10/07/2024


This study suggests that African Americans who frequently engage in customary traditions and organizations with other African Americans may be protected from the harmful effects of feelings of defeat and entrapment on suicide ideation. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).Recent research has shown that a religious upbringing renders children receptive to ordinarily impossible outcomes, but the underlying mechanism for this effect remains unclear. Exposure to religious teachings might alter children's basic understanding of causality. Alternatively, religious exposure might only affect children's religious cognition, not their causal judgments more generally. To test between these possibilities, 6- to 11-year-old children attending either secular (n = 49, 51% female, primarily White and middle-class) or parochial schools (n = 42, 48% female, primarily White and middle-class) heard stories in which characters experienced negative outcomes and indicated how those characters could have prevented them. Both groups of children spontaneously invoked interventions consistent with natural causal laws. Similarly, when judging the plausibility of several counterfactual interventions, participants endorsed the intervention consistent with natural laws at high levels, irrespective of schooling. https://www.selleckchem.com/products/acetalax-oxyphenisatin-acetate.html However, children's endorsement of supernatural interventions inconsistent with these laws revealed both group similarities and differences. Although both groups of children judged divine intervention (i.e., via prayer) as more plausible than mental (i.e., via wishing) and magical (i.e., via magical powers) interventions, children receiving religious (vs. secular) schooling were more likely to do so. Moreover, although children with a secular upbringing overwhelmingly chose naturalistic interventions as the most effective, children with a religious upbringing chose divine as well as naturalistic intervention. These results indicate that religious teaching does not alter children's basic understanding of causality but rather adds divine intervention to their repertoire of possible causal factors. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).Very few studies have assessed infant capacity for bidirectional, contingent communication at birth, and to our knowledge there are none with preterm infants in the neonatal period. Presence versus absence of such interactive contingency makes a difference for our theories of development. We examined whether preterm infants can contingently coordinate behaviors with mothers and fathers in spontaneous communication in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU), and whether mother-infant versus father-infant engagement and contingency differ. Twenty Italian preterm infants (60% girls, born 27-33 weeks, largely middle-class families) lying in a heated cot in the NICU were videotaped at 35 weeks with mothers, and fathers (counterbalanced), in face-to-face communication. Videotapes were coded on a 1-s time-base with parent and infant engagement scales. Multilevel time-series models evaluated self-contingency (auto-correlation) and interactive contingency (lagged cross-correlation). Mothers (vs. fathers) showed higher levels of engagement, interpreted as more arousing. Fathers (vs. mothers) showed more midrange engagement, interpreted as less "demanding" of infant engagement. Infants were more gaze-on-parent's-face and gaze-on-environment with mothers than fathers. Fathers interacted contingently with infants, whereas mothers did not. However, infants interacted contingently with mothers, but not fathers. When infants were in lower engagement levels 1 s prior, fathers stayed in lower engagement levels in the current second, closer to infants than mothers. We suggest that fathers were more coordinated because fathers were more able to join the infant's dampened state. We suggest that infants were more coordinated with mothers because mothers were more socially stimulating, and more familiar. We conclude that preterm infants, shortly after birth, are capable of contingent communication. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).Memorializes Howard Rachlin (1935-2021). Rachlin was born to Irving and Gussie Kugler Rachlin in New York City on March 10, 1935. He died 86 years later of cancer, leaving his wife Nahid, daughter Leila, and grandson Ethan. He received numerous recognitions the Med Associates Distinguished Contributions to Basic Behavioral Research award from Division 25 of the American Psychological Association, the Impact of Science on Application award from the Association for Behavior Analysis, a James McKeen Cattell Fellowship, continuous funding from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Mental Health (from which he received the MERIT award), visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation, and invited speaker at the Nobel symposium on Behavioral and Experimental Economics. Of himself Rachlin wrote "He obtained a bachelor of mechanical engineering degree from Cooper Union in New York City [1957], where he learned to treat all scientific and practical questions as asking for answers rather than for self-expression; masters in philosophy and psychology from The New School of Social Research in New York City [1962], where he learned that the whole may be greater than the sum of its parts; and a PhD from Harvard University [1965], where B. F. Skinner and Richard Herrnstein taught him how to be a behaviorist." After teaching at Harvard, he joined Stony Brook University in New York in 1969, rising to the position of Distinguished Research Professor. Rachlin studied choice and decision-making; he was one of the founders of behavioral economics. