Arousal,positive and negative affect,and preference for Renaissance and 20th-century paintings

Treatments expected to raise the level of arousal and induce different degrees of positive and negative affect were paired on some trials with Renaissance or 20th-century paintings, whereas no paintings were shown on other trials. The design was within-subjects (24 females); the dependent measures were skin conductance (SC) and the preference for paintings. All treatments, including the paintings/no paintings factor, raised SC over the base-line, and the pattern was essentially additive. The perceived failure to attain control over aversive auditory stimulation (resulting in negative affect) raised SC to a higher level than did the unavoidable aversive stimulation (minimal affect) or monetary gains (positive affect). Paintings paired with affect (positiveor negative) were rated as more pleasing than were those paired with no affect. The Renaissance works were preferred to the 20th-century works when negative affect was induced, whereas the opposite was true in the case of positive affect. The collative-motivation model could not account for the fact that pleasingness of paintings was not related to SC by an inverted-U function. The contiguity model could not explain the considerable rated pleasingness of paintings paired with negative affect. In contrast, there was considerable support for a more comprehensive hypothesis (distraction/soothingness) based on attentional and affective considerations, and the differential cognitive labeling of fluctuations of arousal.This research was supported by Grant GS-42802 from the National Science Foundation to VJK. Some of the findings were presented at the 6th International Colloquium of Empirical Aesthetics, and the 21st International Congress of Psychology, both held during July 1976 in Paris, France.     

The concept of personality in 19th-century French and 20th-century American psychology

Since the 1920s, the road to the acknowledgement of personality psychology as a field of scientific psychology that has individuality as its object began with the founding of the discipline by Gordon W. Allport. Historians of psychology have made serious attempts to reconstruct the cultural, political, institutional, and chronological beginnings of this field in America in the 20th century. In this literature, however, an important European tradition of psychological studies of personality that developed in France in the 2nd half of the 19th century has been overlooked. The aim of this article is to cast some light on this unexplored tradition of psychological personality studies and to discuss its influence on the development of the scientific study of personality in the United States.     

Covert detection of attractiveness among the neurologically intact: evidence from skin-conductance responses

Several studies have shown that participants, without a deficit in face recognition, give an increased skin conductance response (SCR) to familiar faces when presented subliminally, hence suggesting covert recognition of these faces. In the experiment presented here we manipulated familiarity and attractiveness and tested whether participants distinguished between faces for these variables when presented too fast to allow conscious recognition. Three sets of faces were presented: famous attractive; unfamiliar attractive; and unfamiliar less attractive. SCRs were the same for each category of faces whether presented subliminally or supraliminally, and were the same for attractive faces, whether famous or unfamiliar; however, SCRs differed between the attractive and less attractive faces. The findings support those of Stone et al (2001 Cognitive, Affective and Behavioral Neuroscience 1 183-191) and suggest that higher SCRs to famous faces are not necessarily due to covert recognition, but may be a response to the positive affective valence of the stimuli.     

The effects of verbal labelling on psychophysiology: Objective but not subjective emotion labelling reduces skin-conductance responses to briefly presented pictures

Verbally labelling emotional stimuli has been shown to reliably decrease emotional responding. The present study compared the use of identical emotional labels during two types of verbal labelling: subjective labelling of one's own emotional response and objective labelling of the stimulus. We recorded skin conductance responses (SCRs) to emotional pictures presented at four brief durations preceding a backward mask. We observed that as the exposure duration increased, SCRs decreased during objective labelling of the stimuli. However, when participants subjectively labelled their own emotional state, SCRs increased as exposure duration increased. In addition, subjective labelling produced larger SCRs than objective labelling at a shorter exposure duration when the presented stimuli were biologically prepared. These results indicate that only objective labelling results in decreased emotional responding, and describe a novel interaction between bottom-up stimulus characteristics and top-down cognitive effects on physiological responses.     

Evaluative priming of naming and semantic categorization responses revisited: a mutual facilitation explanation

The evaluative priming effect (i.e., faster target responses following evaluatively congruent compared with evaluatively incongruent primes) in nonevaluative priming tasks (such as naming or semantic categorization tasks) is considered important for the question of how evaluative connotations are represented in memory. However, the empirical evidence is rather ambiguous: Positive effects as well as null results and negatively signed effects have been found. We tested the assumption that different processes are responsible for these results. In particular, we argue that positive effects are due to target-encoding facilitation (caused by a congruent prime), while negative effects are due to prime-activation maintenance (caused by a congruent target) and subsequent response conflict. In 4 experiments, we used a negative prime-target stimulus-onset asynchrony (SOA) to minimize target-encoding facilitation and maximize prime maintenance. In a naming task (Experiment 1), we found a negatively signed evaluative priming effect if prime and target competed for naming responses. In a semantic categorization task (i.e., person vs. animal; Experiments 2 and 3), response conflicts between prime and target were significantly larger in case of evaluative congruence compared with incongruence. These results corroborate the theory that a prime has more potential to interfere with the target response if its activation is maintained by an evaluatively congruent target. Experiment 4a/b indicated valence specificity of the effect. Implications for the memory representation of valence are discussed.     

Reactions to Interpersonal Evaluative Feedback1

Self-enhancement approaches to self-concept provide a perspective for identifying motivational factors likely to be affected by interpersonal evaluative feedback. The main hypothesies were that in contrast to positive feedback, negative feedback would lead to higher self-esteem, lower perceptions of task importance, and lower perceptions of control over an evaluator's reactions. Students received a lesson on solving analogies from a teacher (confederate), and then took a test on analogies. After reviewing the student's test, the teacher conveyed either positive feedback, negative feedback, or no feedback. Consistent with a self-enhancement perspective, recipients of negative feedback increased their global self-esteem, placed less importance on succeeding at the task, and felt less control over the teachers' reactions. Implications for understanding the role of interpersonal evaluative feedback in motivation and self-esteem, and self-enhancing responses to threats more generally are discussed.     

