Psychological bulletin
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Psychological bulletin · Jan 2013
CommentSearching for evidence, not a war: reply to Lindquist, Siegel, Quigley, and Barrett (2013).
Lindquist, Siegel, Quigley, and Barrett (2013) critiqued our recent meta-analysis that reported the effects of discrete emotions on outcomes, including cognition, judgment, physiology, behavior, and experience (Lench, Flores, & Bench, 2011). Lindquist et al. offered 2 major criticisms-we address both and consider the nature of emotion and scientific debate. Their 1st criticism, that the meta-analysis did not demonstrate emotion-consistent and emotion-specific changes in outcomes, appears to have been based on a misunderstanding of the method that we employed. ⋯ Their 2nd criticism, that the findings are consistent with a psychological constructionist approach to emotion, is partially supported by the data and our statements in Lench et al. (2011). However, only 1 meta-analytic finding is relevant to this hypothesis, and it does not offer unequivocal evidence. Further, we contend that no modern discrete emotion theories would make the claims described by Lindquist et al. as representing a "natural kind" perspective and that viewing a scientific debate as a war has negative implications for the ability to evaluate evidence.
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Psychological bulletin · Sep 2012
ReviewAn inconvenienced youth? Ageism and its potential intergenerational roots.
Age is the only social category identifying subgroups that everyone may eventually join. Despite this and despite the well-known growth of the older population, age-based prejudice remains an understudied topic in social psychology. ⋯ Presenting both sides of this incipient issue, we review relevant empirical work that introduces reasons for both optimism and pessimism concerning intergenerational relations within an aging society. We conclude by suggesting future avenues for ageism research, emphasizing the importance of understanding forthcoming intergenerational dynamics for the benefit of the field and broader society.
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Psychological bulletin · Sep 2012
Review Meta AnalysisRegulatory focus and work-related outcomes: a review and meta-analysis.
Regulatory focus theory (Higgins, 1997) has received growing attention in organizational psychology, necessitating a quantitative review that synthesizes its effects on important criteria. In addition, there is need for theoretical integration of regulatory focus theory with personality research. Theoretical integration is particularly relevant, since personality traits and dispositions are distal factors that are unlikely to have direct effects on work behaviors, yet they may have indirect effects via regulatory focus. ⋯ In addition to estimates of bivariate relationships, we support a meta-analytic path model in which distal personality traits relate to work behaviors via the mediating effects of general and work-specific regulatory focus. Results from tests of incremental and relative validity indicated that regulatory foci predict unique variance in work behaviors after controlling for established personality, motivation, and attitudinal predictors. Consistent with regulatory focus theory and our integrative theoretical framework, regulatory focus has meaningful relations with work outcomes and is not redundant with other individual difference variables.
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Psychological bulletin · Mar 2012
Toward a synthesis of cognitive biases: how noisy information processing can bias human decision making.
A single coherent framework is proposed to synthesize long-standing research on 8 seemingly unrelated cognitive decision-making biases. During the past 6 decades, hundreds of empirical studies have resulted in a variety of rules of thumb that specify how humans systematically deviate from what is normatively expected from their decisions. Several complementary generative mechanisms have been proposed to explain those cognitive biases. ⋯ The ensuing synthesis offers formal mathematical definitions of the biases and their underlying generative mechanism, which permits a consolidated analysis of how they are related. This synthesis contributes to the larger goal of creating a coherent picture that explains the relations among the myriad of seemingly unrelated biases and their potential psychological generative mechanisms. Limitations and research questions are discussed.
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Psychological bulletin · Nov 2011
ReviewPain, nicotine, and smoking: research findings and mechanistic considerations.
Tobacco addiction and chronic pain represent 2 highly prevalent and comorbid conditions that engender substantial burdens upon individuals and systems. Interrelations between pain and smoking have been of clinical and empirical interest for decades, and research in this area has increased dramatically over the past 5 years. We conceptualize the interaction of pain and smoking as a prototypical example of the biopsychosocial model. ⋯ We observed modest evidence that smoking may be a risk factor in the multifactorial etiology of some chronically painful conditions and that pain may come to serve as a potent motivator of smoking. We also found that whereas animal studies yielded consistent support for direct pain-inhibitory effects of nicotine and tobacco, results from human studies were much less consistent. Future research in the emerging area of pain and smoking has the potential to inform theoretical and clinical applications with respect to tobacco smoking, chronic pain, and their comorbid presentation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved).