The feasibility and acceptability of integrating dogs into inpatient rehabilitation therapy with children with acquired brain injury.

INTRODUCTION: Children with acquired brain injury (ABI) are at risk for poor therapeutic engagement due to cognitive impairment, affect lability, pain, and fatigue. Animal-assisted therapy (AAT) has the potential to improve patient engagement in rehabilitation therapies; however, the feasibility of integrating AAT into the rigorous therapy schedule of inpatient clinical care or its reception by patients, families, and staff is unknown. OBJECTIVE: To examine the feasibility and acceptability of incorporating dogs into physical therapy and occupational therapy sessions with pediatric patients being treated on an inpatient rehabilitation unit for acquired brain injury. DESIGN: A feasibility study of AAT within the context of a within-subjects crossover study. SETTING: Pediatric inpatient rehabilitation unit. PARTICIPANTS: Sixteen patients, aged 7-28 years (mean = 13.6 years, standard deviation [SD] = 5.2 years; 50% male), being treated on the inpatient rehabilitation unit following ABI. INTERVENTION: AAT - the integration of dogs into inpatient physical therapy and occupational therapy sessions. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Feasibility measures: enrollment rate, the proportion of AAT sessions a dog attended, adverse events, instances where therapist or handler ended session early, patient animal closeness, and utilization of dog in session. Satisfaction measures: parent satisfaction questionnaires and therapist feedback. RESULTS: Feasibility was supported by high enrollment rate (88.9%) and dog attendance rate of 93%-95%; 84.3% of sessions used the dog in multiple ways and patients reported a high level of closeness with the dog in session, indicating that the dogs were integrated in meaningful ways. No adverse events were noted, therapists reported that intervention was convenient, and clinical care was not negatively impacted. A high level of satisfaction was reported by families and therapists. CONCLUSIONS: Findings suggest that AAT is feasible and acceptable, and it may be a valuable tool for therapists working with patients with ABI on an inpatient rehabilitation unit.

Blinded by wistfulness: on how nostalgia strengthens attitudes.

Across four studies, we explored how feeling nostalgic about an attitude object impacts the metacognitive characteristics of the attitude toward that object and how those metacognitions predict the evaluation's underlying strength. In each study, participants reflected on and evaluated a song or television show that either did or did not elicit nostalgia. Across these studies, we found support for the hypotheses that nostalgic attitude objects are viewed more positively, appraised with greater attitudinal importance, and exhibited less objective ambivalence. In Study 4, we observed that nostalgic attitudes are associated with greater behavioural intentions and that this relationship was mediated both by attitudinal importance and objective ambivalence. These studies contribute to our understanding of how nostalgia affects attitude formation processes.

Denver pain authenticity stimulus set (D-PASS).

We introduce the Denver Pain Authenticity Stimulus Set (D-PASS), a free resource containing 315 videos of 105 unique individuals expressing authentic and posed pain. All expressers were recorded displaying one authentic (105; pain was elicited via a pressure algometer) and two posed (210) expressions of pain (one posed expression recorded before [posed-unrehearsed] and one recorded after [posed-rehearsed] the authentic pain expression). In addition to authentic and posed pain videos, the database includes an accompanying codebook including metrics assessed at the expresser and video levels (e.g., Facial Action Coding System metrics for each video controlling for neutral images of the expresser), expressers' pain threshold and pain tolerance values, averaged pain detection performance by naïve perceivers who viewed the videos (e.g., accuracy, response bias), neutral images of each expresser, and face characteristic rating data for neutral images of each expresser (e.g., attractiveness, trustworthiness). The stimuli and accompanying codebook can be accessed for academic research purposes from https://digitalcommons.du.edu/lsdl_dpass/1/ . The relatively large number of stimuli allow for consideration of expresser-level variability in analyses and enable more advanced statistical approaches (e.g., signal detection analyses). Furthermore, the large number of Black (n = 41) and White (n = 56) expressers permits investigations into the role of race in pain expression, perception, and authenticity detection. Finally, the accompanying codebook may provide pilot data for novel investigations in the intergroup or pain sciences.

Miami University deception detection database.

In the present work, we introduce the Miami University Deception Detection Database (MU3D), a free resource containing 320 videos of target individuals telling truths and lies. Eighty (20 Black female, 20 Black male, 20 White female, and 20 White male) different targets were recorded speaking honestly and dishonestly about their social relationships. Each target generated four different videos (i.e., positive truth, negative truth, positive lie, negative lie), yielding 320 videos fully crossing target race, target gender, statement valence, and statement veracity. These videos were transcribed by trained research assistants and evaluated by naïve raters. Descriptive analyses of the video characteristics (e.g., length) and subjective ratings (e.g., target attractiveness) are provided. The stimuli and an information codebook can be accessed free of charge for academic research purposes from http://hdl.handle.net/2374.MIA/6067 . The MU3D offers scholars the ability to conduct research using standardized stimuli that can aid in building more comprehensive theories of interpersonal sensitivity, enhance replication among labs, facilitate the use of signal detection analyses, and promote consideration of race, gender, and their interactive effects in deception detection research.

