Reviews the book, Dream Life: An Experimental Memoir by J. Allan Hobson (2011). This book is not an autobiography written in a typical way; it is a mixture of private stories, facts about the author’s professional life, and theories that Allan developed over the years. This review focuses mostly on Allan’s scientific career and the implications of his theories in neurophysiology. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)

Reports an error in "On the perpetuation of ignorance: System dependence, system justification, and the motivated avoidance of sociopolitical information" by Steven Shepherd and Aaron C. Kay ( Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , Advanced Online Publication, Nov 7, 2011, np). Due to a production error, the article was published with the images omitted from Appendix A. All versions of this article have been corrected. (The following abstract of the original article appeared in record 2011-25736-001.) How do people cope when they feel uninformed or unable to understand important social issues, such as the environment, energy concerns, or the economy? Do they seek out information, or do they simply ignore the threatening issue at hand? One would intuitively expect that a lack of knowledge would motivate an increased, unbiased search for information, thereby facilitating participation and engagement in these issues—especially when they are consequential, pressing, and self-relevant. However, there appears to be a discrepancy between the importance/self-relevance of social issues and people's willingness to engage with and learn about them. Leveraging the literature on system justification theory (Jost & Banaji, 1994), the authors hypothesized that, rather than motivating an increased search for information, a lack of knowledge about a specific sociopolitical issue will (a) foster feelings of dependence on the government, which will (b) increase system justification and government trust, which will (c) increase desires to avoid learning about the relevant issue when information is negative or when information valence is unknown. In other words, the authors suggest that ignorance—as a function of the system justifying tendencies it may activate—may, ironically, breed more ignorance. In the contexts of energy, environmental, and economic issues, the authors present 5 studies that (a) provide evidence for this specific psychological chain (i.e., ignorance about an issue → dependence → government trust → avoidance of information about that issue); (b) shed light on the role of threat and motivation in driving the second and third links in this chain; and (c) illustrate the unfortunate consequences of this process for individual action in those contexts that may need it most. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)

Although the understanding of the development of infants' social cognition and cooperative reasoning has progressed significantly, to date, it has yet to be worked through in any detail how this knowledge interacts with and constrains emerging syntactic representations. This review is a step in that direction, aiming to offer a more integrated account of the learning mechanisms that support linguistic generalizations. First, I review the developmental literature that suggests social–cognitive foundations get linguistic constructions “off the ground.” Second, I focus on building layers of abstractions on top of this foundation and the kind of cognitive processes that are involved. Crucially important in this explanation will be the fact that humans possess a unique set of social–cognitive and social motivational-skills that allows language to happen. Furthermore, early linguistic categories are formed around the underlying functional core of concepts and on the basis of their communicative discourse function. This, combined with powerful pattern-detection skills, enables distributional regularities in the input to be paired with what the speakers intend to communicate. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)

Stigma by association represents the process through which the companions of stigmatized persons are discredited. Conduits for stigma by association range from the strong and enduring bonds of kinship to the arbitrary occasions of being seen in the company of someone who is stigmatized. A theoretical model is proposed in which both deliberative and spontaneous processes result in the spread of stigma to the companions of stigmatized persons. Support for this model was found across 3 studies that examined how explicit and implicit stigma-relevant attitudes moderate stigma-by-association effects. When social relationships were meaningful (e.g., kinship), both explicit and implicit attitudes moderated the devaluation of stigmatized persons' companions. On the other hand, when social relationships appeared coincidental only implicit attitudes moderated companion devaluation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)

This research program explored how the positivity of people's memories of their past personal attributes is influenced by their desire to cope with negative mood states. The studies tested the hypothesis that beliefs and motives regarding the stability of personality will determine whether people idealize or derogate their earlier attributes in an attempt to repair distressing feelings. When knowledge structures or motives implying personal change are activated, people should derogate their past selves in response to negative moods; in contrast, when these factors imply personal stability, people should idealize their past selves in response to negative moods. Studies 1–3, which assessed the impact of mood negativity (neutral vs. negative) and theories (or motives) regarding personal change (change vs. stability) on the positivity of people's memories of their past attributes, supported this reasoning. Study 4 extended these findings by examining how an underlying mediating variable—mood-repair motivation—guides the effect of negative moods on recall of past selves. Implications of the results for research on temporal comparison, mood-congruent recall, and posttraumatic growth are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)

