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.     

Trust in alternative and professional media: The case of the youth news audiences in three European countries

Abstract

This exploratory paper applying cross-cultural and developmental perspective analyses and discusses trust in alternative media and its relation to trust in professional media, seeking to identify the national specifics of media trust and its developmental patterns. Employing 2016 survey data of Czech, Estonian and Greek youth (aged 14–25, N = 3654) collected as part of the international CATCH-EyoU project (Horizon 2020), the study outlines the typology of media trust, comprising trust in alternative and professional media, and compares social and political predictors influencing media trust in the three countries. The study illustrates the diversity of relations between the two types of media trust, concluding that differences in selected predictors of media trust and the distribution of media trust types across national sub-samples illuminate the strong role national context plays, illustrating the varying pathways development of media trust follows in these varied contexts along socioeconomic and cultural lines.     

Experiential Avoidance: An Examination of the Construct Validity of the AAQ-II and MEAQ

Experiential avoidance (also referred to as acceptance or psychological flexibility) is a core construct of third-wave behavior therapies. It is the tendency to avoid uncomfortable thoughts or feelings, even when doing so has negative long-term consequences. In order for developments in experiential avoidance and third-wave behavior therapies to continue, it is imperative to examine the construct validity of the most widely used measures of this construct, the Acceptance and Action Questionnaire–II (AAQ-II) and the Multidimensional Experiential Avoidance Questionnaire (MEAQ). In Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (N = 1,052) and college (N = 364) samples, we evaluated the construct validity of these measures. The AAQ-II demonstrated suboptimal patterns of convergent and discriminant validity with measures of neuroticism/negative affect (Big Five Inventory, Big Five Aspects Scale, Positive and Negative Affect Schedule), the MEAQ, and mindfulness (Five Factor Mindfulness Questionnaire). In contrast, the MEAQ demonstrated optimal convergent and discriminant validity. Factor analyses at the scale, subscale, and item levels demonstrated that the AAQ-II loads with indicators of neuroticism/negative affect and not with other constructs at the core of third-wave behavior therapies. In contrast, the MEAQ loads on factors with mindfulness or forms its own factors. These findings suggest the AAQ-II functions as a measure of neuroticism/negative affect, whereas the MEAQ functions as an indicator of experiential avoidance. These findings have substantial implications for research on experiential avoidance and third-wave behavior therapies. Therefore, in order to improve the theory, research, and practice of third-wave behavior therapies, we recommend using the MEAQ to assess experiential avoidance.     

New Directions in the Cognitive-Behavioral Treatment of OCD: Theory,Research, and Practice

The beneficial effects of cognitive-behavioral interventions (particularly exposure and response prevention) for OCD are among the most consistent research findings in the mental health literature. Nevertheless, even after an adequate trial, many individuals experience residual symptoms, and others never receive adequate treatment due to limited access. These and other issues have prompted clinicians and researchers to search for ways to improve the conceptual and practical aspects of existing treatment approaches, as well as look for augmentation strategies. In the present article, we review a number of recent developments and new directions in the psychological treatment of OCD, including (a) the application of inhibitory learning approaches to exposure therapy, (b) the development of acceptance-based approaches, (c) involvement of caregivers (partners and parents) in treatment, (d) pharmacological cognitive enhancement of exposure therapy, and (e) the use of technology to disseminate effective treatment. We focus on both the conceptual/scientific and practical aspects of these topics so that clinicians and researchers alike can assess their relative merits and disadvantages.     

Crisis,Biology, Ecology: A New Starting-Point for Phenomenology?

The crisis of European sciences in Husserl’s late work diagnoses Galilean science as specifically and necessarily losing touch with the intuitive evidence that would legitimate it due to its reliance on a formal-mathematical conceptual apparatus. While the vast majority of Husserl’s late work was focussed on a critique of the formal-mathematical paradigm of the physical science of nature, at several points the possibility of biology as the exemplary science is raised to suggest that the lack of a reliance on formal-mathematical conceptual language would mean that a systemic crisis would not occur in such a case. This investigation considers the grounds for the expectation that biology would not engender a crisis, suggests that a paradigmatic role for ecology would more adequately address this expectation, and finally claims that the question of the relation between a specific exemplary science and transcendental phenomenology is not fully resolved even in this case.     

Testing autocorrelation and partial autocorrelation: Asymptotic methods versus resampling techniques

Autocorrelation and partial autocorrelation, which provide a mathematical tool to understand repeating patterns in time series data, are often used to facilitate the identification of model orders of time series models (e.g., moving average and autoregressive models). Asymptotic methods for testing autocorrelation and partial autocorrelation such as the 1/T approximation method and the Bartlett's formula method may fail in finite samples and are vulnerable to non-normality. Resampling techniques such as the moving block bootstrap and the surrogate data method are competitive alternatives. In this study, we use a Monte Carlo simulation study and a real data example to compare asymptotic methods with the aforementioned resampling techniques. For each resampling technique, we consider both the percentile method and the bias-corrected and accelerated method for interval construction. Simulation results show that the surrogate data method with percentile intervals yields better performance than the other methods. An R package pautocorr is used to carry out tests evaluated in this study.