Black and White Lies: Race-Based Biases in Deception Judgments.

In six studies ( N = 605), participants made deception judgments about videos of Black and White targets who told truths and lies about interpersonal relationships. In Studies 1a, 1b, 1c, and 2, White participants judged that Black targets were telling the truth more often than they judged that White targets were telling the truth. This truth bias was predicted by Whites' motivation to respond without prejudice. For Black participants, however, motives to respond without prejudice did not moderate responses (Study 2). In Study 3, we found similar effects with a manipulation of the targets' apparent race. Finally, in Study 4, we used eye-tracking techniques to demonstrate that Whites' truth bias for Black targets is likely the result of late-stage correction processes: Despite ultimately judging that Black targets were telling the truth more often than White targets, Whites were faster to fixate on the on-screen "lie" response box when targets were Black than when targets were White. These systematic race-based biases have important theoretical implications (e.g., for lie detection and improving intergroup communication and relations) and practical implications (e.g., for reducing racial bias in law enforcement).

Friends with benefits: on the positive consequences of pet ownership.

Social support is critical for psychological and physical well-being, reflecting the centrality of belongingness in our lives. Human interactions often provide people with considerable social support, but can pets also fulfill one's social needs? Although there is correlational evidence that pets may help individuals facing significant life stressors, little is known about the well-being benefits of pets for everyday people. Study 1 found in a community sample that pet owners fared better on several well-being (e.g., greater self-esteem, more exercise) and individual-difference (e.g., greater conscientiousness, less fearful attachment) measures. Study 2 assessed a different community sample and found that owners enjoyed better well-being when their pets fulfilled social needs better, and the support that pets provided complemented rather than competed with human sources. Finally, Study 3 brought pet owners into the laboratory and experimentally demonstrated the ability of pets to stave off negativity caused by social rejection. In summary, pets can serve as important sources of social support, providing many positive psychological and physical benefits for their owners.

Discrepancy-based and anticipated emotions in behavioral self-regulation.

Discrepancies between one's current and desired states evoke negative emotions, which presumably guide self-regulation. In the current work we evaluated the function of discrepancy-based emotions in behavioral self-regulation. Contrary to classic theories of self-regulation, discrepancy-based emotions did not predict the degree to which people engaged in self-regulatory behavior. Instead, expectations about how future self-discrepancies would make one feel (i.e., anticipated emotions) predicted self-regulation. However, anticipated emotions were influenced by previous discrepancy-based emotional experiences, suggesting that the latter do not directly motivate self-regulation but rather guide expectations. These findings are consistent with the perspective that emotions do not necessarily direct immediate behavior, but rather have an indirect effect by guiding expectations, which in turn predict goal-directed action.

The multiple self-aspects framework: self-concept representation and its implications.

The multiple self-aspects framework (MSF) conceives of the self-concept as a collection of multiple, context-dependent selves. From this perspective, five principles are derived, addressing issues such as how context activates particular regions of self-knowledge and how self-relevant feedback affects self-evaluations and affect. Support for these principles is discussed. Furthermore, the MSF advances several novel predictions, including how active self-aspects filter one's experiences and perceptions, how the impact of chronic accessibility is more circumscribed than previously realized, and how self-concept representation modulates the experience of affect. In addition, the MSF helps integrate isolated lines of research within several diverse literatures, including self-regulation, stability and variability for the self, the integration of others into the self-concept, and several individual difference factors as well. Overall, the current work speaks to issues of relevance to several subdisciplines in psychology (e.g., cultural, developmental, personality, social) interested in the self, providing conceptual and methodological insights.

The simple life: on the benefits of low self-complexity.

This article examines the spillover amplification hypothesis, which proposes that because people lower in self-complexity experience stronger responses to life events they will show relatively better well-being in the presence of positive factors (e.g., better social support) and relatively poorer well-being in the presence of negative factors (e.g., a history of negative experiences). Across three studies, support for spillover amplification was found. Specifically, people lower in self-complexity revealed greater self-esteem, less depression, and fewer illnesses when they had greater social support (Study 1) and more desirable personality characteristics (Study 2), yet they had poorer well-being if they had a history of many negative life events (Study 3). Thus, how one's self-concept is represented in memory moderates the relationship between many well-established factors and well-being.

Multiple social identities and stereotype threat: imbalance, accessibility, and working memory.

