It Could Be Worse
Karl Halvor Teigen & Tine Jensen
European Psychologist, Winter 2011, Pages 48-57
Abstract:
Subjective experiences of good or bad luck appear to depend upon downward or upward comparisons with close counterfactuals. People exposed to disasters have both options: They were at the wrong place at the wrong time, but their fate could in many cases have been worse; so in a sense, they are unlucky victims, but lucky survivors. Interviews with 85 Norwegian tourists 9-11 months after they had been exposed to the tsunami disaster in Southeast Asia showed good luck to be a pivotal theme in a majority of the narratives. Nobody claimed they had been unfortunate or unlucky. Moreover, downward counterfactual thoughts and downward comparisons with others occurred 10 times more often than upward counterfactuals and upward comparisons. In a follow-up 2 years later, 95% answered they had been lucky. A contextual analysis revealed several facets of luck, including its relation to gratitude, guilt, and supernatural beliefs.
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Alison Blodorn & Laurie O'Brien
Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy, forthcoming
Abstract:
Perceptions of racism against African Americans can result in negative mental health outcomes among African Americans (e.g., Klonoff, Landrine, & Ullman, 1999); however, it is less clear how perceptions of racism against African Americans affect White Americans. The present study examines the relationship between perceptions of racism against African Americans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and negative mental health outcomes among a sample highly impacted by the disaster - White community residents of New Orleans. Perceptions of racism against African Americans were associated with negative mental health outcomes, even after controlling for demographic variables and disaster exposure. Furthermore, feelings of collective guilt mediated the relationship between perceptions of racism and negative mental health outcomes.
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Death and the Evolution of Language
Luca Berta
Human Studies, December 2010, Pages 425-444
Abstract:
My hypothesis is that the cognitive challenge posed by death might have had a co-evolutionary role in the development of linguistic faculties. First, I claim that mirror neurons, which enable us to understand others' actions and emotions, not only activate when we directly observe someone, but can also be triggered by language: words make us feel bodily sensations. Second, I argue that the death of another individual cannot be understood by virtue of the mirror neuron mechanism, since the dead provide no neural pattern for mirroring: this cognitive task requires symbolic thought, which in turn involves emotions. Third, I describe the symbolic leap of the human species as a cognitive detachment from the here and now, allowing displaced reference: through symbols the human mind can refer to what is absent, possible, or even impossible (like the presence of a dead person). Such a detachment has had a huge adaptive impact: adopting a coevolutionary standpoint can help explain why language is as effective as environmental inputs in order to stimulate our bodily experience. In the end I suggest a further coevolutionary "reversal": if language is necessary to understand the death of the other, it might also be true that the peculiar cognitive problem posed by the death of the other (the corpse is present, but the other is absent) has contributed to the crucial transition from an indexical sign system to the symbolic level, i.e., the "cognitive detachment". Death and language, as Heidegger claimed, have an essential relation for humans, both from an evolutionary and a phenomenological perspective: they have shaped the symbolic consciousness that make us conceive of them.
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Inhibitory Spillover: Increased Urination Urgency Facilitates Impulse Control in Unrelated Domains
Mirjam Tuk, Debra Trampe & Luk Warlop
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Visceral states are known to have a (detrimental) impact on our ability to exert self-control. In the current research, we investigate the impact of a visceral factor associated with inhibition, rather than with approach: bladder control. We argue that inhibitory signals are not domain specific, but can spill over to unrelated domains, resulting in increased impulse control in the behavioral domain. We show that urination urgency correlates with improved performance on color naming but not word meaning trials of a Stroop task (Study 1). In Study 2 and 3, we show that higher levels of bladder control result in an increasing ability to resist more immediate temptations in monetary decision making. We show that inhibitory spillover effects are moderated by sensitivity of the behavioral inhibition system (BIS, Study 3), and can be induced by exogenous cues (Study 4). Implications for inhibition and impulse control theories are discussed.
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On fatalistic long-term health behaviour
Serge Macé & Fabrice Le Lec
Journal of Economic Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Many adults have an overly pessimistic view of old age because they fail to correctly predict their ability to hedonically adapt to old-age health related problems. A standard utility model where the marginal utility of health is higher at a lower level of health predicts that this overly pessimist view raises the incentive for healthy behavior. But this is at odds with empirical research that indicates that people with more negative aging stereotypes tend to adopt less healthy practices, transforming this negative view into a self-fulfilling prophecy. The aim of this note is to show that this fatalistic behavior can be explained through prospect theory by modelling this overly pessimistic view of old age as a failure to predict the change in the reference point due to hedonic adaptation. Given the diminishing sensitivity in the loss domain, people undervalue the future marginal value of health investment and may therefore underinvest in health as long as loss aversion is not too strong.