Effort is virtuous,but it's better to have ability: Evaluative responses to perceptions of effort and ability

Evaluative responses to imagined task outcomes were found to depend on the question asked, as well as on perceptions of effort and ability. When university students were asked when they would experience pride or shame, they indicated effort would increase pride over success and reduce shame over failure. On the other hand, when asked what type of person they would like to be they chose high ability regardless of outcome. This modified Weiner's (1972) statement of the relation of causal attributions and affective expression. Individual differences in responses to these questions related to differences in self-concept of ability. This result suggested extensions of the attributional analysis of achievement motivation.     

Emotional and Physiological Responses to Social‐Evaluative Threat

Social‐evaluative threat has been theorized to elicit coordinated psychological and physiological responses, including increases in self‐conscious emotions as well as increases in cortisol and proinflammatory cytokine activity. Acute laboratory stressors with social‐evaluative threat have triggered robust increases in cortisol, whereas equivalent laboratory stressors without this explicit social‐evaluative component have not elicited changes in this physiological parameter. Participants who have reported the greatest increases in self‐conscious emotions have also shown the greatest increases in cortisol activity, suggesting that these physiological changes may occur in concert with self‐conscious states. Other work has shown that social‐evaluative threat and accompanying self‐conscious emotions can influence immune parameters associated with inflammation. These findings have implications for a number of areas of research within social and personality psychology.     

Verbal responses of male college students to human figure paintings varying in collative properties, perceived sexuality, and perceived aggression

20 male undergraduates rated 60 human figure paintings on verbal scales to index collative variability (e.g., simple-complex), perceived sexuality, and perceived aggression in the stimuli. Regression equations were used to predict epistemic (interest) and diversive (pleasingness) responses to the paintings. Collative variability predicted diversive but not epistemic appreciation. Perceived aggression was the strongest predictor for both types of aesthetic reaction. Perceived sexuality was most strongly related to diversive appreciation. Both linear and nonlinear functions emerged and these were discussed in terms of consistency with Berlyne's 1971 theory of aesthetics.     

The (sexual) politics of evolution: popular controversy in the late 20th-century United Kingdom

This article outlines the major threads of controversy around the emerging subject of evolutionary psychology in the U.K. mass media during the 1990s. Much of this controversy centered on the role of evolution in shaping human gender roles and sexualities, contributing to the subject's mass appeal. This case is used to illustrate the argument that in theorizing about evolution and humans, "human nature" and "human origins" both provide a flexible resource for making arguments about how people do and should relate to one another and that such theorizing is therefore reflective of how power is held (and contested) in society. In the case of popular evolutionary psychology, shifts in the U.K. political landscape during the 1990s combined with changes in gender and sexual politics to create a situation where evolutionary theorizing about humans became more acceptable than it had been in the past. This was particularly true in left-liberal media, where a newfound compatibility between certain aspects of Darwinism and feminism created a very different space for debating gender, sexuality, and the role of human nature in today's society.     

The independent roles of diet and serum lipids in the 20th-century rise and decline of coronary heart disease mortality

Risk factors are causally related to coronary heart disease (CHD), but in widely varying historic, geographic, socioeconomic, and individual relationships. Serum cholesterol is only one of many risk factors that, even when considered together in prospective studies, account for well under half of the CHD incidence. It is neither primarily regulated by the diet nor significantly related to it. Many findings discordant with widespread beliefs about a causal role of the diet in CHD are reviewed. It may be concluded that dietary fats are largely not responsible for relationships of serum cholesterol to CHD, or for its 20th-century rise and decline.     

Contextual Variation in Automatic Evaluative Bias to Racially-Ambiguous Faces

Three studies examined the implicit evaluative associations activated by racially-ambiguous Black-White faces. In the context of both Black and White faces, Study 1 revealed a graded pattern of bias against racially-ambiguous faces that was weaker than the bias to Black faces but stronger than that to White faces. Study 2 showed that significant bias was present when racially-ambiguous faces appeared in the context of only White faces, but not in the context of only Black faces. Study 3 demonstrated that context produces perceptual contrast effects on racial-prototypicality judgments. Racially-ambiguous faces were perceived as more prototypically Black in a White-only than mixed-race context, and less prototypically Black in a Black-only context. Conversely, they were seen as more prototypically White in a Black-only than mixed context, and less prototypically White in a White-only context. The studies suggest that both race-related featural properties within a face (i.e., racial ambiguity) and external contextual factors affect automatic evaluative associations.     

Differences in reactions to paintings by male and female college students

38 male and 55 female college students rated digitized color facsimiles of 40 paintings that varied in artistic period (Renaissance, Rococo, Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, 20th Century) and subject matter (portrait, landscape, still life, behavior depiction) on 12 7-point semantic differential scales, e.g., simple-complex. Women judged the content of Rococo and Impressionist paintings as more pleasing than did men and Impressionist paintings evoked greater feelings of pleasure and relaxation among women than among men. In addition, paintings that depicted behaviors evoked more pleasure and alertness among women than among men. The results were interpreted in terms of underlying differences between men and women in perceptual style and emotional sensitivity.     

Evaluative conditioning: Overview and further options

Abstract

The demonstration of evaluative conditioning by Baeyens, Eelen, and Van den Bergh confirms our previous findings and extends the evidential basis for conditioning without awareness. The case made against their findings by Shanks and Dickinson is not supported by the methodological claims they advance. We suggest alternative control procedures and argue that evaluative conditioning plays an adaptive role in the formation of preferences.