In 4 experiments, the authors showed that concurrently making positive and negative self-relevant stereotypes available about performance in the same ability domain can eliminate stereotype threat effects. Replicating past work, the authors demonstrated that introducing negative stereotypes about women's math performance activated participants' female social identity and hurt their math performance (i.e., stereotype threat) by reducing working memory. Moving beyond past work, it was also demonstrated that concomitantly presenting a positive self-relevant stereotype (e.g., college students are good at math) increased the relative accessibility of females' college student identity and inhibited their gender identity, eliminating attendant working memory deficits and contingent math performance decrements. Furthermore, subtle manipulations in questions presented in the demographic section of a math test eliminated stereotype threat effects that result from women reporting their gender before completing the test. This work identifies the motivated processes through which people's social identities became active in situations in which self-relevant stereotypes about a stigmatized group membership and a nonstigmatized group membership were available. In addition, it demonstrates the downstream consequences of this pattern of activation on working memory and performance.

When chronic isn't chronic: the moderating role of active self-aspects.

The current work considered how self-concept organization moderates the consequences of chronic attributes, which are widely assumed to be always accessible and influential. In Study 1, the accessibility of participants' chronic attributes was assessed before and after activating a self-aspect that was either relevant or irrelevant to participants' chronic attributes. Results showed that chronic attributes were more accessible when they were relevant to a participant's active self-aspect than when they were irrelevant to it. In Study 2, participants read ambiguous behaviors performed by others, some of which could be interpreted in line with their own chronic attribute or an alternative attribute. Participants were more likely to interpret behaviors as consistent with their own chronic attributes, but only when a relevant self-aspect had been previously activated. These studies suggest that chronicity can be moderated by self-aspect activation, consistent with the perspective that the self consists of multiple, context-dependent self-aspects.

Forming implicit and explicit attitudes toward individuals: social group association cues.

The authors explored how social group cues (e.g., obesity, physical attractiveness) strongly associated with valence affect the formation of attitudes toward individuals. Although explicit attitude formation has been examined in much past research (e.g., S. T. Fiske & S. L. Neuberg, 1990), in the current work, the authors considered how implicit as well as explicit attitudes toward individuals are influenced by these cues. On the basis of a systems of evaluation perspective (e.g., R. J. Rydell & A. R. McConnell, 2006; R. J. Rydell, A. R. McConnell, D. M. Mackie, & L. M. Strain, 2006), the authors anticipated and found that social group cues had a strong impact on implicit attitude formation in all cases and on explicit attitude formation when behavioral information about the target was ambiguous. These findings obtained for cues related to obesity (Experiments 1 and 4) and physical attractiveness (Experiment 2). In Experiment 3, parallel findings were observed for race, and participants holding greater implicit racial prejudice against African Americans formed more negative implicit attitudes toward a novel African American target person than did participants with less implicit racial prejudice. Implications for research on attitudes, impression formation, and stigma are discussed.

Stereotype threat and working memory: mechanisms, alleviation, and spillover.

Stereotype threat (ST) occurs when the awareness of a negative stereotype about a social group in a particular domain produces suboptimal performance by members of that group. Although ST has been repeatedly demonstrated, far less is known about how its effects are realized. Using mathematical problem solving as a test bed, the authors demonstrate in 5 experiments that ST harms math problems that rely heavily on working memory resources--especially phonological aspects of this system. Moreover, by capitalizing on an understanding of the cognitive mechanisms by which ST exerts its impact, the authors show (a) how ST can be alleviated (e.g., by heavily practicing once-susceptible math problems such that they are retrieved directly from long-term memory rather than computed via a working-memory-intensive algorithm) and (b) when it will spill over onto subsequent tasks unrelated to the stereotype in question but dependent on the same cognitive resources that stereotype threat also uses. The current work extends the knowledge of the causal mechanisms of stereotype threat and demonstrates how its effects can be attenuated and propagated.

Of two minds: forming and changing valence-inconsistent implicit and explicit attitudes.

Because different processes underlie implicit and explicit attitudes, we hypothesized that they are differentially sensitive to different kinds of information. We measured implicit and explicit attitudes over time, as different types of attitude-relevant information about a single attitude object were presented. As expected, explicit attitudes formed and changed in response to the valence of consciously accessible, verbally presented behavioral information about the target. In contrast, implicit attitudes formed and changed in response to the valence of subliminally presented primes, reflecting the progressive accretion of attitude object-evaluation pairings. As a consequence, when subliminal primes and behavioral information were of opposite valence, people formed implicit and explicit attitudes of conflicting valence.

Understanding implicit and explicit attitude change: a systems of reasoning analysis.