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Decreasing pain tolerance outside of awareness
Esther Meerman, Bart Verkuil & Jos Brosschot
Journal of Psychosomatic Research, March 2011, Pages 250-257
Objective: Medically unexplained symptoms (MUSs) are a humanitarian and economic burden. Among them, pain complaints without organic pathology are the most prevalent. Theoretically, activated illness-related memory may cause reporting of symptoms by changing perception and interpretation of bodily signals to the extent that they are not tolerated and become complaints. We tested whether activating illness-related memory without conscious awareness leads to decreased pain tolerance (PT).
Methods: Activation of illness-related memory without conscious awareness was manipulated by a subliminal priming technique. Eighty participants were randomly assigned to four conditions, with prime words describing either (a) health complaints (HCs), to activate an illness-related memory, or three control categories: (b) neutral content, (c) general bodily sensations, and
(d) negative valence. The latter two conditions were added to test the alternative hypotheses that reduced PT could be observed with the semantic activation of these two components of HCs. We measured PT using a cold pressor task.
Results: Participants who were subliminally primed with HC words reported lower PT compared with participants who were primed with neutral words.
Priming with the other words did not lead to significantly different effects relative to priming with neutral words.
Conclusions: The findings suggest that PT can be involuntarily decreased by activating illness-related memory. This implies partial evidence for a crucial element of a cognitive model of medically unexplained symptoms, which holds that chronically activated illness-related memory causes the development of somatic complaints without observable bodily pathology.
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Jeff Galak & Tom Meyvis
Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, February 2011, Pages 63-75
Abstract:
Across 7 laboratory studies and 1 field study, we demonstrated that people remembered an unpleasant experience as more aversive when they expected this experience to return than when they had no such expectation. Our results indicate that this effect results from people's tendency to brace for unpleasant experiences. Specifically, when faced with the anticipated return of the experience, people prepare for the worst, leading them to remember the initial experience as more aversive. This bracing can be reduced either by limiting people's self-regulatory resources or by denying them the time to brace. These results indicate that people's tendency to remember aversive experiences as less unpleasant than they actually were (as demonstrated in prior research) does not necessarily imply that people are willing to re-engage in these experiences-because the anticipation of repeating the experience may counteract the initial memory bias.
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When More Pain Is Preferred To Less: The Effect of Anger in Decision Making
Evan Polman
Social Cognition, February 2011, Pages 43-55
Abstract:
It is axiomatic in social psychology that people protect the perceived worth and integrity of the self - in other words, to self-affirm. But occasionally people may express a desire for self-deprecation, such as causing the self to feel pain. Five studies explored this possibility, namely whether anger propels people toward self-inflicted pain. Compared with both sad and emotionally neutral participants, angered participants rated painful activities as more desirable (Study 1), evidenced greater mental accessibility of pain (Study 2), were more likely to choose a painful-sounding candy (jawbreaker) following a choice between two candies (Study 3), gave themselves more electrical shocks (Study 4), and scored higher on a clinical survey used to measure self-inflicted pain (Study 5). These findings suggest people have a love-hate relationship with the self: Generally, people trump up and self-affirm their intelligence, attractiveness, and benevolence, yet, when people are angry, they deprecate the self and willingly cause the self to feel pain.
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Self-Consciousness and Death Cognitions from a Terror Management Perspective
Orit Taubman-Ben-Ari & Adi Noy
Death Studies, November 2010, Pages 871-892
Abstract:
Two studies explored the connection between self-consciousness and death cognitions. In Study 1 (n = 56), a positive association was found between accessibility of death-related thoughts and the ruminative dimension of self-consciousness. In Study 2 (n = 212), a mortality salience induction led to higher validation of cultural worldviews (a more severe perception of social transgressions) than a control group, but only among individuals with lower self-consciousness, whereas participants characterized by higher self-consciousness did not make increased use of this cultural anxiety buffer. Rather, their naturally heightened death awareness led them to react to social transgressors in a neutral condition in the way usually found only after a mortality salience induction. Gender could not alternatively account for these findings. The results are explained in terms of terror management theory. It is suggested that a high level of self-consciousness may serve as an internal death reminder, leading to greater cultural worldview validation on a regular basis.
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Acute stress impairs memory retrieval independent of time of day
Tom Smeets
Psychoneuroendocrinology, May 2011, Pages 495-501
Abstract:
It is widely recognized that acute stress and associated glucocorticoid stress responses yield memory-enhancing effects when the memory consolidation phase is targeted, while impairing effects are generally found with regard to memory retrieval performance. While some evidence exists that the memory-enhancing effects of consolidation stress are modulated by time of day, no study to date has investigated whether stress-induced retrieval deficits are also prone to such time of day effects. To address this issue, participants (N = 76) were exposed to a stressor or control condition before a retrieval test that probed for neutral and negative words learned 24 h before. Results show that stress exposure resulted in impaired retrieval of both neutral and negative words, but that time of day did not moderate this effect. This memory-impairing effect was larger for negative than for neutral information, and was significantly associated with stress-induced cortisol responses. The current findings demonstrate the robustness of stress-induced retrieval deficits throughout the day, in particular for emotional memory material, and further underscore the importance of cortisol reactivity in impairing memory retrieval.