Investigating the dynamics of affect: Psychological mechanisms of affective habituation to pleasurable stimuli

Affective habituation (i.e., reductions in stimulus-evoked affective reactions as a result of previous exposure) may serve a functional purpose. However, little is know about the psychological mechanisms underlying this process. To elucidate the characteristics of affective habituation, two experiments that examined affective reactions to repeated exposures of pleasurable stimuli were conducted. Results of these experiments indicated that habituation trajectories are characterized by linear decreases in affect. Results also demonstrated that habituation can be slowed by the introduction of novel stimuli (i.e., “novelty effects”), effects that are dimensional (rather than taxonic) in nature. Experiment 2 demonstrated that habituation is mediated by conceptual rather than perceptual processes. Depressed and anhedonic individuals were not more susceptible to habituation in either experiment. The current findings and previous theorizing suggest that habituation may be an important component of an adaptive affective processing system that promotes effective responses to salient stimuli and prevents compulsive reward-seeking behavior.

Beyond job satisfaction: A five-year prospective analysis of the dispositional approach to work attitudes

Mounting evidence indicates a dispositional component to global job satisfaction. Unfortunately, however, relatively little attention has been given to the potential effects of dispositions on work-related attitudes other than global job satisfaction. We used a five-year prospective design to investigate the relationships of affective disposition with a set of attitudes oriented toward different aspects of work: the job, the organization, and the career. Job satisfaction, organizational commitment, job involvement, career commitment and career satisfaction each showed significant stability over five years. Cross-lagged panel analyses suggested that affective disposition plays an important role in the change of job attitudes across time. Analyses also support the hypothesis that affective disposition would be more weakly related to job involvement than to the other attitudes.     

“A Community with Diversity of Culture,Wealth, Resources,and Living Experiences”: Defining Neighborhood in an Unincorporated Community

To obtain a better understanding of how people living in an unincorporated region define their neighborhood, a long-term photovoice project was conducted. Thirty-one photovoice sessions and eight structured interviews were coded and analyzed to assess participants’ neighborhood definitions. Participant’s difficulties in identifying the geographic, physical and demographic characteristics of their neighborhood led them to use social interactions, place-mediated values, and civic engagement to define neighborhood.     

Mental maps in chacma baboons (<Emphasis Type="Italic">Papio ursinus</Emphasis>): using inter-group encounters as a natural experiment

Encounters between groups of wild chacma baboons (Papio ursinus) can be viewed as a natural experiment to investigate the nature of these primates’ mental representations of large-scale space. During a 16-month field study in a high population density habitat we recorded the foraging routes and the most important resources of a group of 25 individuals. Also, we estimated the locations of additional baboon groups relative to the study group. Routes were less linear, travel speed was higher, and inter-resource distances were larger when other groups were present within 500 m of the focal group; thus, the study group avoided others by taking detours. We predicted that evasive manoeuvres would be characteristic of different possible orientation mechanisms, and compared them with our observations. We analysed 34 evasive manoeuvres in detail. In an area that lacked prominent landmarks, detours were small; larger detours occurred when resources were directly visible, or in the vicinity of a hill offering conspicuous landmarks. In areas without prominent landmarks, detours were along familiar routes and waiting bouts of up to 60 min occurred; on one occasion the study group aborted their entire day’s journey. We discuss these findings in the light of time and energy costs and suggest that the baboons lack the ability to compute Euclidean relations among locations, but use network maps to find their way to out-of-sight locations. This contribution is part of the Special Issue “A Socioecological Perspective on Primate Cognition” (Cunningham and Janson 2007a).     

Internalizing Symptoms and Affective Reactivity in Relation to the Severity of Aggression in Clinically Referred,Behavior-Disordered Children

We examined the affective correlates of aggression in children referred to a partial hospitalization program for the treatment of behavior disorders who did not have a mood or anxiety disorder. Parent and teacher ratings of the children’s impulsivity, internalizing symptoms, affective reactivity, and aggression were examined for their interrelationships and then entered into regression analyses to predict the child’s level of aggression in the home, at school, and in the treatment program. Intercorrelations among three affective reactivity factors were modest. Both internalizing symptoms and affective reactivity contributed to aggression severity beyond impulsivity and demographics. Only child irritability predicted treatment program aggression. Because of their potential role in understanding children’s behavioral disturbances, internalizing symptoms and negative emotionality merit careful assessment and treatment in treatment programs serving hard-to-manage children with behavior disorders.     

