What is agentic about the Spatial Agency Bias? How pragmatic relevance contributes to the spatial representations of actions

The mental imagination of (social) actions has been shown to follow a left‐to‐right trajectory, with the thematic agent associated with the left position (Spatial Agency Bias, Suitner & Maass in Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 53, 2016, p. 245–301). For example, individuals asked to choose a picture that visualizes the sentence “Tom kicks George” tend to choose an image where the agent, Tom, is positioned on the left‐hand side rather than on the right‐hand side. However, as an alternative to the thematic role of the agent, such findings may reflect a mental representation following pragmatic relevance. Specifically, a pragmatic perspective holds that word order and syntactic functions are strategic devices to communicate that the element is important for the sentence. Thus, positioning in the described picture‐matching task may actually reflect the agent's pragmatic relevance instead of agency per se. As a test, we vary whether sentences are written in the active versus the passive voice. Results from five studies indicate that the passive voice results in the tendency to place the agent on the right‐hand side rather than on the left‐hand side of a picture. Instead, the acted‐upon person is positioned on the left‐hand side of a picture. A sixth experiment reveals that for the passive voice, the agent is still seen as more agentic than the receiver, but is considered less relevant. The findings are congruent with the proposed pragmatic relevance account. Implications for the Spatial Agency Bias as well as for building mental representations in general are discussed.     

Too exhausted to go to bed: Implicit theories about willpower and stress predict bedtime procrastination

While most people are aware of the importance of sleep for their health, well-being, and performance, bedtime procrastination is a pervasive phenomenon that can be conceptualized as a case of self-control failure (Kroese et al., Frontiers in Psychology, 5, 2014, 1). Two daily diary studies (N₁ = 185, N₂ = 137) investigated beliefs about willpower and stress as interactive predictors of bedtime procrastination. Beliefs about willpower capture whether people think of their willpower as limited resource that gets easily depleted (limited theory) or as something that remains regardless of previous acts of self-control (non-limited theory). Results show that after a stressful day, people with a limited versus non-limited theory procrastinate more on going to bed, while there is no difference in bedtime procrastination on less stressful days. Thus, ironically, limited theorists who should be more concerned with recovering their resources after a stressful day sleep less the following night.     

Individual and Dyadic Coping and Fear of Progression in Mothers and Fathers of Children with Hematologic Cancer

This study investigated the association of individual and dyadic coping strategies with fear of progression (FoP) in mothers and fathers of children with hematologic cancer. Parental couples (N = 44) whose children had been diagnosed with hematologic cancer were recruited at a university hospital and a rehabilitation clinic in Germany between 03/2017 and 08/2017. Data included parents' self-report on FoP (Fear of Progression Questionnaire—parent version, FoP-Q-SF/PR), individual coping (Coping Health Inventory for Parents, CHIP-D), and dyadic coping (Dyadic Coping Inventory, DCI). Statistical analyses were carried out for mothers and fathers individually as well as for parental couples using dyadic data analyses (e.g., actor-partner interdependence model, APIM). Individual and dyadic coping strategies were significantly correlated with FoP in mothers, but not in fathers. Fathers' evaluation of the couple's dyadic coping significantly predicted mothers' FoP. The more frequent use of familial integration (CHIP-D FAM) and maintaining social support (CHIP-D SUP) as well as a better evaluation of their partners' dyadic coping was significantly associated with lower FoP in mothers. Differences in individual and dyadic coping in parental couples were not associated with FoP. Individual and dyadic coping strategies should be addressed in the psychosocial care of mothers and fathers of children with hematologic cancer. Study results support the benefits of involving fathers in psychosocial interventions, for example, in couple-based interventions that acknowledge interpersonal effects of coping on FoP. Future research should further explore coping strategies applied by fathers of children with hematologic cancer for the regulation of FoP.     

Self-protection and growth as the motivational force behind majority group members' cultural adaptation and discrimination: A parallel mediation model via intergroup contact and threat

What motivates majority group members to adapt to or reject cultural diversity? Considering the relevance of personal values on our attitudes and behaviours, we inspected how self-protection and growth predict levels of discriminatory behavioural and cultural adaptation intentions towards migrants via intergroup contact and perceived intergroup threats, simultaneously (i.e., parallel mediation). Specifically, positive contact between groups is known for reducing prejudice through diminishing perceived intergroup threats. Yet current research emphasises the role of individual differences in this interplay while proposing a parallel relationship between perceived intergroup threats and contact. Also by inspecting cultural adaptation and discriminatory behavioural intentions, the present study examined more proximal indicators of real-world intergroup behaviours than explored in past research. Using data from 304 US Americans, structural equation modelling indicated a good fit for a parallel mediation model with growth relating positively to cultural adaptation intentions and negatively to discriminatory behavioural intentions through being positively associated with intergroup contact and negatively with perceived intergroup threats, simultaneously. The reverse was found for self-protection. These findings stress that personal values constitute a relevant individual difference in the contact/threats-outcome relationship, providing a motivational explanation for majority group members' experience of cultural diversity in their own country.     

