Are impulsive adolescents differentially influenced by the good and bad of neighborhood and family?

Using the differential susceptibility perspective (Belsky & Pluess, 2009) as a guiding frame-work, age 12 neighborhood disadvantage (ND) and family characteristics (parental knowledge) were examined as moderators of the relations between age 12 youth impulsivity and the development (ages 13, 14, and 15) of positive (community activities) and negative (antisocial behavior; ASB) adolescent behavior. An interaction between ND and youth impulsivity (age 12) operated with differential susceptibility, but only for female community activities at age 13: under low levels of ND, impulsive adolescent females engaged in the highest levels of community activities, whereas under high ND, they engaged in the lowest levels. Exploratory analysis showed the association between community activities and ND to be partially related to parents' or adults' engagement in informal social controls (e.g., alerting the police with misbehavior in the neighborhood). Differential susceptibility effects were not identified for: (i) parental knowledge and impulsivity; (ii) ASB (ages 13, 14 or 15); or (iii) community involvement at ages 14 and 15. Findings provide limited evidence for impulsivity as a differential susceptibility phenotype.     

Are people's estimates of what other people know influenced by what they themselves know?

An exploratory experiment was done to investigate how estimates of what other people know are influenced by what one knows oneself. Three hypotheses were of interest: (1) that people are more likely to impute a bit of knowledge to other people if they have it themselves than if they do not, (2) that people are likely to overestimate the commonality of their own knowledge, and (3) that people who are unusually knowledgeable with respect to a particular topic are likely to bias their estimates of what other people know in the direction of their personal knowledge store. Subjects answered questions selected from the set for which Nelson and Narens (1980) have provided norms. They also estimated the percentage of other people who would be likely to know the answers to these questions. The results supported the first two hypotheses, but were inconclusive with respect to the third.     

Are there two classes of classically-conditioned responses?

It is proposed that two response classes interact during classical conditioning: (1) a specific effect which directs responding towards or away from the CS, depending upon whether a positive or negative outcome is signaled, and (2) a general, emotional effect which interferes with responding. The interaction between these two response classes can account for the varied results obtained under CER and autoshaping procedures, and must be considered in any analysis which attempts to account for the complex nature of the conditioned response.     

Are covert verbal responses mediating false implicit memory?

In the DRM paradigm, illusory memories of a nonpresented word can be induced by the presentation of strong associates to this word. In two experiments, we explored previous findings of false implicit memory of the nonpresented words (McDermott, 1997; McKone & Murphy, 2000). Experiment 1 extended the finding of false priming to the anagram task. Furthermore, participants attributed this "false" influence on performance to the difficulty of the anagrams and judged them as easier to solve for other students. In Experiment 2, articulatory suppression during the study of the associates resulted in nonsignificant levels of false priming, whereas the normal priming effect was in the same range as that observed in Experiment 1. The study replicates and extends findings of false implicit memory to the anagram task and suggests that future studies should examine the role of covert verbal responses in producing false implicit memory.     

Are words represented by nodes?

Semantic priming in a lexical decision task was investigated with concurrent pretarget and posttarget primes. The posttarget prime also served as a pattern mask of the lexical decision target. Forward priming is defined as the presence of a semantically related pretarget prime and an unrelated posttarget prime. Backward priming is defined as the presence of a semantically related posttarget prime and an unrelated pretarget prime. Forward and backward priming were compared both when the nonword foils were "legal" and when they were "illegal" with respect to English orthography. Predictions were derived for two general approaches to word recognition: spreading-activation and expectancy-set theories. Both approaches assume that word representations occupy distinct, nonoverlapping locations in memory. Backward-prime facilitation was equivalent to forward-prime facilitation when nonword foils were illegal; however, backward-prime facilitation was not significant when nonword foils were legal. These results challenge both approaches. The proposed solution uses semantic-space (distributed) representations that are functionally unitized by a resonant matching (verification) process.     

Are employees' ratings of coworkers' organizational citizenship behavior influenced by their own perceptions of organizational justice?'

Partial correlation analysis of questionnaire data from 62 of 65 employees of a Turkish company indicated that employees' own perceptions of organizational justice in terms of distributive, procedural, and interactional justice were related to how they rated their coworkers' organizational citizenship behavior. Specifically, all three two-way interactions between the justice variables were related to organizational citizenship behavior.     

