Between an Example and a Precept,Which Has Greater Importance? A Comparison of the Channels of Socialization in Military Ethics

In this study, I examined what channels of socialization influence the moral behavior of cadets. We conducted a regression analysis of the effects of parents' attitudes to moral education, the standard and potential curriculum of schools, peer groups, and communication media on individual ethics and discipline using 399 sample participants. The participants were recruited through a questionnaire survey on cadets from academy of military, naval, and air force, and four-year based students from R.O.C. National Defense University. The analysis results showed that the cultivation of morality among cadets was directly influenced by the school's potential curriculum (i.e., intern cadres and officers in company) and their parents' attitudes to moral education during early childhood. The results also indicated that the influence of teaching by example was more significant than that of teaching by precept.     

Can the memory enhancement of the survival judgment task be explained by the elaboration hypothesis?: Evidence from a memory load paradigm1

Many reports have described a survival judgment task that requires participants to judge words according to their relevance to a survival situation, eliciting better recall than that obtained in other judgment tasks (e.g., semantic or self‐judgment tasks). Two explanatory hypotheses (the adaptive hypothesis and the elaboration hypothesis) have been proposed. Here we used the memory load paradigm to investigate whether the adaptive hypothesis or the combination hypothesis can better account for the memory enhancement of the survival judgment task. We used a survival judgment task and an autobiographical recall task with the condition of no memory load or memory load. The 48 participants performed four encoding conditions (memory load—survival, no memory load—survival, memory load—autobiographical, and no memory load—autobiographical). The results showed that memory enhancement of the survival judgment task occurred only in the no memory load condition, but not in the memory load condition. Our results support the elaboration hypothesis. We also discuss the validity of the elaboration hypothesis and future directions to be pursued in this research field.     

The Name-Pronunciation Effect: Further Evidence from Chinese

This study examined the Chinese name-pronunciation effect. The easy-to-pronounce and difficult-to-pronounce Chinese names were created using the same characters in order to control for visual perceptual and conceptual fluency. In Experiment 1, participants rated each name in terms of liking, electability as a state leader, income level, and baby name preference. An additional rating of prevalence was used to estimate familiarity. In Experiment 2, participants did not read the name aloud before rating and performed intentional recall and recognition tests. In both experiments, the easy-to-pronounce names were rated higher than difficult-to-pronounce names on liking. This effect generalized to judgments of electability and baby name preference but not to prevalence and income level. There were no differences in memory performances between the two types of names. Results are discussed in terms of the boundary condition of the name-pronunciation effect and the advantage of using Chinese names to study this effect.     

Occupational Therapy Intervention in the Treatment of Alcoholics

The first section of this article will provide the rationale for all occupational therapists to learn extensively about the isease of alcoholism regardless of area of practice or type of agency where employed. It will offer su estions on how this learning can take place. The second section will take an historic look at occupational therapy literature documenting the use of occupational therapy in alcoholism rehabilitation from 1941 to the present. It will describe modalities currently being used by occupational therapists in alcoholism rehabilitation and discuss expansion of occupational therapy in this practice area.     

Does it help to feel your body? Evidence is inconclusive that interoceptive accuracy and sensibility help cope with negative experiences

ABSTRACT

In four studies (total N?=?534), we examined the moderating impact of Interoceptive Accuracy (i.e. IAcc, as measured with the heartbeat counting task) and Interoceptive Sensibility (IS, assessed via questionnaire) on negative affect, following social exclusion or after receiving negative feedback. Results from an integrative data analysis combining the four studies confirmed that the manipulations were successful at inducing negative affect. However, no significant interaction between mood induction (control versus negative affect induction) and interoception on mood measures was observed, and this was true both for objective (i.e. IAcc) and subjective (i.e. IS) measures of interoception. Hence, previous conclusions on the moderating impact of interoception in the relationship between mood induction and self-reported mood were neither replicated nor generalised to this larger sample. We discuss these findings in light of theories of emotion regulation as well as recent concerns raised about the validity of the heartbeat counting task.     

