Why are conservatives happier than liberals?

In this research, we drew on system-justification theory and the notion that conservative ideology serves a palliative function to explain why conservatives are happier than liberals. Specifically, in three studies using nationally representative data from the United States and nine additional countries, we found that right-wing (vs. left-wing) orientation is indeed associated with greater subjective well-being and that the relation between political orientation and subjective well-being is mediated by the rationalization of inequality. In our third study, we found that increasing economic inequality (as measured by the Gini index) from 1974 to 2004 has exacerbated the happiness gap between liberals and conservatives, apparently because conservatives (more than liberals) possess an ideological buffer against the negative hedonic effects of economic inequality.     

Why are some obsessions more upsetting than others?

Little is known about why certain obsessional thoughts are more upsetting than others for people with obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD). Obsessional thought content often seems arbitrary to sufferers. The current study examined three possible reasons why particular thoughts would be especially upsetting for individuals, based on suggestions put forth by cognitive theories of obsessional thoughts. Twenty-eight individuals with a principal diagnosis of OCD completed questionnaires and interviews at two different periods of time on (1) their most upsetting current obsession and (2) their least upsetting current obsession. Results suggested that more upsetting obsessions were evaluated as more meaningful or significant than less upsetting obsessions, and more upsetting obsessions contradicted valued aspects of the self to a greater degree. All examples of current obsessions, both most and least upsetting, arose in the context of life concerns or issues. Results support cognitive theories in that the strength and nature of appraisal appears to be linked with the distress associated with a thought, and more upsetting thoughts are those that have implications for a person's sense of self.     

When are semantic targets detected faster than visual or acoustic ones?

Duration-discrimination data from an experiment using empty auditory intervals in a two-alternative forced-choice paradigm are presented. The observed functional relationship between standard deviation of the psychometric density function and stimulus duration is shown to be fit significantly better by a Weber’s law model of duration discrimination than by Creelman’s counter model. Both models fail to predict the rapid rise in the Weber fraction observed for durations longer than about 2 sec. However, the Weber’s law model, based on a generalization of Weber’s law, accurately predicts the initial drop in the Weber fraction for very short durations and the observed constancy of the Weber fraction for durations up to 2 sec.     

Positive facial expressions are recognized faster than negative facial expressions, but why?

Three experiments examined the recognition speed advantage for happy faces. The results replicated earlier findings by showing that positive (happy) facial expressions were recognized faster than negative (disgusted or sad) facial expressions (Experiments 1 and 2). In addition, the results showed that this effect was evident even when low-level physical differences between positive and negative faces were controlled by using schematic faces (Experiment 2), and that the effect was not attributable to an artifact arising from facilitated recognition of a single feature in the happy faces (up-turned mouth line, Experiment 3). Together, these results suggest that the happy face advantage may reflect a higher-level asymmetry in the recognition and categorization of emotionally positive and negative signals.     

Why are damped sounds perceived as shorter than ramped sounds?

Hearing is the most accurate sense for perceiving duration. However, rarely it produces inaccurate estimates of duration, for example when it compares the subjective duration of tones that are increasing in intensity over time (i.e., ramped) with that of tones that are decreasing in intensity over time (i.e., damped). The literature reports that the damped tones are perceived as much being shorter than the ramped tones of the same length. The short subjective duration of damped tones may originate from a decay suppression mechanism that parses the source-informative part of many natural sounds (i.e., the beginning) from the less informative part of them (the decay): listeners may interpret the tail of damped tones like an echo or like the decay portion of an impact sound and exclude it from the account of the duration of the tone. In the natural soundscape, the tail of sounds produced in reverberant environments and the tail of impact sounds have a frequency content that is constant throughout the sound’s duration. Here, the carriers used for ramped and damped sounds were a tone constant in frequency and a tone modulated in frequency. The frequency modulation was introduced to prevent the listener from interpreting the tail of these tones as the result of reverberation or the decay portion of an impact sound. Frequency constant damped tones were largely underestimated in duration whereas frequency modulated ones were not (or were only slightly), demonstrating that the decay suppression mechanism is a worthy explanation for the short subjective duration of damped tones.

     

Why are some people with neurological illness more resilient than others?

