Why did I right that? Factors that influence the production of homophone substitution errors

Despite considerable research on language production errors involving speech, little research exists in the complementary domain of writing. Two experiments investigated the production of homophone substitution errors, which occur when a contextually appropriate word (e.g., beech) is replaced with its homophone (e.g., beach tree). Participants wrote down auditorily presented sentences containing dominant or subordinate homophones. Homophones were preceded by a lexical prime that overlapped in phonology and orthography (e.g., teacher) or only orthography (e.g., headmaster) with the target homophone. Results showed more substitution errors when the context elicited a subordinate homophone than when it elicited a dominant homophone. Furthermore, both types of primes equivalently increased production of homophone errors relative to control words (e.g., lawyer), suggesting that only orthographic overlap between the prime and target was necessary to influence errors. These results are explained within dual-route models of spelling, which postulate an interaction between lexical and sublexical routes when spelling.     

Why did I right that? Factors that influence the production of homophone substitution errors

Despite considerable research on language production errors involving speech, little research exists in the complementary domain of writing. Two experiments investigated the production of homophone substitution errors, which occur when a contextually appropriate word (e.g., beech) is replaced with its homophone (e.g., beach tree). Participants wrote down auditorily presented sentences containing dominant or subordinate homophones. Homophones were preceded by a lexical prime that overlapped in phonology and orthography (e.g., teacher) or only orthography (e.g., headmaster) with the target homophone. Results showed more substitution errors when the context elicited a subordinate homophone than when it elicited a dominant homophone. Furthermore, both types of primes equivalently increased production of homophone errors relative to control words (e.g., lawyer), suggesting that only orthographic overlap between the prime and target was necessary to influence errors. These results are explained within dual-route models of spelling, which postulate an interaction between lexical and sublexical routes when spelling.     

Why did I eat that? Perspectives on food decision making and dietary restraint

Consumers trying to watch or restrict what they eat face a battle each day as they attempt to navigate the food-rich environments in which they live. Due to the complexity of food decision making, consumers are susceptible to a wide range of social, cognitive, affective, and environmental forces determined to interrupt their intentions to restrict their dietary intake. In this article, we integrate literature from diverse theoretical perspectives into a conceptual framework designed to offer a better understanding of the antecedents, interruptions, and consequences of dietary restraint. We outline a path for researchers to investigate how restraint behaviors in the eating domain influence a wide variety of consumer psychological phenomena. It is our hope that a collective examination of this literature provides a lens that directs future research on food decision making and dietary restraint and empowers consumers to invest their cognitive and behavioral resources towards healthy eating behaviors.     

Did I read or did I name? Diminished awareness of processes yielding identical 'outputs'

It has been proposed that incompatible intentions (e.g., to inhale and not inhale while holding one’s breath while underwater) are an essential ingredient of conscious conflict. Laboratory tasks such as the Stroop color naming task can instantiate conscious conflict innocuously. However, little research has explored what occurs subjectively at the other end of conflict, when intentions are harmonious. The hypothesis of synchrony blindness proposes that, during harmonious processing, not only may one not experience any conflict, but one may also be unaware that more than one process yielded the same intention/action plan. Accordingly, in the Stroop task, participants reported less of an urge to err (by reading) when words were presented in the congruent condition (e.g., RED presented in red) than when the very same words were presented in standard font color, suggesting that awareness of word-reading was diminished experimentally. The implications of this finding for theories about consciousness are discussed.     

How do I remember that I know you know that I know?

Communication is aided greatly when speakers and listeners take advantage of mutually shared knowledge (i.e., common ground). How such information is represented in memory is not well known. Using a neuropsychological-psycholinguistic approach to real-time language understanding, we investigated the ability to form and use common ground during conversation in memory-impaired participants with hippocampal amnesia. Analyses of amnesics' eye fixations as they interpreted their partner's utterances about a set of objects demonstrated successful use of common ground when the amnesics had immediate access to common-ground information, but dramatic failures when they did not. These findings indicate a clear role for declarative memory in maintenance of common-ground representations. Even when amnesics were successful, however, the eye movement record revealed subtle deficits in resolving potential ambiguity among competing intended referents; this finding suggests that declarative memory may be critical to more basic aspects of the on-line resolution of linguistic ambiguity.     

Why do People Disagree? Explaining and Endorsing the Possibility of Partiality in Judgments

The current study examines developing changes in children's intuitions about why disagreements about decisions might occur, focusing on what children understand about partiality and how it may vary depending on the context. Eighty children ages 6 to 13 years old and 20 adults were presented with stories in which there was a disagreement with the judge about who the winner of a contest should be. Participants were asked to generate their own explanations for why the disagreement may have occurred and to evaluate the plausibility of different explanations provided by the experimenter. Even 6-year-olds generated and endorsed partiality as a possible explanation for disagreement, although they did so at a lower rate than older children. A richer understanding of how context influences both the reasons for disagreement and the likelihood of partiality seems to develop over childhood.     