How children use drawing to regulate their emotions

We examined two ways in which drawing may function to elevate mood in children—venting (expressing negative feelings) and distraction (expressing something unrelated to the negative feelings). We examined the effectiveness of drawing as an emotion regulator when drawing is used to vent versus distract (Study 1) and tested whether the effects found are specific to the activity of creating one's own drawing or generalisable to a drawing activity in which children had to copy another's drawing (Study 2). To induce a negative mood, we asked children to think of a disappointing event. Mood was assessed before and after the assigned activity. In both studies, mood improved significantly more in the distract than in the vent or copy condition. Study 1 demonstrates that drawing improves mood in children via distraction and not via venting. Study 2 demonstrates that this effect is specific to a drawing task in which an image is freely constructed. When a copying task is used, the effect disappears.     

An Empirical Evaluation of the Diagnostic Criteria for Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder: Problems with Sex Specificity and Validity

Premenstrual dysphoric disorder is a psychiatric disorder that reportedly affects between 3 to 8% of women. Although not an official diagnosis in the current Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, premenstrual dysphoric disorder has received increasing attention in the clinical literature, and considerable debate exists regarding the validity of this proposed condition. This study examined the prevalence of premenstrual dysphoric disorder in a sample of women and men and assessed the construct validity of the disorder. Twenty percent of women met the criteria for provisional diagnosis of premenstrual dysphoric disorder using Diagnostic and Statistical Manual criteria. In addition, 4% of men met these criteria when given sex-neutral assessment forms. Self-reported psychological distress and impaired interpersonal functioning did not predict women's likelihood of meeting the criteria for premenstrual dysphoric disorder. Results cast doubt on the sex-specificity of the diagnostic criteria of premenstrual dysphoric disorder and the construct validity of the disorder. Limitations of this study are discussed.     

True Overconfidence in Interval Estimates: Evidence Based on a New Measure of Miscalibration

Overconfidence is often regarded as one of the most prevalent judgment biases. Several studies show that overconfidence can lead to suboptimal decisions of investors, managers, or politicians. Recent research, however, questions whether overconfidence should be regarded as a bias and shows that standard “overconfidence” findings can easily be explained by different degrees of knowledge of agents plus a random error in predictions. We contribute to the current literature and ongoing research by extensively analyzing interval estimates for knowledge questions, for real financial time series, and for artificially generated charts. We thereby suggest a new method to measure overconfidence in interval estimates, which is based on the implied probability mass behind a stated prediction interval. We document overconfidence patterns, which are difficult to reconcile with rationality of agents and which cannot be explained by differences in knowledge as differences in knowledge do not exist in our task. Furthermore, we show that overconfidence measures are reliable in the sense that there exist stable individual differences in the degree of overconfidence in interval estimates, thereby testing an important assumption of behavioral economics and behavioral finance models: stable individual differences in the degree of overconfidence across people. We do this in a “field experiment,” for different levels of expertise of subjects (students on the one hand and professional traders and investment bankers on the other hand), over time, by using different miscalibration metrics, and for tasks that avoid common weaknesses such as a non‐representative selection of trick questions. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Duty to Support Nationalistic Policies

We demonstrate that citizens perceive a duty to support policies that benefit their nation, even when they themselves judge that the consequences of the policies will be worse on the whole, taking outsiders into account. In terms of actions, subjects think they would do their perceived duty rather than violate it for the sake of better consequences. The discrepancy between duty and judged consequences does not seem to result from self‐interest alone. When asked for reasons, many subjects felt an obligation to help their fellow citizens before others, and they also thought that they owed something to their nation, in return for what it did for them. The obligation to help fellow citizens was the strongest predictor of perceived duty. In an experiment with Israeli and Palestinian students, group membership affected both perceived overall consequences and duty, but the effect of group on perceived consequences did not account for the effect on perceived duty. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Normative and Descriptive Models of Military Decisions to Deploy Precision Strike Capabilities

Precision strike capabilities represent a significant and highly controversial part of present day military operations. And yet, there is a surprising dearth of empirical research on military decision making in this domain. In this article, we therefore review different psychological perspectives on how these decisions can be made. Specifically, we compare the application of normative models of judgment and choice against the empirical research on human decision making, which suggests that people are more likely to employ heuristic strategies. We suggest that several features of decision tasks in the precision strike domain evoke the use of intuitive (heuristic) decision making whereas other features such as the sometimes unfamiliar (or novel) nature of the decision task requires analytic strategies to generate good solutions. Therefore, decisions about precision strike capabilities are best made with a mixture of intuitive and analytic thought, a mode of thinking known as quasirationality.