Myopic social prediction and the solo comparison effect

Four experiments explored the psychological processes by which people make comparative social judgments. Each participant chose how much money to wager on beating an opponent on either a difficult or a simple trivia quiz. Quiz difficulty did not influence the average person's probability of winning, yet participants bet more on a simple quiz than on a difficult quiz in the first 3 experiments. The results suggest that this effect results from a tendency to attend more closely to a focal actor than to others. Experiment 4 directly manipulated focusing; when participants were led to focus on the opponent instead of themselves, the effect was reversed. The discussion relates the results to other literatures including overly optimistic self-evaluation, false consensus, overconfidence, and social comparison.     

A Brief Parenting Intervention to Enhance the Parent–Child Relationship in Hong Kong: Harmony@Home

There is a dearth of high-level evidence for brief programs designed to promote positive parent–child relationships in nonwestern cultures. We present a pilot randomized controlled trial of a four-session intervention to enhance the parenting skills that promote a positive relationship with pre-adolescent children in Hong Kong. Our intervention, Harmony@Home, utilized Cunningham’s culturally appropriate coping modeling, problem-solving approach to change parental behavior. Our objective was to evaluate the feasibility, acceptability and initial evidence of benefit of the intervention. We blindly randomized 150 Hong Kong parents of children 10–13 years of age to (a) a Harmony@Home intervention group, (b) a waitlist control group, or (c) a third active intervention which shared the control group. Immediately following the intervention, we report increases in satisfaction with the parent–child relationship, one of the targeted parenting behaviors and family harmony, for the Harmony@Home group versus control group. However, only the results from satisfaction with the parent–child relationship were significant at 3-months post intervention. Most respondents reported high levels of program satisfaction. The results provide preliminary evidence that this parenting intervention is culturally acceptable for a nonwestern general population, is feasible for implementation in a community setting and shows evidence of benefit. This intervention is concordant with public health priorities because of the global importance of the parent–child relationship as a protective factor for adolescent outcomes, the need for culturally-appropriate interventions for nonwestern populations, and design characteristics that promote dissemination.     

Skeptical Conclusions

For a putative knower S and a proposition P, two types of skepticism can be distinguished, depending on the conclusions they draw: outer skepticism, which concludes that S does not know that P, and inner skepticism, which concludes that S does not know whether P. This paper begins by showing that outer skepticism has undesirable consequences because that S does not know that P presupposes P, and inner skepticism does not have this undesirable consequence since that S does not know whether P does not presuppose P. We indicate that the two types of skepticism aim to different loci of doubts: while outer skepticism doubts whether we can gain an epistemic warrant for the actuality, inner skepticism doubts whether we can gain epistemic identification of the actuality. It is further indicated that responses to skepticism from externalist theories, as well as from fallibilist internalist theories, can only respond to outer skepticism but not to inner skepticism.     

Family therapists in trauma-response teams: bringing systems thinking into interdisciplinary fieldwork

Attention to the mental health facets of disaster-preparedness and trauma-response teams has increased considerably over the past decade. As family therapists take part in these efforts, they bring with them a worldview that adds valuable contributions to the nature in which fieldwork is conducted and the manners in which interdisciplinary teams function on the ground. In this article, we present how systems thinking sensitizes trauma workers to a variety of clinical presentations and biopsychosocial complexities inherent in this work. We describe common clinical- and practice-related challenges, alongside practical strategies for effectively dealing with these challenges. We draw upon our experiences as family therapists trained in the field of trauma, and our work as field responders, supervisors and team leaders across a variety of local and large-scale disaster events and contexts.     

Speaker overestimation of communication effectiveness and fear of negative evaluation: Being realistic is unrealistic

Speakers systematically overestimate their communication effectiveness (Keysar & Henly, 2002). We argue that doing so is adaptive, reducing the risk of social anxiety and withdrawal from social situations. This hypothesis was tested by having speakers who scored low and high for fear of negative evaluation (FNE), a hallmark of social phobia, attempt to convey a specific meaning of ambiguous statements to a listener and then estimate their communication effectiveness. Low-FNE speakers consistently overestimated their effectiveness, expecting the listener to understand their intended meaning more often than listeners actually did. In contrast, high-FNE speakers’ estimates of communication effectiveness were consistent with the listener’s actual understanding. Signal detection analysis revealed that low- and high-FNE speakers were equally able to discriminate communication success from failure, but low-FNE speakers exhibited a stronger positive response bias. In conclusion, overestimating one’s communication effectiveness is adaptive, and accurate estimation is associated with dysfunction.     

Country‐of‐Origin Influences on Product Evaluations: The Impact of Animosity and Perceptions of Industriousness Brutality on Judgments of Typical and Atypical Products

When a product's country of origin has a reputation for manufacturing high‐quality products, there may be a positive impact on product judgments. If people feel animosity toward a country as a result of its political or social policies, they may react negatively to the products it produces. These opposing effects may depend in part on the subset of country‐relevant knowledge that is accessible in memory at the time of judgment. When a product was not one on which Germany or Japan had built its reputation for manufacturing high‐quality products, associating the product with these countries increased its evaluations when industriousness had been activated as part of an unrelated experiment. However, when concepts associated with brutality had been primed, the product's country of origin had a negative effect on judgments. When the product was typical of those manufactured in the country, however, identifying its country of origin increased product evaluations regardless of whether industriousness or brutality had been primed. Thus, animosity toward a product's country of origin had an adverse effect on reactions to it only if the product was not one on which the country's reputation was based.     

东西方医学伦理思维之共通性

从中国古代医者的行医事迹、著作来探寻中国的医者是否在行医过程当中勤守医者的本份,也即类似原则思维的表现。虽然中国古代并没有"医学伦理"这个名词,但从历代具有代表性之医者身上发现,其实在中国古代医者的行医事迹当中,就表现出类似的医学伦理情操。因之,医学伦理原则是俱普世价值的,也即世界上有所谓的共同道德存在。     

Extreme appraisals of internal states and bipolar symptoms: the Hypomanic Attitudes and Positive Predictions Inventory

The Hypomanic Attitudes and Positive Predictions Inventory (HAPPI; W. Mansell, 2006) was developed to assess multiple, extreme, self-relevant appraisals of internal states. The present study aimed to validate the HAPPI in a clinical sample. Participants (N = 50) with a diagnosis of bipolar disorder (confirmed by a structured clinical interview) completed a series of questionnaires pertaining to clinical factors, reward motivation, cognitive style, symptoms, and functioning at baseline, in addition to the HAPPI. Over the following 4 weeks, participants were asked to complete self-report measures of symptoms (activation, perceived conflict, depression, and well-being), as well as work and social functioning, twice weekly. The authors hypothesized that the HAPPI would be associated with prospective bipolar symptoms and functioning, when controlling for baseline symptoms and potentially confounding measures. The HAPPI was positively, independently associated with activation and conflict after 4 weeks. Furthermore, individual HAPPI factors were associated with activation, conflict, and depression. The results provided preliminary support for the predictive validity of the HAPPI in a clinical sample. The HAPPI could be used in the future as a tool in cognitive behavioral therapy for bipolar disorder to identify problematic beliefs and guide formulation.