The Role of Counterfactual Thinking and Causal Attribution in Accident-Related Judgments

The effects of counterfactual thinking and causal attribution on accident-related judgments were investigated. Subjects read about a couple who died in an automobile accident where mutability of the outcome was varied. Mutability refers to the extent that a factual event can be mentally altered, with mutable outcomes more easily imagined otherwise than immutable outcomes. In comparison to the immutable scenario, participants reading the mutable scenario saw the accident as more avoidable, ascribed a greater causal role to the accident perpetrator, and perceived the perpetrator having more causal control over the couple's deaths. In addition to increased anger, a harsher financial penalty was levied against the accident perpetrator by participants in the mutable than in the immutable condition. Multiple regression analysis supported the efficacy of attribution theory to explain the affective and behavioral consequences of counterfactual thinking in accident-related judgments.     

On the Ease of (Dis)believing: The Role of Accessibility Experiences in Credibility Judgments

Credibility judgments are common and consequential in many applied settings. Although much research has addressed human observers' ability to discriminate true and deceptive statements, less is known about the psychological processes involved in such judgments. Here, it is proposed that the process of mustering evidence for or against credibility is reflected in a feeling‐based form (ease‐of‐retrieval) and that such feelings can be used as a basis for credibility judgments. The results of an experiment show, as predicted, that the perceived ease with which participants could identify clues strongly influenced credibility judgments. Ironically, mustering more clues in support of a truthful account lowered credibility judgments; in contrast, mustering more clues in support of a deceptive account increased credibility judgments. Mediation analyses suggest that this is because participants relied on a feeling‐based as opposed to content‐based judgment strategy. Practical implications are discussed, and theoretical issues regarding the process of credibility judgment are raised. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The More You See It, the More You Know It: Memory Accessibility and Sexual Harassment Judgments

The influence of the availability of personally known and media known sexual harassment victims and harassers on perceptions of social sexual workplace conduct was examined. Male and female full-time workers evaluated two videotapes that depict sexual harassment in the workplace. Results indicated that perceived likelihood of harassment and discrimination increased as participants recalled more examples of harassment victims whom they personally knew. In some instances, recall of victims in the media had a similar influence. As predicted, the influence of availability was stronger for men than for women. Similar findings resulted from the analyses of the unwelcomeness, severity, and pervasiveness of the conduct; however, legal standard, gender, or case often moderated this relationship. The implications of these findings are discussed.     

The Role of Typical and Atypical Events in Story Memory

To understand how viewers or readers process and remember media narratives such as entertainment, news, and information is critical to our understanding of the mental processing of television and other media. Media stories contain both typical and atypical events and people, but little is known about how readers or viewers process and remember these two types of information. Participants in 2 experiments remembered atypical story items much better even a week later. However, the conservative way they treated atypical memories could give the illusion that typical items are better remembered than they really are. The results have implications for both mass media theory and theories of memory.     

Judging Knowledge in the Digital Age: The Role of External‐Memory Organization

Two studies examined relations between features of external‐memory repositories (personal computers) and confidence in knowing. Participants judged their confidence in knowledge related to their work or studies and then answered questions about the way they store and use information. Participants who maintained more organized repositories were more confident in their knowledge. Furthermore, moderation analyses showed that the participants who navigated through their files by manually clicking through folders to find documents, but not those who use an automated search feature, felt more knowledge confident if they maintained a well‐organized electronic repository. These results provide evidence for relation between assessments of internally ‘stored’ knowledge and the degree of organization of their externally stored ‘knowledge.’ Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Dispositional Optimism and Judgments of Future Life Events: Affective States as Moderators

This research examined the relation between dispositional optimism and judgments of future life events and whether this relation is moderated by affective states. In this study the moderating role of experimentally induced affective states, using film clips (N = 259), was investigated. After filling in the questionnaire for dispositional optimism, the participants were randomly assigned in the experimental conditions in order to induce positive versus negative affective states. Finally, the participants filled in the affective states and judgments of future life events scales. The results indicated that the participants with a higher level of optimism had the tendency to judge positive events as more likely and negative events as less likely to happen in the future. We found evidence for affective states as moderators; the association between dispositional optimism and judgments of future positive events depended on experimentally induced affective states. Specifically, in positive affective state condition, the association between dispositional optimism and judgments of future positive events was weaker than in both negative affective state and control conditions. The implications of these findings for understanding the role of optimism and affective states, in determining the judgments about the likelihood of future events are discussed.     

