Frontiers in psychology
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Frontiers in psychology · Jan 2015
Improving care quality and preventing maltreatment in institutional care - a feasibility study with caregivers.
Institutionalized children in low-income countries often face maltreatment and inadequate caregiving. In addition to prior traumatization and other childhood adversities in the family of origin, abuse and neglect in institutional care are linked to various mental health problems. By providing a manualized training workshop for caregivers, we aimed at improving care quality and preventing maltreatment in institutional care. ⋯ Children reported a decrease in physical maltreatment and assessments showed a decrease in mental health problems. Our approach seems feasible under challenging circumstances and provides first hints for its efficacy. These promising findings call for further studies testing the efficacy and sustainability of this maltreatment prevention approach.
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Frontiers in psychology · Jan 2015
Lay perspectives on the social and psychological functions of heroes.
Declaring and thinking about heroes are common human preoccupations but surprisingly aspects of heroism that reinforce these behaviors are not well-understood. In four thematically consistent studies, we attempt to identify lay perspectives about the psychological functions served by heroes. In Study 1, participants (n = 189) freely generated open-ended descriptions of hero functions, which were then sorted by independent coders into 14 categories (e.g., instill hope, guide others). ⋯ In Study 3 (n = 242), participants rated heroes as more likely to fulfill a protecting function than either leaders or role models. In Studies 4A (n = 38) and 4B (n = 102), participants indicated that thinking about a hero (relative to a leader or an acquaintance) during psychological threat fulfilled personal enhancement, moral modeling, and protection needs. In all, these findings provide an empirical basis to spur additional research about the social and psychological functions that heroes offer.
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Frontiers in psychology · Jan 2015
Interoceptive fear learning to mild breathlessness as a laboratory model for unexpected panic attacks.
Fear learning is thought to play an important role in panic disorder. Benign interoceptive sensations can become predictors (conditioned stimuli - CSs) of massive fear when experienced in the context of an initial panic attack (unconditioned stimulus - US). The mere encounter of these CSs on a later moment can induce anxiety and fear, and precipitate a new panic attack. ⋯ Further analyses on a subgroup of CS-US unaware participants confirmed the presence of startle eyeblink conditioning in the experimental group but not in the control group. Our findings suggest that interoceptive fear learning is not dependent on declarative knowledge of the CS-US relationship. The present interoceptive fear conditioning paradigm may serve as an ecologically valid laboratory model for unexpected panic attacks.
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Frontiers in psychology · Jan 2015
In the moral eye of the beholder: the interactive effects of leader and follower moral identity on perceptions of ethical leadership and LMX quality.
Previous research indicated that leader moral identity (MI; i.e., leaders' self-definition in terms of moral attributes) predicts to what extent followers perceive their leader as ethical (i.e., demonstrating and promoting ethical conduct in the organization). Leadership, however, is a relational process that involves leaders and followers. ⋯ Perceptions of ethical leadership in turn predict how the quality of the relationship will be perceived. Hence, whether leader MI translates to perceptions of ethical leadership and of better relationship quality depends on the MI of followers.
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Frontiers in psychology · Jan 2015
Punctuation, Prosody, and Discourse: Afterthought Vs. Right Dislocation.
In a reading production experiment we investigate the impact of punctuation and discourse structure on the prosodic differentiation of right dislocation (RD) and afterthought (AT). Both discourse structure and punctuation are likely to affect the prosodic marking of these right-peripheral constructions, as certain prosodic markings are appropriate only in certain discourse structures, and punctuation is said to correlate with prosodic phrasing. With RD and AT clearly differing in discourse function (comment-topic structuring vs. disambiguation) and punctuation (comma vs. full stop), critical items in this study were manipulated with regard to the (mis-)match of these parameters. ⋯ Interestingly, for pitch range reduction no difference between RDs and ATs could be observed. Our results corroborate a language architecture model in which punctuation, prosody, syntax, and discourse-semantics are independent but interacting domains with correspondence constraints between them. Our findings suggest there are tight correspondence constraints between (i) punctuation (full stop and comma in particular) and syntax, (ii) prosody and syntax as well as (iii) prosody and discourse-semantics.