Why did he do it? attribution of obedience and the phenomenon of dispositional bias

Two studies are reported which demonstrate the influence of perceptual or ‘perspective’ variables in mediating attribution processes. In both studies subjects first observed a re-enactment of Milgram's (1963) experiment of obedience in which a ‘teacher’ obeys an experimenter's request to deliver dangerously high levels of shock. They were then asked to make judgements concerning the magnitude of situational forces acting upon the teacher and also to make inferences about his personality dispositions. Study I showed that passage of time can lead observers to assume more situational control when they were required to think and write about the witnessed re-enactment of the Milgram situation compared with observers who had no time to contemplate or who were prevented from doing so. Study II did not support the notion that focus of attribution is a simple function of what one pays attention to, or a function of the differing perspectives which actors and observers employ. Both of these results seriously challenge Jones and Nisbett's (1972) contention that the differences in attribution tendencies between actors and observers arise from the difference in perspective, Moreover, considerable evidence suggests that changes in situational and dispositional attributions may not follow a simple ‘zero-sum’ model, and that subjects seem to be unwilling to treat the two sources of control as if they were inversely correlated.     

Does dietary learning occur outside awareness?

Several forms of dietary learning have been identified in humans. These include flavor-flavor learning, flavor-postingestive learning (including flavor-caffeine learning), and learned satiety. Generally, learning is thought to occur in the absence of contingency (CS-US) or demand awareness. However, a review of the literature suggests that this conclusion may be premature because measures of awareness lack the rigor that is found in studies of other kinds of human learning. If associations do configure outside awareness then this should be regarded as a rare instance of automatic learning. Conversely, if awareness is important, then successful learning may be governed by an individual's beliefs and predilection to attend to stimulus relationships. For researchers of dietary learning this could be critical because it might explain why learning paradigms have a reputation for being unreliable. Since most food preferences are learned, asking questions about awareness can also tell us something fundamental about everyday dietary control.     

How did I remember to do that? Self-reported strategy use for laboratory prospective memory tasks

ABSTRACT

The role of metacognition in prospective memory (PM) has received relatively little attention. This study combined data from several experiments to identify the strategy repertoire employed during a classic laboratory PM task and to determine whether self-reported strategy was related to performance. Participants (N?=?668) completed either a focal or nonfocal PM task embedded in an ongoing lexical decision task. The results indicated that participants reported the same strategy repertoire regardless of PM task focality. Participants who reported using a strategy performed better than those who did not report using one, and this was especially true under nonfocal conditions. Self-reported strategy use was also associated with more cost to the ongoing task when the opportunity to complete the PM task was present. These findings add to what is known about the metacognitive components of PM and underscore the need for additional research in this area.     

Why do I feel this way? Attributional assessment of happiness and unhappiness

ABSTRACT

Much research has shown that how people explain events affects subjective well-being (SWB), in particular when they explain positive events as being due to internal, stable, and global factors, and negative events as being due to external, unstable, and local factors. In the current research, we asked: how do people explain their SWB itself, and how do such attributions in turn relate to SWB? In repeated measures studies 1 (N = 281) and 2 (N = 169) participants viewed happy feelings as more personally controllable, stable, and internally caused compared to unhappy feelings. In Study 3 (N = 142) participants made causal attributions about accurate SWB feedback, or about randomly assigned false (low or high) SWB feedback. Those in the false low-SWB feedback condition attributed their SWB to external and unstable factors controlled by others compared to those in the high-level feedback condition. In all three studies, attributing SWB to stable, personally controllable factors was positively associated with SWB.     

How did I do it then? How will I do it later? A theoretical review of the impact of mental time travel on decision-making processes

Mentally traveling to one's personal past and future connects the current self with self at different points in time. When making decisions in the present, individuals benefit from their past and potential future decisions with the help of mental time travel. This review documents the theoretical and empirical studies concerning mental time travel to past and future decisions and their influence on current decision-making processes. Particularly, certain characteristics of past and future decisions directly or indirectly influence present life decisions. Synthesizing the existing literature, we developed a theoretical model suggests that temporally close decisions tend to include different type of details and diverge from distant decisions in terms of personal meaningfulness. Further, past and future decisions that are elaborated and meaningful, have a great impact on present decisions. Future empirical work testing this model has the potential to generate findings that will inform intervention strategies towards improved decision-making.     

Why do gorillas make sequences of gestures?

