Experiments revealing 'spontaneous' visual perspective-taking are conventionally interpreted as demonstrating that adults have the capacity to track simple mental states in a fast and efficient manner ('implicit mentalising'). A rival account suggests that these experiments can be explained by the general purpose mechanisms responsible for reflexive attentional orienting. Here, we report two experiments designed to distinguish between these competing accounts. In Experiment 1, we assessed whether reflexive attention orienting was sufficient to yield findings interpreted as spontaneous perspective-taking in the 'avatar task' when the protocol was adapted so that participants were unaware that they were taking part in a perspective-taking experiment. Results revealed no evidence for perspective-taking. In Experiment 2, we employed a Posner paradigm to investigate the attentional orienting properties of the avatar stimuli. This revealed cue-validity effects only for longer stimulus onset asynchronies, which indicates a voluntary rather than reflexive shift in spatial attention. Taken together, these findings suggest that attentional orienting does indeed contribute to performance in the Samson et al. avatar task. However, attention orienting appears to be voluntary rather than reflexive, indicating that the perspective-taking phenomenon measured may be less spontaneous than first reported.
Previous studies have reported reliable associations between personality and music preferences, but have tended to rely on cross-genre preferences at the expense of preferences within a single subgenre. We sought to overcome this limitation by examining associations between individual differences and preferences for a specific subgenre of music, namely, contemporary heavy metal. A total of 414 individuals from Britain were presented with clips of 10 tracks of contemporary heavy metal and asked to rate each for liking. Participants also completed measures of the Big Five personality traits, attitudes toward authority, self-esteem, need for uniqueness, and religiosity. A multiple regression showed that stronger composite preference for the heavy metal tracks was associated with higher Openness to Experience, more negative attitudes toward authority, lower self-esteem, greater need for uniqueness, and lower religiosity. In addition, men showed a significantly stronger preference for the tracks than women (d = 0.54). These results are discussed in terms of the psychological needs that contemporary heavy metal fills for some individuals.
Previous studies have reported equivocal findings concerning the impact of wearing a hijab, or Islamic head- and body-cover, on Muslim women's body image. Here, we sought to examine that impact using a larger sample of Muslim women than has been relied upon and a wider range of body image measures. A total of 587 British Muslim women completed a battery of scales assessing their frequency and conservativeness of hijab use, body image variables, attitudes towards the media and beauty ideals, importance of appearance, and religiosity. Preliminary results indicated that 218 women never used the hijab and 369 women used some form of the hijab at least rarely. Controlling for religiosity, women who wore the hijab had more positive body image, lower internalization of media messages about beauty standards, and placed less importance on appearance than women who did not wear the hijab. Among women who wore the hijab, hijab use significantly predicted weight discrepancy and body appreciation over and above religiosity. These results are discussed in terms of the possible protective impact among British Muslim women of wearing the hijab.
Self-inflicted deaths in prisons in England and Wales were at a 10-year low in 2006 but rose in 2007, largely attributed to an unexpected increase in self-inflicted deaths by foreign national (FN) prisoners. All deaths were reviewed in detail using prison and clinical records and interviews with prison staff. This paper reports findings for the deaths of the 20 FN prisoners from non-EU countries. Similarities were found between these deaths and self-inflicted deaths of UK nationals in terms of method, location of death, index offence, and prevalence of mental illness. Additional factors found in the FNs included early anxiety, trauma symptoms in refugees from conflict, language issues, deportation fears, and cultural concepts of shame. These findings are discussed in relation to the entrapment model of suicide and the need for specialised mental health service provision.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.