[Correction Notice: An erratum for this article was reported in Vol 102(2) of Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (see record 2011-28190-001). Due to a production error, the article was published with the images omitted from Appendix A. All versions of this article have been corrected.] How do people cope when they feel uninformed or unable to understand important social issues, such as the environment, energy concerns, or the economy? Do they seek out information, or do they simply ignore the threatening issue at hand? One would intuitively expect that a lack of knowledge would motivate an increased, unbiased search for information, thereby facilitating participation and engagement in these issues—especially when they are consequential, pressing, and self-relevant. However, there appears to be a discrepancy between the importance/self-relevance of social issues and people's willingness to engage with and learn about them. Leveraging the literature on system justification theory (Jost & Banaji, 1994), the authors hypothesized that, rather than motivating an increased search for information, a lack of knowledge about a specific sociopolitical issue will (a) foster feelings of dependence on the government, which will (b) increase system justification and government trust, which will (c) increase desires to avoid learning about the relevant issue when information is negative or when information valence is unknown. In other words, the authors suggest that ignorance—as a function of the system justifying tendencies it may activate—may, ironically, breed more ignorance. In the contexts of energy, environmental, and economic issues, the authors present 5 studies that (a) provide evidence for this specific psychological chain (i.e., ignorance about an issue → dependence → government trust → avoidance of information about that issue); (b) shed light on the role of threat and motivation in driving the second and third links in this chain; and (c) illustrate the unfortunate consequences of this process for individual action in those contexts that may need it most. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)

As a contribution to the ongoing debate over the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM)-5, we present a framework for jointly conceptualizing personality and personality pathology. The key element is an explicit distinction between personality description (which is the realm of basic personality psychology) and personality evaluation (which is the realm of clinical personality psychology). Previous diagnostic systems did not acknowledge this crucial distinction. We created a sample diagnostic system, to illustrate how a practical application of our conceptual framework may look like. The system comprises two ingredients: First, a list of personality dispositions that may become problematic. These are described at a “basic level” of abstraction (i.e., the level at which patients and clinicians intuitively communicate about personality problems). Second, a list of negative consequences that are used to evaluate the extent to which a patient's personality pattern is “problematic.” A sample of therapists used the system for describing actual patients and found it to be better than the International Classification of Diseases (ICD)-10 and DSM–IV. Based on our conceptual deliberations, we analyze the DSM-5 proposal for personality and personality disorders. The proposal contains three different sets of “higher-order concepts” (personality traits, personality types, and levels of personality functioning). Only the first of these is sufficiently supported by empirical evidence, including analyses of our own set of personality dispositions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)

In recent years, the topic of intuition has become an important focus of attention in psychology. It is often assumed to be a unitary construct; however, recent research suggests that intuition is multifaceted. This article disaggregates intuition by discriminating between domain-general mechanisms and domain-specific processes of intuiting and primary types of intuition and secondary types of intuition. The theoretical relationships between and within processes and types are examined and analyzed at behavioral and information processing levels, noting the importance in advances in social cognition research. As a result of this analysis, we provide a conceptual framework that connects intuitive processes and outcomes. The article concludes by outlining some of the implications of the framework and in particular highlights future methodological challenges faced by intuition researchers in laboratory and organizational field settings. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)

The Vygotskyan sociocultural approach to human development and cognition marked a new direction in psychology and created new, distinctive avenues for exploring fundamental matters of the mind. The complexity, diversity, and multilayered meaning of Vygotsky's formulations have in the history of psychology triggered scholastic debate, which has focused on the clarification, implications, and extension of the core explanatory constructs of his framework—mediation and internalization. The aim of this review is to offer a contemporary logico-semantic rereading of Vygotsky's formulations of these constructs with an emphasis on speech and, in particular, its dual mediatory role as a primary mediational means and a mediating process. Vygotsky's less renowned, and rather incomplete, propositions on the types of internalization are revived and examined in relation to the ontogenetic formation of speech. In this critical analysis, some ambiguous conceptual links between the notion of internalization types and the transformation of social speech into private speech and inner speech are explicated, debated, and refined. By addressing these conceptual links, the present examination extends the sociocultural account of semiotic mediation. The interpretations proposed highlight the logical cohesion and enhance the comprehensibility of Vygotsky's theoretical stance on human development. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)

