The automatic evaluation of novel stimuli

From classic theory and research in psychology, we distill a broad theoretical statement that evaluative responding can be immediate, unintentional, implicit, stimulus based, and linked directly to approach and avoidance motives. This statement suggests that evaluative responses should be elicited by novel, nonrepresentational stimuli (e.g., abstract art, "foreign" words). We tested this hypothesis through combining the best features of relevant automatic–affect research paradigms. We first obtained explicit evaluative ratings of novel stimuli. From these, we selected normatively positive and negative stimuli to use as primes in a sequential priming paradigm. Two experiments using this paradigm demonstrated that briefly presented novel prime stimuli were evaluated automatically, as they facilitated responses to subsequently presented target stimuli of the same valence just as much as did pictures or names of real objects. A final experiment revealed that exposure to novel stimuli produces muscular predispositions to approach or avoid them.     

Mental contrasting facilitates academic performance in school children

Two brief intervention studies tested whether teaching students to mentally contrast a desired future with its present reality resulted in better academic performance than teaching students to only think about the desired future. German elementary school children (N = 49; Study 1) and US middle school children (N = 63; Study 2) from low-income neighborhoods who were taught mental contrasting achieved comparatively higher scores in learning foreign language vocabulary words after 2 weeks or 4 days, respectively. Results have implications for research on the self-regulation of commitment to solve assigned tasks in classroom settings, and for increasing academic performance in school children in low-income areas.     

Survivor mission: Do those who survive have a drive to thrive at work?

Are helping professionals who have experienced the same types of struggles as their clients more engaged at work? In the current investigation, we examine this question in samples of police detectives (with and without a history of violent victimization) and mental health workers (with and without a history of mental illness). Our results indicate that police detectives who have experienced violent victimization and mental health professionals who have experienced the same mental illness as their clients do indeed exhibit greater work engagement than their colleagues who lack these parallel life experiences. The link between a professional’s firsthand experience of his/her client’s hardships and work engagement appears to be partially explained by higher levels of grit among police detectives and by a greater sense of life-narrative continuity among mental health professionals.     

Do as you’re told! Facets of agreeableness and early adult outcomes for inner-city boys

With data from the middle cohort of the Pittsburgh Youth Study, a prospective longitudinal study of inner-city boys, we examined whether Big Five agreeableness facets could be reliably recovered in this sample, and whether facets predicted educational, occupational, social, and antisocial life outcomes assessed a decade later. Caregivers described their adolescent boys’ personalities using the Common California Q-Set; twelve years later, participants were interviewed and court records were obtained. Factor analyses recovered two facets: compliance and compassion. Compliance predicted more schooling and lower risk of unemployment, teenage fatherhood, and crime; compassion related to longer committed relationships. Findings highlight the value of studying personality at the facet level.     

ETHICS CONCERNING LEISURE

In the United States, non-work, or non-productive activity can produce ego anxiety within a person who considers work as the primary index of self-worth. This anxiety can become extreme when a person retires or is forced into unemployment. One cause of this anxiety is society's standards concerning acceptable activity; particularly the work-oriented attiude formulated in the “Protestant Ethic.” However, the “Protestant Ethic” is neither Protestant nor religious. Rather, it is a set of national mores, which justify our work-oriented economy in religious terms. Situational ethics, which reflect both sound counseling practice and contemporary theology, can be formulated concerning the problem of leisure. And, we propose a guideline for such an ethic.     

The story of some: everyday pragmatic inference by children and adults.

The statement, some elephants have trunks, is logically true but pragmatically infelicitous. Whilst some is logically consistent with all, it is often pragmatically interpreted as precluding all. In Experiments 1 and 2, we show that with pragmatically impoverished materials, sensitivity to the pragmatic implicature associated with some is apparent earlier in development than has previously been found. Amongst 8-year-old children, we observed much greater sensitivity to the implicature in pragmatically enriched contexts. Finally, in Experiment 3, we found that amongst adults, logical responses to infelicitous some statements take longer to produce than do logical responses to felicitous some statements, and that working memory capacity predicts the tendency to give logical responses to the former kind of statement. These results suggest that some adults develop the ability to inhibit a pragmatic response in favour of a logical answer. We discuss the implications of these findings for theories of pragmatic inference.     

