Couple disagreement: Inevitable and healthy? Belgian and Japanese conceptions

“Couples who argue together, stay together” is a popular English saying suggesting the necessity of disagreement for a healthy and stable romantic relationship. The present study explores whether Belgian and Japanese participants similarly view couple disagreement as a necessity, and whether conceptions of disagreement have implications for partners' ideas of how to deal with disagreement. We conducted four focus groups in each culture and analyzed them using thematic analysis. The findings suggested that Belgian participants thought that partners' needs unavoidably clash. They thus saw disagreement as inevitable. In contrast, Japanese participants thought of disagreement as avoidable. To avoid disagreement, they reported that they adjusted to and accepted the differences of their partner. Consistent with these respective conceptions of disagreement, Belgian participants highlighted the importance of addressing disagreement through open communication, while Japanese participants reported to frequently engage in indirect forms of communication such as mindreading. The differences in Belgian and Japanese conceptions of disagreement reflect different cultural notions of a healthy relationship, with Belgian partners valuing independence and Japanese emphasizing interdependence in the relationship. We discuss the implications of existing research on couple disagreement, which often starts from assumptions closer to the English saying and the Belgian conceptions of disagreement.     

What ugly and beautiful photographs reveal about COVID-19 lockdown experiences,everyday aesthetics and photography aesthetics

Against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic, which restricted our daily (visual) experiences, we asked people to take an ugly and beautiful photograph from within their homes. In total, 284 photographs (142 ugly and 142 beautiful) and accompanying statements were submitted and brought to light an intimate portrait of how participants were experiencing their (lockdown) home environment. Results revealed an aesthetic preference for (living) nature. Beauty and ugliness were also connected to good versus bad views, mess versus cosiness, unflattering versus flattering portraits and positive versus negative (COVID-19) emotions. In terms of photography strategies, editing and colour were important for beautiful photographs, whereas a lack of effort and sharpness showed up relatively more in ugly photographs. A follow-up study revealed that other viewers' (n = 86) aesthetic judgements of the photographs were largely in line with the original submissions, and confirmed several of the themes. Overall, our study provides a unique photographic window on our everyday aesthetic experiences at home during the COVID-19 lockdown.     

Perceived physical and social causality in animated motions: spontaneous reports and ratings

Michotte argued that we perceive cause-and-effect, without contributions from reasoning or learning, even in displays of two-dimensional moving shapes. Two studies extend this line of work from perception of mechanical to social causality. We compared verbal reports with structured ratings of causality to gain a better understanding of the extent to which perceptual causality occurs spontaneously or depends on instruction or context. A total of 120 adult observers (72 in the main experiment, 48 in an initial experiment) saw 12 (or 8) different computer animations of shape A moving up to B, which in turn moved away. Animations factorially varied the temporal and spatial relations of the shapes, and whether they moved rigidly or in a non-rigid, animal-like manner. Impressions of social as well as physical causality appeared in both free reports and ratings. Perception of physical causality was stronger than perception of social causality, particularly in free reports. No differences of this nature appear in infants and children, so the asymmetry may reflect learnt knowledge. Physical causality was relatively unspecific initially, but discrimination of causal and delayed control events improved with exposure to multiple events. Experience seems to affect the causal illusion even over a short timeframe; the idea of 'one-trial causality' may be somewhat misleading. Regardless of such effects on the absolute level of responses, the different measures showed similar patterns of variation with the spatio-temporal configuration and type of motion. The good fit of ratings and reports validates much recent work in this area.     

Muscimol diffusion after intracerebral microinjections: a reevaluation based on electrophysiological and autoradiographic quantifications

Intracerebral muscimol injection is widely used to inactivate discrete brain structures during behavioral tasks. However, little effort has been made to quantify the extent of muscimol diffusion. The authors report here electrophysiological and autoradiographic results obtained after muscimol injection (1 microg/microl) either into the nucleus basalis magnocellularis (0.1-0.4 microl) or into the thalamic reticular nucleus (RE, 0.05-0.1 microl). In 52 rats, multiunit recordings were collected either in the RE or in the auditory thalamus during the 2 h following muscimol injection. Decreases in neuronal activity were observed up to 3 mm from the injection site; their time of occurrence was a function of the distance between the injection and recording sites. Because these decreases cannot be explained by physiological effects, they likely reflected muscimol diffusion up to the recording sites. Autoradiographic studies involved 25 rats and different experimental conditions. Optical density (OD) measures indicated that after a survival time of 15 min, a 0.05 microl injection produced a labeled area of 5.25 mm(2) at the injection site and a rostrocaudal labeling of 1.7 mm. Increasing the survival time to 60 min, or increasing the injected volume to 0.1 microl, systematically led to a larger labeled area at the injection site (8-12 mm(2)) and to a larger rostrocaudal diffusion (2.0-2.5 mm). Direct quantifications of radioactivity by a high-resolution radioimager validated the OD measures and even indicated a larger muscimol diffusion (up to 3.25 mm). Thus, these data point out that muscimol diffusion after intracerebral microinjection is larger than usually supposed. The relationships between these results and those obtained in behavioral studies are discussed.     