Within American psychology, there has been a recent surge of interest in self-compassion, a construct from Buddhist thought. Self-compassion entails: (a) being kind and understanding toward oneself in times of pain or failure, (b) perceiving one's own suffering as part of a larger human experience, and (c) holding painful feelings and thoughts in mindful awareness. In this article we review findings from personality, social, and clinical psychology related to self-compassion. First, we define self-compassion and distinguish it from other self-constructs such as self-esteem, self-pity, and self-criticism. Next, we review empirical work on the correlates of self-compassion, demonstrating that self-compassion has consistently been found to be related to well-being. These findings support the call for interventions that can raise self-compassion. We then review the theory and empirical support behind current interventions that could enhance self-compassion including compassionate mind training (CMT), imagery work, the gestalt two-chair technique, mindfulness based stress reduction (MBSR), dialectical behavior therapy (DBT), and acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT). Directions for future research are also discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)

Over time, the problem solving paradigm has been widely used in different disciplines, as logic, methodology, economics, and psychology. Most of its applications referred to one's ability in dealing with an external situation. In dreams, the whole representation is generally used to trace inner emotional and relational meanings. Besides, the dream content develops into a narrative plot, in which the dreamer faces all kind of events. Applying the problem solving theory to the analysis of the dream content means to read it as a “drama” in order to assess how a central issue is brought to a solution. A specific grid has been used to study “Oneiric Problem Solving” in all dreams reported by a patient during three years of psychotherapy. Results are presented. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)

Soldiers who play video games to varying degrees were solicited to fill out a survey on dreams and gaming. A prescreening filtered out those who were not soldiers, who did not game, and who were suffering from various psychological problems in the last six months. The remaining soldiers filled out these inventories: general and military demographics, history of video game play, Emotional Reactivity and Numbing Scale (ERNS), and a Trauma Inventory. They were then asked to provide two dreams, one recent and one that was impactful from their military service. Following the military dream they filled out Impactful Dreams Questionnaire (IDQ) about that dream only. Dream content analysis was conducted using threat simulation, war content, and lucid/control/gaming content. High- and low-end frequency gamer groups were identified and compared on these dream content scales. Because the nightmare literature shows that affect load and distress are predictors of nightmare suffering, ERNS and Trauma history were covariates in the ANCOVA's on gamer group × dream type. It was found that the high-end gaming group exhibited less threat and war content in their military dreams than the low-end group. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)

Previous research has established that experiential purchases tend to yield greater enduring satisfaction than material purchases. The present work suggests that this difference in satisfaction is paralleled by a tendency for material and experiential purchases to differ in the types of regrets they elicit. In 5 studies, we find that people's material purchase decisions are more likely to generate regrets of action (buyer's remorse) and their experiential purchase decisions are more likely to lead to regrets of inaction (missed opportunities). These results were not attributable to differences in the desirability of or satisfaction provided by the two purchase types. Demonstrating the robustness of this effect, we found that focusing participants on the material versus experiential properties of the very same purchase was enough to shift its dominant type of regret. This pattern of regret is driven by the tendency for experiences to be seen as more singular—less interchangeable—than material purchases; interchangeable goods tend to yield regrets of action, whereas singular goods tend to yield regrets of inaction. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)

This study extended previous research by exploring Canadian male university students because only the dreams of females had been previously assessed. Dream content and discovery passages were scored using the Hall and Van de Castle (1966) content analysis guidelines. Discovery was assessed via The Storytelling Method of dream interpretation. Thirty-nine male students provided one dream each. Content categories, discovery categories, and content and discovery categories together were analyzed for significant relationships. Regression analyses predicting discovery categories from dream content were also conducted. Findings were representative of the sample of male students, with a mean age of 23.67 (SD = 5.36), support the continuity hypothesis, and were consistent with previous research on the dreams of males and students with some notable exceptions. The predictive value of dreams is evident from the results of the regression analyses, which show significant relations between specific content categories and discovery categories. Significant correlations were found among content and discovery categories and the predictions. For examples, anger in dream content significantly predicts learning something about anger in waking day. Limitations and directions for future research are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)