Authenticity and positivity strivings in marriage and courtship.

Proposed that married persons would want their spouses to see them as they saw themselves but that dating persons would want their relationship partners to evaluate them favorably. A survey of 176 married and dating couples tested these predictions. Just as married persons were most intimate with spouses whose evaluations verified their self-views, dating persons were most intimate with partners who evaluated them favorably. For married people with negative self-views, then, intimacy increased as their spouses evaluated them more negatively. Marriage apparently precipitates a shift from a desire for positive evaluations to a desire for self-verifying evaluations. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Outcasts in a white-lie society: The enigmatic worlds of people with negative self-conceptions.

Although people with negative self-views want to be liked at some level, they repeatedly enact behaviors that alienate their relationship partners. Why? One possibility is that such persons reside in social environments that offer them little insight into what they are doing wrong. Although persons who had negative self-views elicited unfavorable reactions, they did not appreciate this fact because their interaction partners concealed their aversion behind a facade of kind words. To be sure, the interaction partners of people with negative self-views tended to leak their disdain nonverbally. These negative nonverbal messages proved to be uninformative, however, because people with negative self-views overlooked them. These data imply that people with negative self-views may live in social worlds in which they are deprived of corrective feedback that could allow them to improve themselves. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Motivated sensitivity to preference-inconsistent information.

If preference-inconsistent information initiates more effortful cognitive analysis than does preference-consistent information, then people should be more sensitive processors of information they do not want to believe than of information they do want to believe. Three studies supported this prediction. Study 1 found that inferences drawn from favorable interpersonal feedback revealed a correspondence bias, whereas inferences drawn from unfavorable feedback were sensitive to situational constraint. Study 2 showed this sensitivity to the quality of unfavorable feedback to disappear under cognitive load. Study 3 showed that evaluations of the accuracy of favorable medical diagnoses were insensitive to the probability of alternative explanation, whereas evaluations of unfavorable diagnoses were sensitive to probability information. The importance of adaptive considerations in theories of motivated reasoning is discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Introduction of insurance system for long-term care

The newly proposed insurance system for long-term care aims at providing elderly persons with quality care for their self-reliance. Under the proposed system, elderly persons themselves would choose services. Therefore, for its efficient use of services utilization, more coordination between health and welfare sectors will be required. To fulfill its purpose, specialists in geriatric medicine should take a major role, too. Health care providers will have to take into consideration each elderly person's whole life-style for self-reliance despite their health problems. The medical sector will also need to be familiar with the various procedures which would be essential for the smooth implementation of the system. These include not only the providing of care but also the documentation of care need which is one of the essential materials for the certification of care need which determines the reimbursement for the care.     

Designing drugs for transport into the brain

Research findings regarding general self-concept, academic self-concept, and self-awareness in students with learning disabilities have varied, and results are still inconclusive regarding the consistency between students' and teachers' judgments of academic performance. The current study focuses on students' and teachers perceptions of the students' strategy use and performance in nine different academic and organizational domains. Six hundred sixty-three students and their 57 teachers were involved in the study. Findings indicated that the students with learning disabilities considered themselves appropriately strategic and competent in the five domains of reading, writing, spelling, math, and organization. These students also rated their academic performance and organization as average to above-average in seven of nine domains, with the exception of checking and planning their work. Nevertheless, the self-ratings of the students with learning disabilities were still significantly lower than the self-ratings of average achievers in virtually all domains. The second major set of findings revealed a sharp discrepancy between the self-assessments of the students with learning disabilities and their teachers' judgments. Teachers rated the students with learning disabilities as weak in their strategy use and below-average in their performance in all nine academic and organizational domains. Finally, gender differences were not evident in eight of the nine domains. These results have added to the increasing body of literature indicating that students with learning disabilities frequently perceive themselves as capable and effective and often rate themselves as academically stronger than their teachers judge them to be.     

Attributions of responsibility for group tasks: The egocentric bias and the actor–observer difference.

