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Insomniacs were found to have compromised perception offacial expressions. Through eye movement examinations,here we test the hypothesis that this effect is due to impairedvisual attention functions for retrieving diagnostic features infacial expression judgments. 23 individuals with insomniasymptoms and 23 non-insomniac controls completed a task tocategorize happy, sad, fearful, and angry faces. Theinsomniacs were less accurate to recognize angry faces andmade more “fearful” mistakes than controls. A hiddenMarkov modeling approach for eye movement data analysisrevealed that when recognizing angry faces, more insomniacsadopted an eye movement pattern focusing on the mouthwhile more controls adopted a pattern attending to both theeyes and the mouth. This result is consistent with previousfindings that the primary diagnostic feature for recognizingangry faces is the eyes suggesting that impaired informationselection through visual attention control may account for thecompromised emotion perception in insomniac individuals.

How would religion and a life event carrying an existential threat (LEET) jointly impact a person's life goals of becoming wealthy and successful in one's career? Goal reprioritisation, socioemotional selectivity, and gerotranscendence theories predict a shift away from material goals following a LEET, independent of the effect of religion. However, terror management theory (TMT) predicts that the effect of death thoughts depends on one's prevailing cultural values. As religion can be regarded as a culture, it is possible that Christians' and non-believers' material life goals would be differentially altered by LEET. Data from 1259 young Chinese adults reveal no main effect of LEET, but a strong effect of religion. Moreover, there was an interaction effect between LEET and religion on material life goals: LEET weakened material goals for Christians but not for non-believers. These findings suggest that TMT is more suitable than the other theories for predicting life goal changes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

By the nature of the job, police officers are required to deal with conflicts frequently in work-related situations and, unquestionably, training of conflict management would benefit the work of policing. This study attempts to examine the effectiveness of a conflict management training (CMT) programme designed by the Psychological Services Group (PSG) for traffic police officers in Hong Kong, which used a train-the-trainer Model. Twenty-one officers trained by police clinical psychologists (PCP) were the primary level (PL) participants. They served as trainers for 211 fellow officers, constituting the secondary level (SL) participants. The training highlighted three major components: (1) heightening awareness of emotional reactions and CM approaches; (2) strengthening communication skills; and (3) enhancing anger management and emotional regulation. Outcome of the training was assessed using multi-measures, on which significant improvements were found using paired-sample t-tests, except for one measure of supervisors' ratings. Three-month and six-month follow-up assessments demonstrated maintenance of the training effects on self-efficacy. Findings of this study show that psychological knowledge can be utilised in law enforcement operations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]