Psychology's Essential Role in Alleviating the Impacts of Climate Change

Psychologists have long been concerned with individuals' behaviour that contributes to climate change.1 In particular, environmental psychology, a child of 1960s idealism, was conceived to solve environment-related problems through scientific evidencebased research. Research on energy conservation and other environmental problems has been going on for 35 years (e.g., Buckhout, 1972; Pallak & Cummings, 1976; Seligman & Darley, 1977). Derived in part from Kurt Lewin' s mantra that nothi...

Investigating and Influencing How Buildings Affect Health: Interdisciplinary Endeavours

Noise exposure has been the focus of research attention for nearly 40 years, since the classic work by Glass and Singer (1972). Several studies have documented adverse effects of chronic noise exposure on children, including disrupted reading acquisition (Bronzaft & McCarthy, 1975; Evans & Maxwell, 1997), memory impairment (Hygge, Evans, & Bullinger, 2002), and physiological stress responses (Evans, Hygge, & Bullinger, 1995). Fortunately, these effects appear to be reversible:...

Sustainable Happiness: How Happiness Studies Can Contribute to a More Sustainable Future

Happiness is defined by Veenhoven (2008) as "the overall appreciation of one 's life-as-a-whole, in short, how much one likes the life one lives" (p. 2, itaUcs in original). Seligman's (2002) work on authentic happiness focuses on an enduring experience of happiness. Sustainable happiness is relevant to essentially every definition of happiness. As a demonstration, consider the momentary pleasure of drinking a cup of coffee. Benefits of attending to and being mindful of the experience have be...

Can Health Psychology Help the Planet? Applying Theory and Models of Health Behaviour to Environmental Actions

Other personality characteristics may promote healthy and proenvironmental behaviour. For example, conscientiousness is associated with health behaviours such as safer driving habits, better diet, and exercise (Booth-Kewley & Vickers, 1994). More conscientious, open, and future-thinking people report more proenvironmental attitudes and behaviour (Ebreo & Vining, 2001; Lindsay & Strathman, 1997; Nisbet, Zelenski, & Murphy, in press), and individual differences in connectedness ...

Environmental Psychology and Sustainability: Comments On Topics Important for Our Future

A first line of research that appears obvious to us concerns people's motivation for PEBs. Because people appear to be relatively inactive regarding the environmental situation and a sense of emergency is now fuelling the debate about the importance of doing something, proenvironmental groups, behavioural scientists, and to some extent governments are increasingly attempting to find ways to motivate people to stop and then reverse the degradation of environmental conditions. An important obse...

Transmission Intergénérationnelle Des Troubles Intériorisés : Modèles Théoriques Et Recherches Empiriques

Parmi les multiples caractéristiques psychosociales identifées dans les études épidémiologiques, la présence d'au moins un trouble intériorisé chez les parents semble jouer un rôle majeur dans le développement de ce même type de trouble chez les enfants et les adolescents ([Bergeron, L, Valla] et al., 2000; Bergeron, Valla & Gauthier, 2007; Bergeron et al., 2007; [Goodman] et al., 1998). L'une de ces études, l'Enquête québécoise sur la santé mentale des jeunes (EQSMJ), a été effectuée aup...

La Mesure Des Fonctions Exécutives Chez Les Enfants d'Âge Préscolaire

Les tests de flexibilité recensés seront classés sous la même rubrique, puisqu'une distinction telle que froide/chaude ne s'applique pas aussi clairement aux tests de flexibilité. Il faut toutefois mentionner à cet égard que certains auteurs tels que [Zelazo] et Müller (2002) considèrent que les épreuves de théorie de l'esprit (theory of mind) peuvent être considérées comme des mesures de flexibilité chaude. Les tests de théorie de l'esprit chez les enfants d'âge préscolaire demandent habitue...

Book Reviews - Comptes Rendus De Lecture

Aspects Neurologiques de L'Addiction

Tel qu'il a été mentionné précédemment, les chapitres consacrés aux différentes catégories de psychotropes comportent certaines limites. Ainsi, certains constats sur les traitements, principalement les approches psychologiques, ne reflètent pas les consensus scientifiques actuels. En voici quelques exemples. Dans le chapitre sur l'éthanol, l'auteur conclut que « pour ce qui concerne la psychothérapie et la pharmacothérapie, les preuves d'un bénéfice sont rares » (p. 478). Pourtant, ce constat...

Economics and Psychology: A Promising New Cross-Disciplinary Field

Chapter 6 (Layard) reviews research that shows how happiness is only related to wealth in countries with average income below $20,000. Several explanations are offered, including stimulus adaptation, social comparisons, and cultural norms, which seemed sketchy at best. A better understanding of current well-being research and social comparison theory may be needed. Some arguments were difficult to follow and might benefit from a better psychological explanation. For example, the author argues...

Making Up the Mind: How the Brain Creates Our Mental World

Following this introduction, the author develops a theoretical framework for understanding brain systems that would produce mental representations with the properties just described. For this purpose, he introduces the principle of learning by prediction and links it to Bayesian decision theory. He argues that many of the cognitive phenomena considered can be explained if it is assumed that the brain operates as an ideal Bayesian observer. This conceptualization directly builds on the notion ...

Cognition and Emotion: From Order to Disorder, Second Edition

My expectation at the outset was that Part 1 of the book would focus almost exclusively on contemporary cognitive and affective neuroscience accounts of emotion. However, Power and Dalgleish far exceeded my initial expectation with their concise yet rich review of philosophical accounts by Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Aquinas, and Spinoza (amongst others) in Chapter 2. In the same chapter, the authors also encourage the reader to contemplate eight questions about emotion. Examples include, "w...

Self-Help Approaches for Obesity and Eating Disorders: Research and Practice

There are four chapters in the section on partially assisted self-help. Chapter 3 relates to strategies for promoting and maintaining physical activity. Several excellent conceptual points that cut across content areas are described in this chapter. The authors stress the importance of having a theoretical basis for self-help programs so that interventions, presumed mechanisms, and expected outcomes are linked and internally consistent. They also note that much more work is needed to identify...

Attitudes: Their Structure, Function, and Consequences

Of course, no matter what is included in such a text; there will always be someone who can say a "key" reading is missing. Despite the difficulty of the task [Russell H. Fazio] and [Richard E. Petty] set for themselves, the result is a book that is appropriate for an authence ranging from the advanced undergraduate to the professional academic. Consistent with the editors' proven record of empirical research, they surveyed 13 leading attitudes researchers to help them determine the "essential...

Take Control of Your Drinking . . . And You May Not Need to Quit

Parts 3 and 4 outline two paths in the self-help materials. Moderation is addressed by creating a personal moderate drinking contract that specifies upper limits of frequency and quantity of drinking, along with acceptable and unacceptable situations for alcohol consumption. These materials are supplemented by a variety of practical and intuitive techniques (sipping drinks, delaying drinking, being alert to triggers and changes in drinking patterns, changing social contexts of alcohol use). A...

Feeling Pain and Being in Pain, 2nd Edition

The argument is quite simply based on the distinction captured in the title - namely, that between feeling pain and being in pain. [Nikola Grahek] describes two syndromes in human pain experience: one that he calls "pain without painfulness" and the other which consists of ''painfulness without pain." These two syndromes rely on the tide's distinction between "feeling" and "being" in pain, which Grahek wants to show as crucial to understanding the biological and psychological significance of ...