School readiness and later achievement

Using 6 longitudinal data sets, the authors estimate links between three key elements of school readiness--school-entry academic, attention, and socioemotional skills--and later school reading and math achievement. In an effort to isolate the effects of these school-entry skills, the authors ensured that most of their regression models control for cognitive, attention, and socioemotional skills measured prior to school entry, as well as a host of family background measures. Across all 6 studies, the strongest predictors of later achievement are school-entry math, reading, and attention skills. A meta-analysis of the results shows that early math skills have the greatest predictive power, followed by reading and then attention skills. By contrast, measures of socioemotional behaviors, including internalizing and externalizing problems and social skills, were generally insignificant predictors of later academic performance, even among children with relatively high levels of problem behavior. Patterns of association were similar for boys and girls and for children from high and low socioeconomic backgrounds.     

Early predictors of high school mathematics achievement

Identifying the types of mathematics content knowledge that are most predictive of students' long-term learning is essential for improving both theories of mathematical development and mathematics education. To identify these types of knowledge, we examined long-term predictors of high school students' knowledge of algebra and overall mathematics achievement. Analyses of large, nationally representative, longitudinal data sets from the United States and the United Kingdom revealed that elementary school students' knowledge of fractions and of division uniquely predicts those students' knowledge of algebra and overall mathematics achievement in high school, 5 or 6 years later, even after statistically controlling for other types of mathematical knowledge, general intellectual ability, working memory, and family income and education. Implications of these findings for understanding and improving mathematics learning are discussed.     

Echoes of Tsültrim Lodrö: An Indigenous Voice from Contemporary Tibet on the ‘Buddhism and Science Dialogue’

This paper seeks to find a place for the intellectual voices of an indigenous movement of ‘Buddhist modernism’ that recently took shape in eastern Tibet. It presents how a prominent leader of this movement, Tsültrim Lodrö (tshul khrims blo gros, b. 1962), articulates Buddhism in response to modern discourses of rationality and science. In particular, since the ‘dialogue’ between Buddhism and science in recent years has largely been a series of monologues, this paper seeks to open up the conversation in order to shed light on the nature of this dialogue and what is at stake in this conversation. I will discuss Tsültrim Lodrö’s most recent work on philosophy and science with the aim to shed light on the nature of the current Buddhism and science discourses through considering the contributions of this influential contemporary Tibetan.     

Information processing in chronic pain disorder: A preliminary analysis

Researchers have alternately suggested selective attention, impaired stimulus filtering, and affective language deficiency models as accounting for multiple somatic complaints in persons with chronic pain disorder. The purpose of the present study was to establish the comparative usefulness of these three models for explaining somatic focus in a chronic pain population. Nine chronic pain patients evidencing high somatic focus (somatizing chronic pain patients), 10 chronic pain patients evidencing low somatic focus (nonsomatizing chronic pain patients), and 10 healthy control subjects were administered a computerized version of the emotional Stroop test as a test of these models. A total of 105 pain-, depression-, and neutral-content words were used as Stroop test stimuli. Stroop test color-naming response latencies were submitted to a two-way Group × Word Type mixed-model ANOVA, with Word Type as the repeated measure. Results reveal that neither the selective attention model nor the affective language deficiency model adequately explain Stroop test performance in somatizing chronic pain patients. Findings provide tentative support for the impaired stimulus filtering model, with somatizing chronic pain patients evidencing similar Stroop test response delays across all words. These results suggest that chronic pain sufferers misinterpret bodily sensations. Findings are discussed in terms of a bilevel approach for treatment of somatizing chronic pain patients that would include assisting the patient in accurate appraisal and interpretation of physical symptoms.