it can wash out and reverse an effect of learning. We argue that these findings need a more robust and ecologically valid test, which we provide in this article. Our results support the claim that gestures not only reflect information in our mental representations, but can also influence gesturer's thought by adding action information to one's mental representation during problem solving (Tower of Hanoi). We show, however, that the effect of gestures on subsequent performance is not as strong as previously suggested. As opposed to what previous research indicates, gestures' facilitative effect through learning was not nullified by the potentially interfering effect on subsequent problem-solving performance of incompatible gestures. To conclude, using gestures during problem solving seems to provide more benefits than costs for task performance.     

Supervision in Community Mental Health: Understanding Intensity of EBT Focus

The goal of the present study was to examine clinician, supervisor, and organizational factors that are associated with the intensity of evidence-based treatment (EBT) focus in workplace-based clinical supervision of a specific EBT, Trauma-Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (TF-CBT). Supervisors (n = 56) and clinicians (n = 207) from mental health organizations across Washington State completed online self-report questionnaires. Multilevel modeling (MLM) analyses were used to examine the relative influence of nested clinician and supervisor factors on the intensity of EBT focus in supervision. We found that 33% of the variance in clinician report of EBT supervision intensity clustered at the supervisor level and implementation climate was the only significant factor associated with EBT supervision intensity. While individual clinician and supervisor factors may play a role in EBT coverage in supervision, our results suggest that an implementation climate that supports EBT may be the most critical factor for improving intensity of EBT coverage. Thus, implementation efforts that address the extent to which EBTs are expected, rewarded, and supported within an organization may be needed to support greater coverage of EBT during workplace-based supervision.     

The Effect of Locus of Control on University Students' Mental Health: Possible Mediation through Self-Esteem and Coping

The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of locus of control on university students' mental health and to examine possible mediational roles of self-esteem and coping. A total of 418 university students completed Rotters I-E Scale, Self-liking/self-competence Scale, Endlers Coping with Stressful Situations Scale and Depression, Anxiety and Stress Scale. The results showed that external locus of control, lower self-liking and self-competence, as well as less problem-focused and more emotion-focused coping predict more symptoms of depression, anxiety, and stress in university students. However, mediational analysis revealed that the effect of locus of control was fully mediated by self-esteem and coping, with self-liking and emotion-focused coping being the strongest mediators. Results suggest that beliefs about control affect beliefs about one's self-worth and coping strategies, which in turn can affect one's mental health.     

HANDBOOK OF ATTACHMENT,THIRD EDITION: THEORY,RESEARCH, AND CLINICAL APPLICATIONS JudeCassidy and Phillip R.Shaver (Eds.), New York: Guilford Press, 2016, 1,068 pp., ISBN 978‐1‐4625‐2529‐4

Jude Cassidy and Phillip R. Shaver's third edition of the Handbook of Attachment has emerged and set a new bar for formative texts on pivotal issues related to the field of attachment. This state‐of‐the‐science reference on attachment eloquently intertwines attachment theory, research, and clinical applications, giving us innovative conceptualizations and perspectives on both implications for clinical advancement and directions for future research. This handbook moves basic research findings quickly into the realm of clinical and community applications, providing the field with new information about intervention procedures and outcomes while setting the stage for theoretical advancement. New chapters reflect the way we think about the interweaving of attachment, development, and infant mental health research and application. From the authors’ opening “Overview of Attachment” to the summary overview and evaluation of the field, “The Place of Attachment in Development” by attachment‐research pioneer L. Alan Sroufe, this third edition broadly delivers the most significant and important information that the field has on attachment. Researchers, clinicians, and professionals will benefit from this handbook as it presents with the most up‐to‐date, innovative, and thorough presentation of attachment theory.     

Legacies of War: Asian American Women and War Trauma

ABSTRACT

Although Asian Americans are diverse in many ways, such as language, culture, ethnicity, religion, generational status, and more, many share a common experience: that of having experienced war first hand or being progeny of war survivors. World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Cambodian genocide, along with centuries of oppressive and authoritarian rule, have brought experiences of trauma, directly and historically, to the lives of many Asians. Subsequent experiences of migration and resettlement, as well as life in the United States as an ethnic minority, have also compounded the layers of oppression for many Asian Americans. Sexism in our cultures of origin, as well as sexism in the U.S., represents additional realities and traumas faced by Asian American women. In this article, we explore the experiences of war and subsequent traumas in the lives of Asian American women. We present a brief review of the current state of mental health as it relates to the experiences of war trauma, with the goal of providing a crucial contextual backdrop for our review of the best practices in mental health services to Asian American women. We review some of the best practices and conclude with a narrative reflection based on our own involvement in a small professional women’s group that yielded insights, discoveries, healing, and empowerment from the legacy of war trauma.     

The animacy advantage for free-recall performance is not attributable to greater mental arousal

People often demonstrate better memory for animate concepts (e.g., lion and sailor) than for inanimate concepts (e.g., hammer and mountain). Researchers have attributed this effect to an adaptive memory mechanism that favours information relevant for survival, including information about living things. In the present experiment, we examined the hypothesis that people demonstrate better free-recall performance for animate than inanimate words because animate words tend to be associated with greater mental arousal than inanimate words, a factor that was not controlled for in previous experiments on this topic. To this end, we matched animate and inanimate word lists on mental arousal (and several other factors), and compared participants’ free-recall performance for the two word types. We were able to replicate past findings that participants’ free-recall of animate words exceeds their free-recall of inanimate words, but we found no support for the possibility that the effect stems from differences in mental arousal between animate and inanimate concepts, as this effect maintained even when the word lists were matched on mental arousal. The present results therefore indicate that mental arousal cannot explain the effects of animacy on free-recall performance.     

Excitatory and inhibitory priming by attended and ignored non-recycled words with monolinguals and bilinguals

Experiments examining identity priming from attended and ignored novel words (words that are used only once except when repetition is required due to experimental manipulation) in a lexical decision task are reported. Experiment 1 tested English monolinguals whereas Experiment 2 tested Twi (a native language of Ghana, Africa)-English bilinguals. Participants were presented with sequential pairs of stimuli composed of a prime followed by a probe, with each containing two items. The participants were required to name the target word in the prime display, and to make a lexical decision to the target item in the probe display. On attended repetition (AR) trials the probe target item was identical to the target word on the preceding attentional display. On ignored repetition (IR) trials the probe target item was the same as the distractor word in the preceding attentional display. The experiments produced facilitated (positive) priming in the AR trials and delayed (negative) priming in the IR trials. Significantly, the positive and negative priming effects also replicated across both monolingual and bilingual groups of participants, despite the fact that the bilinguals were responding to the task in their non-dominant language.     

Real Objects Can Impede Conditional Reasoning but Augmented Objects Do Not

In this study, Knauff and Johnson‐Laird's (2002) visual impedance hypothesis (i.e., mental representations with irrelevant visual detail can impede reasoning) is applied to the domain of external representations and diagrammatic reasoning. We show that the use of real objects and augmented real (AR) objects can control human interpretation and reasoning about conditionals. As participants made inferences (e.g., an invalid one from "if P then Q" to "P"), they also moved objects corresponding to premises. Participants who moved real objects made more invalid inferences than those who moved AR objects and those who did not manipulate objects (there was no significant difference between the last two groups). Our results showed that real objects impeded conditional reasoning, but AR objects did not. These findings are explained by the fact that real objects may over‐specify a single state that exists, while AR objects suggest multiple possibilities.