The timing of appraisals

The appraisal process consists of the subjective evaluation that occurs during an individual's encounter with significant events in the environment, determining the nature of the emotional reaction and experience. Placed in the context of appraisal theories of emotion-elicitation and differentiation, the aim of the present research was to test empirically the hypothesis that the intrinsic pleasantness evaluation occurs before the goal conduciveness evaluation. In two studies, intrinsically pleasant and unpleasant images were used to manipulate pleasantness, and a specific event in a Pacman-type videogame was used to manipulate goal conduciveness. Facial EMG was used to measure facial reactions to each evaluation. As predicted, facial reactions to the intrinsic pleasantness manipulation were faster than facial reactions to the goal conduciveness manipulation. These results provide good empirical support for the sequential nature of the appraisal process.     

Differential effects of age-of-acquisition for concrete nouns and action verbs: evidence for partly distinct representations?

There is growing evidence that words that are acquired early in life are processed faster and more accurately than words acquired later, even by adults. As neuropsychological and neuroimaging studies have implicated different brain networks in the processing of action verbs and concrete nouns, the present study was aimed at contrasting reaction times to early and later-acquired action verbs and concrete nouns, in order to determine whether effects of word learning age express differently for the two types of words. Our results show that while word frequency affected both types of words in the same way, distinct learning age effects were observed for action verbs and concrete nouns. A further experiment specified that this difference was observed for verbs describing actions belonging to the human motor repertoire, but not for verbs denoting actions past this repertoire (e.g., to neigh). We interpret these data within a recently emerging framework according to which language processing is associated with sensory motor programs.     

Emotional responses in spider fear are closely related to picture awareness

Theories of emotion propose that responses to emotional pictures can occur independently of whether or not people are aware of the picture content. Because evidence from dissociation paradigms is inconclusive, we manipulated picture awareness gradually and studied whether emotional responses varied with degree of awareness. Spider fearful and non-fearful participants viewed pictures of spiders and flowers at four levels of backward masking while electrodermal activity and heart rate were measured continuously. Recognition ratings confirmed that participants’ picture awareness decreased with masking. Critically, effects of spider fear on emotion ratings and heart rate also decreased with masking. These findings suggest that effects of spider fear on emotion ratings and heart rate are closely related to picture awareness.     

Values and Justice as Predictors of Perceived Stress in Lebanese Organisational Settings

Research investigating predictors of stress perceptions in organisational settings has been extensive. Value incongruence between employees and the organisation as well as organisational justice (distributive, procedural, informational, and interpersonal) are thought to be significant predictors of organisational outcomes. The current study investigated value incongruence and organisational justice as predictors of perceived stress in a sample of 362 organisational employees in Beirut, Lebanon. Results indicated that incongruence on value types of benevolence, power, and self‐direction are weakly predictive of perceived stress, while perceptions of interpersonal and distributive injustice are strongly predictive of perceived stress in the Lebanese organisational context. Implications of these differential findings for organisational and cross‐cultural research are discussed. Nombreuses ont été les recherches sur les prédicteurs du vécu du stress dans les organisations. La contradiction des valeurs des salariés et de l'organisation ainsi que la justice organisationnelle (distributive, procédurale, informationnelle et interpersonnelle) sont considérées comme étant des prédicteurs efficaces des réalités organisationnelles. Ce travail porte sur l'incohérence des valeurs et la justice organisationnelle en tant que prédicteurs du stress ressenti dans un échantillon de 362 salariés de Beyrouth (Liban). Les résultats montrent que des contradictions sur des valeurs comme la bienveillance, le pouvoir et l'autonomie sont peu prédictives du stress perçu, tandis que la perception des injustices interpersonnelle et distributive est fortement prédictive du stress ressenti dans le contexte organisationnel libanais. On discute des retombées de ces résultats différentiels sur les travaux organisationnels et transculturels.     

Incongruent object/context relationships in visual scenes: Where are they processed in the brain?

Rapid object visual categorization in briefly flashed natural scenes is influenced by the surrounding context. The neural correlates underlying reduced categorization performance in response to incongruent object/context associations remain unclear and were investigated in the present study using fMRI. Participants were instructed to categorize objects in briefly presented scenes (exposure duration = 100 ms). Half of the scenes consisted of objects pasted in an expected (congruent) context, whereas for the other half, objects were embedded in incongruent contexts. Object categorization was more accurate and faster in congruent relative to incongruent scenes. Moreover, we found that the two types of scenes elicited different patterns of cerebral activation. In particular, the processing of incongruent scenes induced increased activations in the parahippocampal cortex, as well as in the right frontal cortex. This higher activity may indicate additional neural processing of the novel (non experienced) contextual associations that were inherent to the incongruent scenes. Moreover, our results suggest that the locus of object categorization impairment due to contextual incongruence is in the right anterior parahippocampal cortex. Indeed in this region activity was correlated with the reaction time increase observed with incongruent scenes. Representations for associations between objects and their usual context of appearance might be encoded in the right anterior parahippocampal cortex.     

Salience Not Status: How Category Labels Influence Feature Inference

Two main uses of categories are classification and feature inference, and category labels have been widely shown to play a dominant role in feature inference. However, the nature of this influence remains unclear, and we evaluate two contrasting hypotheses formalized as mathematical models: the label special‐mechanism hypothesis and the label super‐salience hypothesis. The special‐mechanism hypothesis is that category labels, unlike other features, trigger inference decision making in reference to the category prototypes. This results in a tendency for prototype‐compatible inferences because the labels trigger a special mechanism rather than because of any influences they have on similarity evaluation. The super‐salience hypothesis assumes that the large label influence is due to their high salience and corresponding impact on similarity without any need for a special mechanism. Application of the two models to a feature inference task based on a family resemblance category structure yields strong support for the label super‐salience hypothesis and in particular does not support the need for a special mechanism based on prototypes.