There is considerable controversy about how to conceptualize implicit and explicit attitudes, reflecting substantial speculation about the mechanisms involved in implicit and explicit attitude formation and change. To investigate this issue, the current work examines the processes by which new attitudes are formed and changed and how these attitudes predict behavior. Five experiments support a systems of reasoning approach to implicit and explicit attitude change. Specifically, explicit attitudes were shaped in a manner consistent with fast-changing processes, were affected by explicit processing goals, and uniquely predicted more deliberate behavioral intentions. Conversely, implicit attitudes reflected an associative system characterized by a slower process of repeated pairings between an attitude object and related evaluations, were unaffected by explicit processing goals, uniquely predicted spontaneous behaviors, and were exclusively affected by associative information about the attitude object that was not available for higher order cognition.

On the causal mechanisms of stereotype threat: can skills that don't rely heavily on working memory still be threatened?

Recent work suggests that stereotype threat (ST) harms performance by reducing available working memory capacity. Is this the only mechanism by which ST can occur? Three experiments examined ST's impact on expert golf putting, which is not harmed when working memory is reduced but is hurt when attention is allocated to proceduralized processes that normally run outside working memory. Experiment 1 showed that well learned golf putting is susceptible to ST. Experiments 2 and 3 demonstrated that giving expert golfers a secondary task eliminates ST-induced impairment. Distracting attention away from the stereotype-related behavior eliminates the harmful impact of negative stereotype activation. These results are consistent with explicit monitoring theories of choking under pressure, which suggest that performance degradation can occur when too much attention is allocated to processes that usually run more automatically. Thus, ST alters information processing in multiple ways, inducing performance decrements for different reasons in different tasks.

Resistance can be good or bad: how theories of resistance and dissonance affect attitude certainty.

This research investigated how lay theories about resisting persuasion can affect attitude certainty. Specifically, people who believed that resistance was negative (i.e., implies close-mindedness) showed different levels of attitude certainty after resisting persuasive messages than people who believed resistance was positive (i.e., implies intelligence). When people held positive lay theories of resistance and overcame ostensibly strong arguments, they showed increased attitude certainty (compared to those who overcame ostensibly weak arguments). However, individuals who believed that resistance was negative did not show increases in attitude certainty when overcoming strong arguments. Experiment 2 suggests that the effect of lay theories and perceived argument strength on attitude certainty was due to dissonance created by believing that resistance is undesirable but nonetheless resisting persuasion.

Perceptions of entitativity and attitude change.

The current work explored the properties of groups that lead them to be persuasive and the processes through which such persuasion occurs. Because more entitative groups induce greater levels of information processing, their arguments should receive greater elaboration, leading to persuasion when members of groups present strong (vs. weak) counter attitudinal arguments. Experiment 1 explored these hypotheses by examining if idiosyncratic perceptions of group entitativity and manipulations of argument strength affect attitude change and argument elaboration. Experiment 2 experimentally manipulated group entitativity and argument strength independently to examine the causal relationship between entitativity, attitude change, and argument elaboration. In both experiments, it was found that groups greater in entitativity were more persuasive when presenting strong (vs. weak) arguments and induced greater argument elaboration. Implications for our understanding of entitativity, persuasion, and information processing about social groups are discussed.

Implicit and explicit measures of sexual orientation attitudes: in group preferences and related behaviors and beliefs among gay and straight men.

The relations among implicit and explicit measures of sexual orientation attitudes and sexual-orientation-related behavior and beliefs among gay men (Study 1) and straight men (Studies 1 and 2) were explored. Study 1 found relations between implicit and explicit measures of sexual orientation attitudes, large differences between gay and straight men on both implicit and explicit measures, and that these measures predicted sexual-orientation-related behaviors among gay men. Also, only straight men exhibited a negative relation between their attitudes toward homosexuality and heterosexuality. Study 2 found that as straight men held more negative attitudes toward homosexuality, they more strongly endorsed the importance of heterosexual identity and of traditional masculine gender roles. These endorsements mediated the negative relation between their attitudes toward heterosexuality and homosexuality. Implications for assessing attitudes toward sexual orientation and their relations for sexual orientation identity are discussed.

The mediating effects of attitudes toward homosexuality between secure attachment and disclosure outcomes among gay men.

Past research has found that a stronger secure attachment style, developed in childhood, enhances one's ability to acknowledge negative feelings, cope with negative life events, and develop satisfying social relationships. Because an integral part of the "coming out" process for gay men is the ability to seek support from the gay community in order to reevaluate negative beliefs toward homosexuality, a gay man's attachment style may strongly impact this critical stage of his life. Results demonstrated that men who more strongly endorsed a secure attachment style reported more positive attitudes toward their own homosexuality, and that these more positive attitudes could mediate the relation between more secure attachment style, greater levels of self-disclosure regarding their homosexuality, and greater self-esteem. Implications of these data for internalized homophobia, the coming-out process, and effective social functioning are discussed.