What a feeling! Touching sexually laden stimuli makes women seek rewards

We argue that women's previously documented unresponsiveness to sexual primes when making economic decisions may be a consequence of the specific types of primes that have been used (i.e., visual primes). In three studies we show that presenting women with tactile sexual cues does influence their decisions about economic rewards. Similar to the effect found in men, the first study demonstrates that touching a pair of boxer shorts leads to a craving for monetary rewards in women. In the second study it is shown that touching a pair of boxers makes women less loss averse for both money and food. The third study explicitly focuses on the relative effectiveness of tactile versus visual sexual cues in altering women's economic decisions, and reveals that women's willingness-to-pay for economic rewards increases only when the sexual cue is tactile. We suggest that touching (vs. seeing) sexually laden stimuli prompts pre-programmed consummatory Pavlovian responses that promote approaching economic rewards.     

Health and well-being at work: The hospital context

IntroductionStudies have shown the importance of psychosocial risks for physical and mental health particularly in the medical sector and among hospital workers.ObjectiveThe main goal of our study is to measure the magnitude of the six dimensions of the psychosocial work environment in a French hospital. The second goal is to highlight from the six dimensions, which are the most important ones for the hospital workers in order to propose specific actions of improvement of the well-being at work and prevention of social risks.MethodOur sample is composed of 1139 hospital workers. (1) A 24-item scale was created, based on the six dimensions identified by the DARES study. This scale allows measuring the degree of psychosocial risk and of well-being at work. (2) Social representations are measured by a free association task based on the target expression: well-being at work in the hospital. (3) Participants also answered an open-ended question, on how to improve well-being at work in the hospital; answers were analyzed by a hierarchical classification.ResultsFour of the six dimensions extracted from the factorial analysis are equal to those identified by the DARES’ report: Work demand, Emotional demands, Relationships at work and Job insecurity. Quantitative analyses show that, for hospital workers, the level of risk is the highest on the first two. The social representation of well-being at work in the hospital, and the discourse analysis indicate that the dimension which is the most important for the hospital workers is Relationships at work.ConclusionIn this study, the use of both quantitative and qualitative assessments allows having some elements to analyze the quality of working conditions in the hospital. Moreover, reducing the level of psychosocial risk has a positive effect on workers’ satisfaction, well-being and health.     

Gender and Sexuality in the Pastoral Encounter

Abstract

At the ‘Embodied Ministry: Gender, Sexuality and Formation’ conference at which the articles in this special issue were delivered, three people in active ministry in different denominations — United Reformed Church, Metropolitan Community Church and Roman Catholic — were invited to take part in a panel discussion on gender and sexuality in the pastoral encounter. Their remarks were originally delivered in this conversational context. Martin Pendergast chaired this panel discussion.     

A method in modeling interactive pedestrian crossing and driver yielding decisions during their interactions at intersections

Investigating pedestrian crossing and driver yielding decisions should be an important focus considering the high risks of pedestrians in exposed to motorized traffic. Limitations, however, exist in previous studies – variables considered previously have been limited; how their behavior affect each other (defined as interactive impacts) were not sufficiently considered. This paper aims to provide a methodological approach for pedestrian crossing and driver yielding decisions during their interactions, considering of different variable types including interactive impact variables, traffic condition variables, road design variables, and environment variables. A Distance-Velocity (DV) framework proposed in an earlier study is introduced for definitions and concepts in studying pedestrian-vehicle interactions. Logistic regression, support vector machines, neural networks and random forests, are introduced as candidate models. A case study involving six crosswalk locations is conducted, focusing on interactions between pedestrians and right-turn vehicles. The proposed methodological approach is applied, with the performance of the four machine learning methods compared in terms of model generalization and confusion matrix. The model with the best performance is further compared to the typical gap-based model. Results show that random forest and logistic regression models performed the best in modeling pedestrian crossing and driver yielding decisions respective, in terms of model generalization. Besides, the DV-based modeling method (average accuracy of over 90% for pedestrians and 80% for drivers) outperformed the traditional gap-based method in all test seeds. As a key finding, interactive impacts from each other (the pedestrian and the driver) act as a key contributing variable on their decisions.     