Are responses in avoidance procedures "safety" signals?

Dinsmoor's (2001) position has the advantage of parsimony in that it relies on well-established principles rather than a separate process--shock-frequency reduction--to account for avoidance. Other advantages are that it blends well with what is known about the effectiveness of momentary contiguities in the study of positive reinforcement and that it might provide an account of why different response forms seem to condition at different rates. Despite these advantages, the view needs elaboration about the temporal characteristics of response-associated stimuli, the functions that "warning' stimuli may have, and especially about how 'safety" is established.     

Gender identity: affected by social change?

To determine whether social changes in attitudes toward the role of men and women have influenced gender identity measures, 60 male and female college students were assessed using both a Thematic Apperception Test measure (May's, 1966, Deprivation/Enhancement measure) and a self-report measure (Bem's, 1974, Sex Role Identity [BSRI]), both of which were developed more than 20 years ago. Although some recent research has found the BSRI to no longer differentiate between men and women (Twenge, 1997; Wilcox & Francis, 1997), this study found significant gender differences for both gender identity measures.1     

Is an optimistic memory less easily influenced by negative than by positive emotions?

This work examines whether a positive personality trait, such as optimism, can reduce bias in differential words recalled after inducing a certain emotion. After showing a list of words with various emotional valences to a group of 59 subjects, a specific emotional state was induced. Subsequently, the subjects were asked to recall the list of words. The results obtained indicated that less optimistic subjects had a tendency to recall and recognize a greater number of negative words when in a negative emotional condition. Statistical significance was reached in the female group's negative word recognition when experiencing negative emotion.     

Are occupational interests hormonally influenced? The 2D:4D-interest nexus

Occupational interests constitute a psychological variable with pronounced sex differences. Whereas males are more interested in things, females primarily take an interest in people. As various studies with mammals and humans documented the role of androgen exposure on sex-typical behavior, we assumed that androgen levels are associated with occupational interests. In our study, we used 2D:4D digit ratio as an indicator of prenatal androgen levels and finger lengths as an indicator of post-pubertal androgen levels. Occupational interests were measured with a standard interest inventory. We hypothesized that finger lengths and ratios indicating high androgen levels are associated with stronger interests in things and weaker interests in people. All measures were gathered using an online interest inventory thereby leading to sufficient statistical power (N = 8646). Results partly confirmed our hypotheses. We found significant correlations between finger lengths and interests in things for males. Moreover, in the case of males we identified significant correlations between finger lengths (positive) as well as digit ratios (negative) with realistic interests and significant correlations between finger lengths (negative) and social interests, which are a marker variable of the people-things dimension.     

Is surface-based orientation influenced by a proportional relationship of shape parameters?

We investigated the extent to which parameters of environmental shape – namely the major and minor principal axes of space which pass through the centroid and approximate length and width of the entire space, respectively, were subject to similar psychophysical principles as those involved in distance discriminations. We developed an orientation task that allowed us to manipulate the ratio of the major to the minor principal axes of an enclosure during training and control for orientation by alternative cues other than principal axes such as wall lengths or corner angles during testing. Participants trained in an environment with a larger hypothetical discriminability ratio allocated more responses to locations specified by the principal axes of space across novel enclosure types compared to a group trained with a smaller hypothetical discriminability ratio. Results suggest that psychophysical principles may operate on the discrimination of environmental shape parameters and delineate a potential mechanism for experiential and developmental changes in orientation ability.     

Is reading-aloud performance in megastudies systematically influenced by the list context?

To examine megastudy context effects, 585 critical words, each with a different orthographic rime, were placed at the beginning or end of a 2614-word megastudy of reading aloud. Sixty participants (30 participants in each condition) responded to these words. Specific predictors examined for change between beginning and end conditions were frequency, length, feedforward rime consistency, feedforward onset consistency, orthographic neighbourhood size, age of acquisition (AoA), and imageability. While it took longer to respond to items at the end of the experiment than items at the beginning of the experiment, there was very little change in the effects of the specific variables assessed. Thus, there is little evidence of list context effects influencing the estimates of the predictor variables in large-scale megastudies.     

Is the relationship between pattern recall and decision-making influenced by anticipatory recall?