Understanding Variations in Judgments of Infidelity: An Application of Attribution Theory

The current program of research examined how the four dimensions of the attribution (locus of causality, controllability, stability, intentionality) influenced judgments of a partner’s hypothetical infidelity and actor-observer discrepancies associated with judgments of real-life infidelity. The results from Study 1 (N?=?396) revealed that the dimensions of the attribution affected the extent to which adults’ judged a partner’s hypothetical behavior as indicative of infidelity differently depending on the type of behavior. When reporting on real-life behavior (Study 2, N?=?802), adults attributed the cause of their partner’s infidelity as being a result of internal, controllable, stable, and intentional causes to a greater extent than when judging their own infidelity.     

The Influence of Ease of Retrieval on Judgment as a Function of Attention to Subjective Experience

The ease with which information comes to mind can impact judgment. We examine whether the influence of ease of retrieval is moderated by situational factors that call it to attention before judgment and by individual differences in experiential processing style, as measured by the rational experiential inventory scale (Pacini & Epstein, 1999). An ease of retrieval effect, indicated by less favorable evaluations of a proposal following the retrieval of many reasons advocating the proposal than following the retrieval of only a few, was found for high‐experiential style processors regardless of situational factors that made ease of retrieval salient. However, the effect was found among low‐experiential style processors only when ease of retrieval was explicitly called to their attention prior to judgment.     

Memory for Early Life Events: Consistency of Retrieval of Memories Over a One-year Interval

Adults who had previously answered questions about a sibling's birth experienced when they were 2 or 3 years old were asked the same question again after a oneyear interval. The results showed considerable consistency in reported memories. The majority of answers given on the second occasion provided substantially the same information as on the first occasion. However, those who were only just 2 years old when their sibling was born recalled less information overall and showed less consistency in their answers. A second group of adults was asked for a second time about a family birth for which they could have no memory. They also produced answers that were consistent with those given before, but there was no age effect in the consistency of their responses. The implications of these patterns of consistency are discussed.     

空间知识记忆和提取的理论模型

对物理空间知识记忆和提取规律的探讨一直是空间认知领域研究中的一个重点和热点。对其进行深入研究,不仅有助于了解人类的空间行为,而且为相关的诸如界面设计、虚拟环境等空间认知应用领域（研究）提供支持。该文从空间记忆的内在参照系理论、坐标系统模型、空间情境模型和位置记忆的空间类属模型4个方面对当前有关物理环境中空间知识记忆和提取的理论或模型进行了回顾并作了初步评价。     

意图信息在物权判断和道德判断中的作用

意图会影响人们的道德判断,但尚不清楚意图在物权判断中的作用。本研究以266名非法学专业的大学生为被试,通过包含不同意图（恶意/善意/无意）的故事情境,考察了在损失求偿和获益分享情境中人们的物权判断和道德判断。结果发现,在损失求偿情境中,不管是出于善意、恶意还是无意,被试均判断行为者应当赔偿他人损失,但不认为无意的行为者应受谴责。在获益分享情境中,被试认为善意的行为者应分享给他人带来的收益且应受赞扬,但恶意的行为者不应分享收益和受赞扬。综合来看,物权判断比道德判断较少受意图信息的影响,反映人们的物权判断具有领域特异性。     

Affective Arousal as Information: How Affective Arousal Influences Judgments,Learning, and Memory

The affect‐as‐information framework posits that affect is embodied information about value and importance. The valence dimension of affect provides evaluative information about stimulus objects, which plays a role in judgment and decision‐making. Affect can also provide evaluative information about one's own cognitions and response inclinations, information that guides thinking and reasoning. In particular, positive affect often promotes, and negative affect inhibits, accessible responses or dominant modes of thinking. Affect thus moderates many of the textbook phenomena in cognitive psychology. In the current review, we suggest additionally that the arousal dimension of affect amplifies reactions, leading to intensified evaluations, increased reliance on particular styles of learning, and enhanced long‐term memory for events. We conclude that whereas valenced affective cues serve as information about value, the arousal dimension provides information about urgency or importance.     