In each of 3 experiments it was demonstrated that under certain conditions individuals who work on a task in a dyad will tend to attribute greater responsibility for a positive outcome to their partners than to themselves. In Exp I 56 college students, who had qualifying scores on the Beck Depression Inventory, working in dyads on a crossword puzzle attributed more responsibility to their partners than to themselves for an outcome they were led to believe was quite good, thus contradicting the expected "egocentric bias" effect. This was true across depression categories. In Exp II, 100 college students working in dyads on the puzzle attributed more responsibility to their partners than to themselves for a positive outcome when asked immediately after the task to make the attribution. However, Ss attributed greater responsibility to themselves than to their partners when asked to make the attribution 3 days later, thus replicating the egocentric bias effect. Half of the 30 dyads in Exp III believed they were being videotaped while working on the puzzle, whereas the other half did not. "Videotaped" Ss attributed more responsibility for the positive outcome to themselves than to their partners, whereas the nonvideotaped Ss attributed more responsibility to their partners than to themselves when both groups were asked to give their attributions immediately after the task. The relationship between the egocentric bias effect and the actor–observer difference phenomenon is discussed. (24 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A solution to the problem of jail suicide

In American studies in the sixties and seventies caregivers, including physicians, showed a negative attitude towards the elderly. There are indications that such a negative attitude affects the quality of care and the communication with the elderly. Based on predominantly American literature this article reviews research on medical students' knowledge about and attitudes towards older people as well as the impact of geriatric training on the image of older patients and physician-patient communication. In medical students who did not receive a geriatric training, attitudes improved in the eighties and nineties up till a slightly positive level but general gerontological knowledge displayed as many shortcomings as in former days. A few studies show that instructional modules in geriatrics do not have an impact on the attitude towards the elderly. Several studies show that contact with aged persons has a positive influence. Rather than geriatric residency or work in a nursing home, contact with healthy elderly has favourable effects. Attitude improvement based on interactions with older people is maintained during medical education. A program in gerontology as well as geriatric instructional modules can lead to knowledge improvement. Since significantly positive correlations between knowledge and attitude are sometimes demonstrated, increasing gerontological knowledge may lead to more positive attitudes.     

Academic achievement and self-evaluations of academic performance.

College students often make informal evaluations of their own course performance. Previous research has shown that the accuracy of these self-evaluations is correlated positively with actual course achievement; however, no one has yet explained why such a relationship exists. It was hypothesized that poor students make less accurate performance evaluations because they know less about the criteria by which their work will be judged. To test that hypothesis, 52 students in an introductory psychology course graded their own work and that of others on both a midterm and a final examination and described their instructor's grading criteria on each occasion. As expected, poor students were less accurate than others at evaluating their own course performance. Poor and good students did not differ, however, in their ability to accurately evaluate the performance of others. The relative inaccuracy of the poor students' self-evaluations was not due to a lack of knowledge about the instructor's grading criteria, but instead involved a failure to apply those criteria to their own course work. (51 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

IFN-tau suppresses both the autoreactive humoral and cellular immune responses and induces stable remission in mice with chronic experimental allergic encephalomyelitis

PURPOSE: The purpose of this study was to compare attitudes toward violence and weapon-carrying among seventh-grade students in three dissimilar U.S. communities. A second focus was to determine students' understanding of their parents' violence-related guidance and behavior. METHODS: Five hundred sixty-seven seventh-grade students (48% male, 46% white, 35% African-American, 13% Latino) completed a self-administered questionnaire in May or October 1991. RESULTS: Thirty-four percent of the students had fought at least once, and 7% more than four times during the previous month. Also, within that period, 5% had skipped school owing to fear of violence. Students whose parents used nonviolent disciplinary techniques fought less frequently than those whose parents relied on hitting and more violent disciplinary methods (p < 0.001). Fighting was significantly more common among students who believe their parents want them to fight if insulted (p = 0.001). Students who reported that they try to stay out of fights usually succeeded (p = 0.001). Those students who more frequently participated in and observed fighting were more likely to carry a weapon (p = 0.001). CONCLUSIONS: Fighting is a frequent occurrence in the lives of seventh-grade students. Students' understanding of their parents' attitudes and behavior correlate strongly with violent behavior. While many students feel that weapons confer safety, those students who actually carry weapons are much more likely to fight.     

Projection in surrogate decisions about life-sustaining medical treatments.

To honor the wishes of an incapacitated patient, surrogate decision makers must predict the treatment decisions patients would make for themselves if able. Social psychological research, however, suggests that surrogates' own treatment preferences may influence their predictions of others' preferences. In 2 studies (1 involving 60 college student surrogates and a parent, the other involving 361 elderly outpatients and their chosen surrogate decision maker), surrogates predicted whether a close other would want life-sustaining treatment in hypothetical end-of-life scenarios and stated their own treatment preferences in the same scenarios. Surrogate predictions more closely resembled surrogates' own treatment wishes than they did the wishes of the individual they were trying to predict. Although the majority of prediction errors reflected inaccurate use of surrogates' own treatment preferences, projection was also found to result in accurate prediction more often than counterprojective predictions. The rationality and accuracy of projection in surrogate decision making is discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Psychological models of the justice motive: Antecedents of distributive and procedural justice.