The current qualitative study was designed to evaluate the coping strategies of people living with a chronic progressive neurological illness and their carers. The neurological illnesses were Huntington's disease, motor neurone disease, multiple sclerosis and Parkinson's disease. Participants included 15 people who showed high levels of adjustment and 15 who showed low levels of adjustment. Participants were selected from an earlier study, to ensure that they satisfied the inclusion criteria for the current study. Interviews were completed to determine the strategies used to cope with the demands of the illness. Participants who demonstrated good adjustment were more likely to draw on social support to provide them with the resources to deal with the illness. In contrast, those who evidenced poor adjustment were more likely to draw on external supports to complete tasks for them. The implications of these findings for people with chronic neurological illnesses and their families are discussed.     

Why are familiar-only experiences more frequent for voices than for faces?

Hanley,Smith, and Hadfield (1998) showed that when participants were asked to recognize famous people from hearing their voice , there was a relatively large number of trials in which the celebrity's voice was felt to be familiar but biographical information about the person could not be retrieved. When a face was found familiar, however, the celebrity's occupation was significantly more likely to be recalled. This finding is consistent with the view that it is much more difficult to associate biographical information with voices than with faces. Nevertheless, recognition level was much lower for voices than for faces in Hanleyet al.'s study,and participants made significantly more false alarms in the voice condition. In the present study, recognition performance in the face condition was brought down to the same level as recognition in the voice condition by presenting the faces out of focus. Under these circumstances, it proved just as difficult to recall the occupations of faces found familiar as it was to recall the occupations of voices found familiar. In other words, there was an equally large number of familiar-only responses when faces were presented out of focus as in the voice condition. It is argued that these results provide no support for the view that it is relatively difficult to associate biographical information with a person's voice. It is suggested instead that associative connections between processing units at different levels in the voice-processing system are much weaker than is the case with the corresponding units in the face-processing system. This will reduce the recall of occupations from voices even when the voice has been found familiar. A simulation was performed using the latest version of the IAC model of person recognition (Burton, Bruce, & Hancock, 1999) which demonstrated that the model can readily accommodate the pattern of results obtained in this study.     

Memory enhancement for emotional words: Are emotional words more vividly remembered than neutral words?

Individuals are more likely to remember negative information than neutral information. In the experiments reported here, we examined whether individuals were also more likely to remember details of the presentation of negative words, as compared with neutral words. In Experiment 1, the remember-know procedure was used to examine the effect of emotion on the vividness of an individual's memory, showing that remember responses were more frequently assigned to negative words than neutral words. In Experiment 2, a source memory paradigm was used, and again, evidence that individuals' memories were more detailed for negative than for neutral words was found. In Experiments 3-6, we examined the relative contribution of valence and arousal, finding that both dimensions increased the vividness of remembered information (i.e., items with valence only and those that elicited arousal were better remembered than neutral information) but that the effect was greater for words that evoked arousal than for those with valence only. The results support a qualitative, as well as a quantitative, memory benefit for emotional, as compared with neutral, words.     

Why are some moral beliefs perceived to be more objective than others?

Recent research has investigated whether people think of their moral beliefs as objectively true facts about the world, or as subjective preferences. The present research examines variability in the perceived objectivity of different moral beliefs, with respect both to the content of moral beliefs themselves (what they are about), and to the social representation of those moral beliefs (whether other individuals are thought to hold them). It also examines the possible consequences of perceiving a moral belief as objective. With respect to the content of moral beliefs, we find that beliefs about the moral properties of negatively valenced acts are seen as reliably more objective than beliefs about the moral properties of positively valenced acts. With respect to the social representation of moral beliefs, we find that the degree of perceived consensus regarding a moral belief positively influences its perceived objectivity. The present experiments also demonstrate that holding a moral belief to be objective is associated with a more ‘closed’ response in the face of disagreement about it, and with more morally pejorative attributions towards a disagreeing other person.     

Are the spoken durations of rare words longer than those of common words?

The effects of word frequency, word length, and practice were examined in oral productions of subjects reading lists of 25 rare or common monosyllabic words. Articulation and pause durations, their ratio, and total reading durations were derived from recordings of subjects’ speech. Recorded speech was sampled at 10 kHz, and a criterion of eight times the mean noise level was used to classify productions as articulation or pause. Lists of high frequency words were read more quickly than lists of low-frequency words. No differences were observed in the articulation component. Pause duration was greater for rare than for common words. The ratio of pause to articulation varied with length and word type. No differences were found for high-frequency words, but the ratio of five-letter words was significantly greater than that of three- or four-letter rare words. Results were discussed in relation to the nature and locus of the word-frequency effect. Criteria for defining and measuring speech productions were also raised.     