任务难度预见的准确性与记忆成绩的相关

本研究采用 3× 3二因素混合实验设计 (年龄、材料 ) ,以 |P -A|÷A做指标 ,对任务难度预见的准确性与记忆成绩之间的相关进行了研究。发现 :任务难度的预见准确性与记忆成绩之间存在显著相关 ;被试年龄对任务难度预见的准确性与记忆成绩之间的相关有影响 ;材料难度对任务难度预见的准确性与记忆成绩之间的相关没有影响     

人格判断的自我—他人一致性:熟悉度和亲密度的作用

关系质量是影响人格判断准确性的重要因素,该研究分别在男性、女性朋友两个样本中考查了熟悉度与关系亲密度对人格判断自我—他人一致性(SOA)的影响,结果表明:(1)神经质的自我评定显著高于朋友评定,责任心的自我评定显著低于朋友评定;(2)两个样本中大五人格所有维度的SOA都达到了显著水平,尽管女性样本中外倾性、宜人性和责任心的SOA均比男性样本高,但两样本之间不存在显著差异;(3)两样本聚合的SOA中,外倾性最高(r=0.41),责任心其次(r=0.36),神经质和开放性最低(均为r=0.21);(4)除了男性样本中的外倾性,熟悉度对其他维度的SOA都没有显著调节效应;(5)两样本中关系亲密度对所有人格维度SOA的调节效应均不显著。     

The Role of Face Familiarity in Judgments of Personality and Intelligence

Personality judgments based on facial features are a common occurrence. The face familiarity overgeneralization hypothesis states that people make judgments of unknown faces based on their similarity to known faces. However, there is a dearth of research regarding how face familiarity relates to perceptions of personality and intelligence in strangers. The current article used two studies to provide evidence for the relationship between face familiarity and judgments of personality and intelligence. Study 1 showed that photographs perceived as familiar by one set of participants were rated more positively regarding personality and intelligence by a second group of participants. Study 2 found that high perceived familiarity resulted in positive judgments of personality and intelligence, whereas familiarity based on exposure did not. These findings indicate both that perceived familiarity significantly impacts positive judgments of personality and intelligence and that the face familiarity overgeneralization hypothesis is a useful framework for this area of research.     

Collaboration and Memory: Effects of Dyadic Retrieval on Different Memory Tasks

Collaborative retrieval was investigated in two experiments. The experiments were explicitly designed to investigate how different types of memory tasks were affected by two individuals working together compared to individuals working on their own. A nominal group score was treated as the predicted potential a dyad could attain. In Experiment 1, semantic and episodic retrieval were employed. The episodic task was to encode and retrieve a story and the semantic task was to answer, without any encoding, 20 questions from the same history domain as the episodic task. In Experiment 2, explicit recognition and implicit retrieval of dot patterns were employed. The explicit recognition task was forced-choice, and in the implicit task, subjects were instructed to complete a pattern they saw from an incomplete pattern. The results suggest that: (1) dyads suffer from collaboration relative to the predicted potential, (2) the reduction of productivity for dyads was limited to explicit and episodic memory tasks, and (3) friends as opposed to non-friends reduced the negative effect of collaboration. The results replicate and extend the results from a previous study.     

Judgments of Frequency and Recency in a Distributed Memory Model

TODAM is a theory of distributed associative memory based on the convolution-correlation formalism of A. Borsellino and T. Poggio (1973, Kybernetik, 122, 113-122), and TODAM2 is a revised version which includes context, auto-associations for binding, a dual basis for item information, and mediators for associative information. It can explain some complex interactions (differential forgetting and differential attention) between item and associative information. In this paper we derive the basic expressions for the memory-probe dot product for the 2x2 cases (item and pair study crossed with item and pair probe), and then we apply these expressions to judgments of frequency (JOF) and judgments of recency (JOR). We report an experiment which tests both JOF and JOR for single items with post-cuing to control for encoding strategies and suggest an attenuation factor for repetition to improve the fits. With attenuation, TODAM2 can fit the JOR data, but the JOF fits, while not too bad, consistently predict too much dependence between item and associative information. Copyright 2001 Academic Press.     

When Group Influence Is More or Less Likely: The Case of Moral Judgments

We investigated whether group influence can change judgments even for high-consensus (i.e., unambiguous) moral norms. We found that participants often matched the judgment of the other current group members even when this moral judgment was normatively incorrect (nonstandard), and this occurred more for more ambiguous issues. Moreover, this social influence on public judgments was generally followed by private agreement and re-interpreting general values to be consistent with those judgements. We also found that participants who experienced a fit between their regulatory focus and their feelings of power (i.e., promotion/high power; prevention/low power) were less influenced by the group.