Two psychological theories consider why people care about justice. The social-exchange-based resource model argues that people want to maximize the resources they obtain from social interactions, a goal that they believe is facilitated by following rules of distributive and procedural justice; the identity-based relational model suggests that people attempt to maintain high status within groups and use the justice of their experiences to evaluate their group status. Two studies on reactions to experiences with authorities (legal and managerial) examine the influence of these motives on (1) people's evaluations of the distributive and procedural justice of their experiences and (2) affective and behavioral reactions to those experiences. Results support a model in which relational issues dominate definitions of justice. Whereas distributive justice judgments are shaped by both resource and relational judgments, procedural justice judgments are shaped by relational concerns. The findings suggest two distinct justice motives. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Error and bias in comparative judgment: On being both better and worse than we think we are.

People believe that they are better than others on easy tasks and worse than others on difficult tasks. In previous attempts to explain these better-than-average and worse-than-average effects, researchers have invoked bias and motivation as causes. In this article, the authors develop a more parsimonious account, the differential information explanation, in which it is assumed only that people typically have better information about themselves than they do about others. When one's own performance is exceptional (either good or bad), it is often reasonable to assume others' will be less so. Consequently, people estimate the performance of others as less extreme (more regressive) than their own. The result is that people believe they are above average on easy tasks and below average on difficult tasks. These effects are exacerbated when people have accurate information about their performances, increasing the natural discrepancy between knowledge of the self and knowledge of others. The effects are attenuated when people obtain accurate information about the performances of others. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Special not different: general practitioners' accounts of their care of dying people

In modern Britain the majority of terminal care occurs in people's own homes and many dying people and their carers would prefer the death itself to occur in the home. The quality of terminal care in the home and the possibility of a home death depend to a great extent upon the care provided by GPs and community nurses. This paper reports on GPs' experiences of caring for dying people and their attitudes towards such work. It is based on unstructured interviews with 25 GPs who graduated from the 1979 entry cohort to the University of Leicester medical school. The respondents were recruited via a questionnaire following up previous research with this cohort on 'fear of death'. Although self-selecting, interviewees were not significantly different from those who did not volunteer for interview in any of the statistical analyses of the questionnaire data. There were a number of similarities in their accounts of their care of dying people. Common themes were that the care of dying people was important, rewarding and satisfying; that the GPs saw themselves as part of a team of carers, frequently as team co-ordinators; good working relationships with district nurses but less satisfactory relationships with hospitals and social workers; that patient and family were both recipients of care; and honesty in communication with dying people, albeit tempered. Three issues of contemporary relevance were: tensions over the role of hospice and specialist terminal care services; care of people with chronic terminal illnesses other than cancer; and the role of GPs in the social construction of bereavement.     

Review of Understanding psychological research: An introduction to methods.

Reviews the book, Understanding psychological research: An introduction to methods by Richard St. Jean (2001). Richard St. Jean's book has the stated goal to be a brief text that presents essential concepts in a concise but interesting format. In this the author succeeds admirably. The nine short chapters and three appendices present the basic content that any method course needs to cover. The chapters are centred around lively research examples, often from the author's own work. Each chapter is followed by a brief summary and a glossary of key terms. The examples are used to introduce the methodological question and to illustrate various solutions. If the book suffers from a drawback, it is that it is too good at what it wants to be: an easily accessible, succinct introduction. The author visibly aims to make the issues as clear and understandable as possible, even if this implies glossing over details and leaving out more difficult aspects. The book does not want to be, nor is it, a manual for people who actual want to do research. In sum, this book will be most useful for those who teach introductory methods courses aimed at students who want to "consume" research rather than pursue it themselves. For these students, the book will be a valuable resource to better understand pertinent issues and to be alert towards methodological problems. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

College students' self-insight and common implicit theories in rating of teaching effectiveness.