In Search of the Supracultural: American Missionaries in the Gulf in 1920s–1930s

ABSTRACT

This article examines the dynamics of cultural encounters, with reference to the concept of Gustav Warneck (1834–1910) of the connections between mission and culture. It introduces the reader to the personal experience of the missionaries of the Arabian Mission, which was launched in 1889 and operated until 1973 in Basra, Amara, Bahrain, Kuwait and Muscat. While the Mission did not bring about the mass conversion of Muslims, its activities resulted in numerous everyday contacts with the local population. The article stresses that missionaries were a diverse group of individuals with different methods and aspirations, and explores how these diversities challenge a narrative on missions that usually reduces them to a homogenized missiology. Much of the content focuses on the 1920s–1930s, a very unique period in the Middle East, and seeks to show the way that the historical and local context shaped the diversities of missiology. Findings suggest that missionaries, as outsiders in the process of contacting the alien culture, often crossed cultural borders, and that these cultural encounters exhibited contrasting dynamics: the exclusion and rejection of local culture was accompanied by the ‘discovery’ of Islam and the search for ‘supracultural’ components of Islamic culture.     

Locomotor strategies in response to altered lower limb segmental mechanical properties

The present study sought to use stilt walking as a model to uncover modifications to gait dynamics caused by changes in lower limb anthropometrics. We examined 10 novice and 10 expert stilt walkers, each walking with and without stilts, to determine the specific adaptations brought about by experience. Three-dimensional kinematics and force platform data were used to calculate the intersegmental forces, net joint moments and moment powers at the ankle, knee and hip. Spatio-temporal data were computed to aid the interpretation of these data. Non-dimensional scaling was used to facilitate comparison between stilt- and normal-walking. In general, the stilts induced largely the same alterations in the locomotor patterns of both novices and experts, which did not allow for the conclusion that the experts employed locomotor dynamics that were better suited to the challenges imposed by alterations to limb length, mass and mass moment of inertia induced by the stilts. Nevertheless, the experts exhibited a lesser reduction in dimensionless stride length and velocity and generated larger concentric knee flexor and hip extensor powers, relative to the novices, which may be indicative of enhanced dynamic stability control.     

Quantity versus uncertainty: When winning one prize is better than winning two

We predicted that a state of uncertainty would prolong a positive mood, but that people would not anticipate this when making affective forecasts. In Study 1, participants learned that they had won one prize (certain condition), two prizes (two-gift condition), or one of two prizes (uncertain condition). People in the uncertain condition were in a positive mood longer than people in the other two conditions. In Study 2, forecaster participants underestimated the benefits of uncertainty and overestimated the benefits of quantity (getting two gifts instead of one). Under some circumstances, and contrary to people’s predictions, uncertainty can prolong positive mood, and winning one prize under a state of uncertainty can bring more short-term pleasure than winning two prizes.     

The developmental pathways leading to pattern recognition, joint attention, language and cognition

According to the functional/emotional hypothesis, the core capacities necessary for cognitive and language development, such as pattern recognition, joint attention, and intention reading, are downstream effects of more basic processes having to do with early patterns of affect signalling. In this paper, we present preliminary research that tests the functional/emotional hypothesis. The data set consists of profiles of the emotional functioning of infants and young children at ages 0-3, 4-5, 6-9, 10-14, 15-18, 19-24, 25-30, and 31-42 months. Data were collected on a representative population of 1640 children across the US. Results of this preliminary research point to expected correlations between the development of affective signalling and pattern recognition, joint attention, and intention reading. However, we acknowledge that this is only the first step in providing supportive evidence for the functional/emotional hypothesis. Further research is needed to establish causal connections between affective signalling and the core capacities necessary for cognitive and language development.     

Psychophysiological evidence of response conflict and strategic control of responses in affective priming

This experiment investigated the role of conflict in the response and evaluative categorization systems in the affective congruency effect using event-related brain potentials (ERPs). Participants completed a primed evaluative decision task in which the proportion of congruent to incongruent trials was manipulated. The size of the affective congruency effect increased along with the proportion of congruent trials. ERP data identified the locus of this effect in the response system: the lateralized readiness potential (LRP) showed that preferential response activation occurred in motor cortex following prime onset, and the fronto-central N2 (conflict monitoring) component indicated that conflict occurred when the response activated by the prime differed from the target response, irrespective of the affective congruency of the prime and target. The extent of this conflict covaried with strategic processing of primes, as participants directed less attention to primes that were likely to elicit conflict. These data support a response conflict account of affective congruency effects in the evaluative decision task and indicate that strategic control of attention is important in determining the extent to which conflict occurs.     

Psychological contract breach,affective commitment to organization and supervisor,and newcomer adjustment: A three-wave moderated mediation model

This study examines the relationship of psychological contract breach to newcomer adjustment outcomes using affective commitments to organizations and supervisors as mediators and also looks at the moderating role of affective commitment to supervisors. Drawing from data collected at three points in time among a sample of newcomers (N = 224), we found that Time 2 affective organizational commitment mediated a positive relationship between Time 1 psychological contract breach and Time 3 turnover intention and emotional exhaustion. Moreover, affective commitment to supervisors interacted with organizational commitment such that the latter was more negatively related to Time 3 outcomes at low levels of commitment to supervisors. Similarly, the indirect relationships of psychological contract breach to Time 3 outcomes were stronger and negative at low levels of commitment to supervisors. Affective commitment's role in the psychological contract breach-outcome relationships during the entry period is discussed.