Why do non-color words interfere with color naming?

In the non-color-word Stroop task, university students' response latencies were longer for low-frequency than for higher frequency target words. Visual identity primes facilitated color naming in groups reading the prime silently or processing it semantically (Experiment 1) but did not when participants generated a rhyme of the prime (Experiment 3). With auditory identity primes, generating an associate or a rhyme of the prime produced interference (Experiments 2 and 3). Color-naming latencies were longer for nonwords than for words (Experiment 4). There was a small long-term repetition benefit in color naming for low-frequency words that had been presented in the lexical decision task (Experiment 5). Facilitation of word recognition speeds color naming except when phonological activation of the base word increases response competition.     

Are number gestures easier than number words for preschoolers?

Some researchers have argued that children's earliest symbols are based on their sensorimotor experience and that arbitrary symbol-referent mapping poses a challenge for them. If so, exposure to iconic symbols (such as one-finger-for-one-object manual gestures) might help children in a difficult domain such as number. We assessed 44 preschoolers’ processing of number gestures and number words on two tasks: give-a-number and how-many. Children were generally more accurate when mapping number words than number gestures onto a number of toys, suggesting that the iconicity of number gestures does not help children map symbols to numbers. We argue that children learn number gestures as arbitrary symbols and do not take advantage of their iconicity.     

Why are idioms recognized fast?

It is an established fact that idiomatic expressions are fast to process. However, the explanation of the phenomenon is controversial. Using a semantic judgment paradigm, where people decide whether a string is meaningful or not, the present experiment tested the predictions deriving from the three main theories of idiom recognition—the lexical representation hypothesis, the idiom decomposition hypothesis, and the configuration hypothesis. Participants were faster at judging decomposable idioms, nondecomposable idioms, and clichés than at judging their matched controls. The effect was comparable for all conventional expressions. The results were interpreted as suggesting that, as posited by the configuration hypothesis, the fact that they are known expressions, rather than idiomaticity, explains their fast recognition.     

Why are Benevolent Sexists Happier?

Research indicates that the endorsement of sexist ideology is linked to higher subjective wellbeing for both men and women. We examine gender differences in the rationalisations which drive this effect in an egalitarian nation (New Zealand). Results from a nationally representative sample (N?=?6,100) indicated that the endorsement of Benevolent Sexism (BS) predicted life satisfaction through different mechanisms for men and women. For men, BS was directly associated with life satisfaction. For women, the palliative effect of BS was indirect and occurred because BS-ideology positioning women as deserving of men??s adoration and protection was linked to general perceptions of gender relations as fair and equitable, which in turn predicted greater levels of life satisfaction.     

How are number words mapped to approximate magnitudes?

How do we map number words to the magnitudes they represent? While much is known about the developmental trajectory of number word learning, the acquisition of the counting routine, and the academic correlates of estimation ability, previous studies have yet to describe the mechanisms that link number words to nonverbal representations of number. We investigated two mechanisms: associative mapping and structure mapping. Four dot array estimation tasks found that adults' ability to match a number word to one of two discriminably different sets declined as a function of set size and that participants' estimates of relatively large, but not small, set sizes were influenced by misleading feedback during an estimation task. We propose that subjects employ structure mappings for linking relatively large number words to set sizes, but rely chiefly on item-by-item associative mappings for smaller sets. These results indicate that both inference and association play important roles in mapping number words to approximate magnitudes.     

Children’s cross-ethnic friendships: Why are they less stable than same-ethnic friendships?

Previous findings suggest that children’s cross-ethnic friendships are less stable than same-ethnic friendships. However, it is not clear why this is. This study examined stability of same- and cross-ethnic friendships among 10-year-old children over the course of five months. Analyses focused on both individual-level data (comparing 82 German and 37 Turkish children) and social network data (comparing 125 German and 172 non-German children). We predicted that children high in empathy and who perceived peer norms about cross-ethnic friendships to be positive would have more stable cross-ethnic friendships. Results showed that cross-ethnic friendships were indeed less stable than same-ethnic friendships. Empathy marginally predicted stability of cross-ethnic friendships while peer norms only predicted German but not Turkish children’s cross-ethnic friendship stability. Further, children high in empathy were less likely to be deselected by their cross-ethnic friends and similarity in empathy between cross-ethnic friends increased the longevity of their friendship.