计算机化分类测验终止规则的类别、特点及应用

计算机化分类测验(Computerized Classification Testing, CCT)能够高效地对被试进行分类, 已广泛应用于合格性测验及临床心理学中。作为CCT的重要组成部分, 终止规则决定测验何时停止以及将被试最终划分到何种类别, 因此直接影响测验效率及分类准确率。已有的三大类终止规则(似然比规则、贝叶斯决策理论规则及置信区间规则)的核心思想分别为构造假设检验、设计损失函数和比较置信区间相对位置。同时, 在不同测验情境下, CCT的终止规则发展出不同的具体形式。未来研究可以继续开发贝叶斯规则、考虑多维多类别情境以及结合作答时间和机器学习算法。针对测验实际需求, 三类终止规则在合格性测验上均有应用潜力, 而临床问卷则倾向应用贝叶斯规则。     

Learning from parents' stories about what works in early intervention

Using a multiple case study approach, this ethnography examined the experiences of parents of children deemed at risk for developmental delays or disabilities who had received early intervention (EI) services (birth to age 3 years) in a large urban location in Western Canada. Participants (11 adult parents and 7 children) were drawn from six families. Methods of data collection included focus groups (FG), face‐to‐face interviews and file reviews. Member check and expert reviews were conducted throughout data collection and data analyses as part of the validation process in this ethnography. Qualitative content analyses followed by thematic analyses highlighted the implementation of family‐centred practices (FCP) as a main theme. Parents identified how EI professionals using FCP embraced collaborative practices. FCP resulted in parents leading the EI process for their children. More specifically, EI professionals shared strategies and information to support parents in gaining a deeper understanding of their children's individual developmental characteristics. Parents expressed how empowering this level of understanding was for them as they learned to articulate what were their children's needs for developmental, health and educational services. Recommendations for future research include inquiring about parents' experiences for families of diverse constellations and/or residing in smaller urban or rural communities.     

The affect heuristic,mortality salience,and risk: Domain‐specific effects of a natural disaster on risk‐benefit perception

We examine how affect and accessible thoughts following a major natural disaster influence everyday risk perception. A survey was conducted in the months following the 2004 south Asian Tsunami in a representative sample of the Swedish population (N = 733). Respondents rated their experienced affect as well as the perceived risk and benefits of various everyday decision domains. Affect influenced risk and benefit perception in a way that could be predicted from both the affect‐congruency and affect heuristic literatures (increased risk perception and stronger risk‐benefit correlations). However, in some decision domains, self‐regulation goals primed by the natural disaster predicted risk and benefit ratings. Together, these results show that affect, accessible thoughts and motivational states influence perceptions of risks and benefits.     

The Secrecy Heuristic: Inferring Quality from Secrecy in Foreign Policy Contexts

Three experiments demonstrate that in the context of U.S. foreign policy decision making, people infer informational quality from secrecy. In Experiment 1, people weighed secret information more heavily than public information when making recommendations about foreign political candidates. In Experiment 2, people judged information presented in documents ostensibly produced by the Department of State and the National Security Council as being of relatively higher quality when those documents were secret rather than public. Finally, in Experiment 3, people judged a National Security Council document as being of higher quality when presented as a secret document rather than a public document and evaluated others' decisions more favorably when those decisions were based on secret information. Discussion centers on the mediators, moderators, and broader implications of this secrecy heuristic in foreign policy contexts.     

Randomized controlled trial of parental responsiveness intervention for toddlers at high risk for autism

This study tested the effects of a parent-mediated intervention on parental responsiveness with their toddlers at high risk for an autism spectrum disorder (ASD).Participants included caregivers and their 66 toddlers at high risk for ASD. Caregivers were randomized to 12 sessions of an individualized parent education intervention aimed at improving parental responsiveness or to a monitoring control group involving 4 sessions of behavioral support. Parental responsiveness and child outcomes were measured at three time points: at beginning and end of the 3-month treatment and at 12-months post-study entry. Parental responsiveness improved significantly in the treatment group but not the control group. However, parental responsiveness was not fully maintained at follow up. There were no treatment effects on child outcomes of joint attention or language. Children in both groups made significant developmental gains in cognition and language skills over one year. These results support parental responsiveness as an important intervention target given its general association with child outcomes in the extant literature; however, additional supports are likely needed to fully maintain the treatment effect and to affect child outcomes.     

The vision heuristic: Judging music ensembles by sight alone

Team effectiveness and group performance are often defined by standards set by domain experts. Professional musicians consistently report that sound output is the most important standard for evaluating the quality of group performance in the domain of music. However, across six studies, visual information dominated rapid judgments of group performance. Participants (1062 experts and novices) were able to select the actual winners of live ensemble competitions and distinguish top-ranked orchestras from non-ranked orchestras based on 6-s silent video recordings yet were unable to do so from sound recordings or recordings with both video and sound. These findings suggest that judgments of group performance in the domain of music are driven at least in part by visual cues about group dynamics and leadership.