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).Memorializes Irwin Pollack (1925-2021). Pollack, one of the early pioneers in human performance and the information processing approach to cognition that emerged after WWII, died in Ann Arbor, MI on January 23, 2021. He was a Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University of Michigan. During a career spanning more than 50 years, first as a civilian research scientist in the U.S. Air Force from 1949 to 1963, then as a Professor and Research Scientist at the Mental Health Research Institute at Michigan from 1963 until his retirement in 1995, Irwin was a creative and highly productive experimental/cognitive psychologist who worked on a wide range of challenging problems in sensory psychology, hearing, speech perception, cognition, decision-making, and human information processing. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).Memorializes Leslie Rescorla (1945-2020). Rescorla, Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Class of 1897 Professor of Science Emeritus at Bryn Mawr College, passed away in Havertown, PA on October 12, 2020. Rescorla, who was born in Washington, DC on August 15, 1945, came to Bryn Mawr in 1985; where she taught in the Psychology Department and directed the College's Phebe Anna Thorne School and, until 2018, its Child study Institute. For many years she chaired the department and directed its Clinical Developmental Psychology doctoral program. She supervised over 70 undergraduate senior research projects, 26 MA theses, and 45 PhD dissertations, and in 2002 received the College's McPherson Prize for excellence in teaching, scholarship, and service to the community. Leslie majored in Modern European History at Radcliffe College, graduating magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa in 1967 and earned her MA in Economic History at the London School of Economics in 1968. She received a PhD in Child Development and Clinical Psychology from Yale in 1976 and completed her clinical training at Yale, Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, and the Philadelphia Child Guidance Center. She remained a licensed clinical and school psychologist throughout her career and was long-time director of Bryn Mawr's School Psychologist Certification program. Leslie's research focused on late development of language in children. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).Memorializes Robert A. Wicklund (1941-2020). Wicklund was born in Seattle, WA, December 1, 1941. At the time of his death on December 12, 2020, he maintained residences in Bainbridge Island, WA, and Bielefeld, Germany. Bob earned his undergraduate degree at the University of Washington and his doctorate at Duke University in 1968. He held primary faculty positions at the University of Texas at Austin, Universität Bielefeld, and the Università di Trieste, and secondary appointments at numerous institutions, including the Ruhr-Universität Bochum, University of Bergen, Universität Mannheim, and Università di Palermo. Bob was a scholar's scholar who dedicated his entire life to understanding psychological phenomena, and to sharing his ideas with others. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).How might core values of psychology impede efforts to promote public psychology? We identify some of the ways the discipline's aspirations for publicly engaged science are undermined by its norms, particularly when engaging with communities affected by historically entrenched, structural inequalities. We interrogate what makes for "good" psychology, including methodological and ethical norms that are used to maintain scientific integrity and police the boundaries of the discipline. We suggest that some of the discipline's classical tenets and contemporary movements may produce structural, epistemic barriers to the production of science and practice that enhance the public good. Reflecting critically on the rise of implicit bias training in institutional diversity efforts as a case study, we consider how evidence-based efforts to intervene in social problems on behalf of the so-called public interest can inadvertently reproduce or exacerbate extant inequities. We turn to various social movements' reclamation of what counts as "bad" to imagine a psychology that refuses to adjust itself to racism and structural inequality. We argue that much of what psychologists might characterize as "bad" should not be viewed as antithetical to the very best kind of psychological practice, particularly trailblazing work that reimagines the relationship between psychologists and society. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).Part of the "boundary work" (Gieryn, 1983) throughout the history of psychology has been to divide the discipline into camps of "basic" and "applied" researchers who take different methodological approaches to construct knowledge. Each "side" has come up with different processes for conceptualizing, constructing, and evaluating the legitimacy of knowledge claims, processes that have implications for applying research insights to practical issues in society. In this article, I review and synthesize research on the history of knowledge construction in both basic and applied psychology, and the implications of their respective methodological practices for their perceived legitimacy. I then discuss how the lessons learned from the past can be leveraged to address the current crisis of confidence in the "credibility revolution" era (Vazire, 2018), as well as the field's perceived legitimacy to external stakeholders. Finally, I end with recommendations for structural changes to improve the credibility and legitimacy of our field's findings as well as their relevance for achieving our public psychology goals.