The present study compared traditional measures of pattern recall to measures of anticipatory recall and decision-making to examine the underlying mechanisms of expert pattern perception and to address methodological limitations in previous studies where anticipatory recall has generally been overlooked. Recall performance in expert and novice basketball players was measured by examining the spatial error in recalling player positions both for a target image (traditional recall) and at 40-ms increments following the target image (anticipatory recall). Decision-making performance was measured by comparing the participant's response to those identified by a panel of expert coaches. Anticipatory recall was observed in the recall task and was significantly more pronounced for the experts, suggesting that traditional methods of spatial recall analysis may not have provided a completely accurate determination of the full magnitude of the experts' superiority. Accounting for anticipatory recall also increased the relative contribution of recall skill to decision-making accuracy although the gains in explained variance were modest and of debatable functional significance.     

Are strategy shifts caused by data-driven processes or by voluntary processes?

The present research investigates the role of voluntary, conscious processing in strategy change. In 2 experiments, we address whether the switch to a new strategy is the result of data-driven, automatic processes or of voluntary processes. Experiment 1 demonstrates that participants performing an alphabet verification task are able to (a) transfer a newly adopted strategy to dissimilar information never encountered before, (b) verbally describe the task regularity that allows for the generation and application of the new strategy immediately after the strategy was adopted. Using the same experimental task, Experiment 2 shows that participants, and (c) decide against adopting a new strategy when the available evidence suggests that the new strategy cannot be used for the entire range of problems encountered. Overall, the obtained results support the view that strategy change is mediated by voluntary controlled processing. They do not support the view that strategy change is an inevitable, automatic consequence of task practice. The present research thus highlights a potential function of conscious human processing.     

Are faces perceived as configurations more by adults than by children?

Abstract

Adult face recognition is severely hampered by stimulus inversion. Several investigators have attributed this vulnerability to the effect of orientation on encoding relational aspects of faces. Previous work has also demonstrated that children are less sensitive to orientation of faces than are adults. This has been interpreted as reflecting an increasing reliance on configural aspects of faces with increasing age and expertise.

Young, Hellawell, and Hay (1987) demonstrated that for adults the encoding of relations among facial parts is, indeed, sensitive to orientation. When chimeric faces are upright, the top half of one face fuses with the bottom half of the other, making the person depicted in the top half difficult to recognize. This effect (the composite effect) is not seen when the faces are inverted. The present study obtained the composite effect for 6-year-old and 10-year-old children, just as for adults. The composite effect was found to an equal degree at all ages tested and was seen both in tasks involving highly familiar faces and in those involving newly learned, previously unfamiliar faces. Thus, these data provided no support for the hypothesis of increasing reliance on configural aspects of faces with increasing age, at least in the sense tapped by this procedure.

However, the data did confirm an Age X Orientation interaction. In recognizing both familiar and previously unfamiliar faces, 6-year-olds were less affected by inversion than were 10-year-olds, who, in turn, were less affected than were adults. Increasing vulnerability to inversion of faces with age was independent of the composite effect. Apparently, there are two distinct sources to the large effect of inversion that characterizes adult face encoding: one seen throughout development and one acquired only with expertise.     

Is preparation of responses precluded by choice reaction time testing?

Choice reaction times for short (Dit) and long (Dah) Morse key presses were measured using a number of different left hand/right hand Dit/Dah 2-response combinations. When Dit and Dah responses were made with the same hand, Dits were initiated significantly faster, which confirms the finding of Klapp et al. (1974). The absolute sizes of Dit and Dah CRT's, however, varied significantly from one test situation to another; and the Dit:Dah difference was shown to be intransitive. Such context effects cast doubt on the extrapolative power of CRT findings, and on the usefulness of CRT as a measure of movement complexity. Latencies were reduced when subjects knew in advance which hand would be used; but the usefulness of response duration pre-knowledge was not unambiguously demonstrated. Preparation of responses is, therefore, not precluded by CRT testing; and possible explanations for these savings in terms of response selection and motor preprogramming were discussed. On balance, the hypothesis that the longer reaction times of Dah responses are due to their greater movement complexity (Klapp et al. 1974) was rejected, in favour of the explanation that subjects adopt a strategy of preferentially preparing Dit responses.