Predicting stuttering from linguistic factors for German speakers in two age groups

Brown's factors [J. Speech Disorders 10 (1945) 181] predict the likely loci of disfluency in English-speaking adults who stutter. A word is more likely to be stuttered for these speakers if it is a content word, starts with a consonant, is positioned at the beginning of a sentence, and if it is a long word. These same factors were examined in native German-speaking children and adults who stutter. Speech data of 15 German adults and 17 children were coded according to Brown's factors. For the adult group, it was predicted that words starting with consonants would not lead to as much of an increase in disfluencies compared with English samples, because of cross-linguistic differences in syllable onset properties. It was predicted that stuttering would be more likely in later sentence positions in German because in German the verb is usually near the end of a sentence. There were no obvious reasons to expect differences on the two remaining factors, content words and word length. With children, it was hypothesised that Brown's factors that specify level of linguistic difficulty would not be such a good predictor of stuttering rate. Specifically, it was predicted that the difference in stuttering rate between function and content words would be lower in children. For the adults both word type (content/function) and word length increased stuttering rate significantly, whereas changes in stuttering rate for the other two factors were non-significant. It was also found that when word difficulty (based on a combined measure of all factors) increased, stuttering rate rose. With children, only the word-length factor was significant, and stuttering rate was not governed to the same extent by overall word difficulty. Conclusions are drawn as to the effect of linguistic and motor influences on stuttering. EDUCATIONAL OBJECTIVES: The reader will learn about and be able to describe: (1) how linguistic factors affect stuttering rates in German; (2) the different patterns of adults and children who stutter and how language might influence this pattern; and (3) how to interpret these findings in light of a current theory of fluency failure.     

The Role of Perfectionism in Relation to an Intervention to Reduce Anxious and Depressive Symptoms in Children

Research has demonstrated an association between perfectionism and depressive and anxious symptoms in children. We examined whether a school-based program targeting anxious and depressive symptoms would reduce perfectionism, and whether perfectionism would interfere with intervention outcomes. The participants were 78 school-age children identified as at-risk for anxiety and/or depression. At-risk children took part in a randomized controlled trial of a school-based intervention program. Levels of perfectionism, depression, and anxiety were assessed at pre-treatment (Time 1) and again at post-treatment (Time 2) after participating in either a cognitive behavioral group or a structured activity group. Participation in either group was associated with significant reductions in overall levels of self-oriented perfectionism, anxious symptoms, and depressive symptoms. Supplementary analyses indicated that pre-treatment self-oriented perfectionism influenced post-treatment depression scores, suggesting that perfectionism interferes with treatment outcome. Perfectionism in children appeared amenable to group-based intervention, and identifying perfectionism may be important for treating children with depressive symptoms.     

Using individual differences to predict job performance: correcting for direct and indirect restriction of range

The present study investigates the relationship between individual differences, indicated by personality (FFM) and general mental ability (GMA), and job performance applying two different methods of correction for range restriction. The results, derived by analyzing meta-analytic correlations, show that the more accurate method of correcting for indirect range restriction increased the operational validity of individual differences in predicting job performance and that this increase primarily was due to general mental ability being a stronger predictor than any of the personality traits. The estimates for single traits can be applied in practice to maximize prediction of job performance. Further, differences in the relative importance of general mental ability in relation to overall personality assessment methods was substantive and the estimates provided enables practitioners to perform a correct utility analysis of their overall selection procedure.     

Prospective memory training in older adults and its relevance for successful aging

In research on cognitive plasticity, two training approaches have been established: (1) training of strategies to improve performance in a given task (e.g., encoding strategies to improve episodic memory performance) and (2) training of basic cognitive processes (e.g., working memory, inhibition) that underlie a range of more complex cognitive tasks (e.g., planning) to improve both the training target and the complex transfer tasks. Strategy training aims to compensate or circumvent limitations in underlying processes, while process training attempts to augment or to restore these processes. Although research on both approaches has produced some promising findings, results are still heterogeneous and the impact of most training regimes for everyday life is unknown. We, therefore, discuss recent proposals of training regimes aiming to improve prospective memory (i.e., forming and realizing delayed intentions) as this type of complex cognition is highly relevant for independent living. Furthermore, prospective memory is associated with working memory and executive functions and age-related decline is widely reported. We review initial evidence suggesting that both training regimes (i.e., strategy and/or process training) can successfully be applied to improve prospective memory. Conceptual and methodological implications of the findings for research on age-related prospective memory and for training research in general are discussed.