The objectives of this study were to determine whether (a) students have self-insight into how they make overall evaluations of teaching effectiveness, and (b) there is a reasonably high level of consensus among the student raters in making overall evaluations. A policy-capturing approach was used with 3 different college student groups (94 introductory geology, 82 accounting, and 53 graduate education students) to determine the implicit and explicit weights of the teaching factors students used in arriving at their overall evaluations. The results indicated that the students had self-insight and a reasonably high level of consensus in making their overall evaluations, providing further evidence of the validity of students' overall evaluations of teaching effectiveness. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Cultivating curricular reform

Since the 1960s there has been pressure to reform medical education in a more humanistic direction. One reason this has been difficult is that most medical schools have been forced to maintain themselves on resources allocated to support research and the technology of specialized tertiary care. Nevertheless, many people believe that medical education can still change because of changes taking place outside the sciences, such as a redefinition of the meaning of health and the need to provide better health care to the U.S. population at a lower cost. Taking this optimistic view will help strengthen reformers' resolve for curricular change and the incorporation of important areas such as family violence into medical students' education. There are numerous barriers to curricular change. Yet there are useful principles that can guide reform efforts, such as having an explicit rationale for the desired change, focusing on educational goals rather than on resources for their implementation, recruiting support from the departmental and school leadership, anticipating negative reactions, and recognizing the need for negotiation. There are also principles to foster successful implementation, the most important of which is to have everyone involved agree on the goals of the new program and participate in the process. The way to increase an emphasis on family violence issues is to find areas in the curriculum where these issues can be integrated with current teaching. Finally, a medical school curriculum on family violence does not need to be all-inclusive, but instead should prepare a good foundation so that students can expand their knowledge and skills during residency training and medical practice.     

The patients' experiences of their chronic non-malignant pain

This paper reports the results of a study which investigated the experiences of 75 people with chronic non-malignant pain. People with chronic non-malignant pain can find that traditional medical techniques do not help their pain, and they have to learn to live with it. However, pain can affect their lives in many ways. Within this study, qualitative data were collected to illustrate what it meant to people to experience this chronic pain. It was found that pain adversely affected many dimensions of sufferers' lives, and the effects extended to family and friends. It seemed that having others believe the pain was crucial to many patients. Health care professionals can offer these patients much in helping them come to terms with the way in which pain has affected both themselves and their lives.     

Teachers' and deaf students' perceptions of communication ease and engagement.

Collected ratings of communication ease and of engagement for 95 deaf junior and senior high school students (aged 12–21 yrs) in a large, urban, multiethnic school for the deaf. Ratings were made by the students' English teachers and by the students themselves. High teacher ratings for communication ease and engagement were associated with high academic achievement as measured by the Stanford Achievement Test. High student ratings for communication ease were also associated with academic achievement. The 2 best predictors of academic achievement were student-rated communication ease and teacher-rated engagement. Findings suggest that it is important for teachers to be sensitive to the level of communication comfort of their students because students who enjoy easier communication may be more likely to be engaged, or more actively involved, in classroom learning and to demonstrate higher academic achievement. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Putting off tomorrow to do what you want today: Planning for retirement.

In this article we note that in the coming years, a larger number of people will be experiencing retirement for a longer period of time than ever before and that despite this fact, many will find themselves unprepared for this stage of their lives. We review the literature on retirement preparation, structuring our review around the key questions that need to be addressed when planning for retirement: (a) What will I do? (b) How will I afford it? (c) Where will I live? and (d) Who will I share it with? We make a number of suggestions for research and practice. We conclude that although psychology has begun to play a role in understanding and addressing retirement preparation, there are considerable opportunities for psychologists to engage with this issue in their research and applied work. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

How Students and Teachers View the Seriousness of Peer Harassment: When Is It Appropriate to Seek Help?

When schoolchildren are harassed by peers, it sometimes is necessary to seek help from a teacher. However, students and teachers may have a different sense of when it is necessary. The authors investigated students' perceptions of harassment and help seeking, examining whether students' perceptions are related to popularity and whether perceptions of students and teachers differ. Fourth- and 5th-grade students (classified as popular, average, or unpopular) and teachers were interviewed about different types of harassment. Unpopular children perceived teasing more seriously than teachers and other children; in fact, they said that teasing is as serious as threats and physical aggression. Children often are reluctant to seek help because they believe that doing so will not resolve and may exacerbate the situation; unpopular children in particular fear retribution from the perpetrator. Findings suggest that unpopular children are at risk when teachers do not share their sensitivity regarding danger and the need for help. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)