Great ape gestures have attracted considerable research interest in recent years, prompted by their flexible and intentional pattern of use; but almost all studies have focused on single gestures. Here, we report the first quantitative analysis of sequential gesture use in western gorillas (Gorilla gorilla gorilla), using data from three captive groups and one African study site. We found no evidence that gesture sequences were given for reasons of increased communicative efficiency over single gestures. Longer sequences of repeated gestures did not increase the likelihood of response, and using a sequence was seldom in reaction to communicative failure. Sequential combination of two gestures with similar meanings did not generally increase effectiveness, and sometimes reduced it. Gesture sequences were closely associated with play contexts. Markov transition analysis showed two networks of frequently co-occurring gestures, both consisting of gestures used to regulate play. One network comprised only tactile gestures, the other a mix of silent, audible and tactile gestures; apparently, these clusters resulted from gesture use in play with proximal or distal contact, respectively. No evidence was found for syntactic effects of sequential combination: meanings changed little or not at all. Semantically, many gestures overlapped massively with others in their core information (i.e. message), and gesture messages spanned relatively few functions. We suggest that the underlying semantics of gorilla gestures is highly simplified compared to that of human words. Gesture sequences allow continual adjustment of the tempo and nature of social interactions, rather than generally conveying semantically referential information or syntactic structures.     

Why do I study? The moderating effect of attachment style on academic motivation

Past research has shown the importance of considering close others' interests when pursuing goals, but no research has examined potential moderators of this effect. Two studies examined how attachment style moderates the association between reasons for studying and academic outcomes. In Study 1, 119 participants reported their attachment style, the reasons why they study, and their study habits. As predicted, the association between relational reasons and studying was positive for secure individuals and negative for avoidant individuals. In Study 2, 195 participants reported their attachment style and reasons for studying, as well as their GPA and academic well-being. As predicted, the association between relational reasons and GPA was positive for secure individuals, whereas the associations between personal reasons for studying and academic well-being were positive for avoidant individuals. These results indicate the importance of considering individual differences as moderators of the association between goal motives and outcomes.     

Why did freud choose medical school?

Abstract

After demonstrating the unsatisfactory nature of the reasons Freud gave us for his choice of medical school, the author shows how it is possible to throw new light on it on the basis of his letters to his adolescent friend Emil Fluss. This relationship played a crucial role in forcing Freud to come out of his isolation and the defensive dissection of his feelings that he used to practice, and thus experience an intimate relationship as a better source of self-knowledge and growth. This is the context in which his choice of medical school took place, which can consequently be conceptualized in terms of his unconscious—and self-concealed—pursuit of a growth-promoting and self-healing agency and experience. It thus was an interpersonal event which compelled him to deviate from his original purpose, i.e. the study of law or the humanities, and take up the “unconscious plan” to soften his defensive apparatus. This is consequently the new meaning we can attach to the experience of “rest and full satisfaction” he made in Brücke's laboratory between 1876 and 1882. What he defines as the “triumph” of his life thus also acquires a new meaning: the possibility to take up again his original interest in psychology not on an exclusively defensive basis any more, but eventually in a constructive way. Such a personal itinerary also represented one of Freud's most convincing experiences of the power of the unconscious, as he formulated it in his book on dreams—and as he articulated it in the new field of psychoanalysis. Since, in the author's opinion, the attempt at self-cure lies at the root of our own choice of our profession, this must have been also Freud's case, at a much earlier time than what is traditionally referred to as his self-analysis. At variance with what Freud himself used to claim, the study of his life remains one of the best keys to the understanding of his intellectual legacy.     

Why did Mary Shelley Write Frankenstein?

Mary Shelley’s novel “Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus” is presented here as her encoded image of unconscious emotions too painful for her waking personality to deal with. Her innovative image of man-made life is taken as emerging from the confrontation of her hopes for secure love with painful events in her life with Percy Shelley. This paper proposes that her novel served as a waking expression of unconscious feelings of hurt in reaction to Percy. The monster’s role is here decoded as her way to consciously process the idea that parts of her relation to Percy were so hurtful as to deform it into a miscreant. It is further proposed that the losses and frustrations of her earliest years inclined her to accept Percy’s violations in the hope of the secure love she longed for. The answer offered to this paper’s title accounts for why “Frankenstein” is taken to refer to the unnamed monster and not its creator.Anthony F. Badalamenti is a research scientist in psychiatry. He has a private practice in psychoanalysis and works at quantifying psychiatric research with Columbia University Psychiatric Institute, The Nathan Kline Institute and The University of New England. He holds PhDs in mathematics from Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute and in systems from Bell Telephone Laboratories. He is a member of the Society for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, from whom he received a distinguished research award, the American Mathematical Society, the Society for General Systems Research and the New York Academy of Sciences. He has published over 60 papers in psychiatric research.     

Why did you choose that person over me? Ingroup rejection and attributions to discrimination

The present research examined the attributions that people make when an individual rejects a member of his or her own group in favor of a member of an outgroup (i.e., ingroup rejection). Study 1 showed that Latinos rejected by an ingroup member (perpetrator) made more attributions to discrimination than Whites under similar circumstances. Study 2 showed that Latinos made more attributions to discrimination for ingroup rejection when the perpetrator was Latino as compared to when the perpetrator was White, whereas Whites' attributions to discrimination were relatively low regardless of perpetrator's ethnicity. Study 3 showed that priming loyalty norms increased attributions to discrimination among Latinos in response to ingroup rejection, but not in response to outgroup rejection. This research brings a new perspective to discrimination research by focusing on intragroup rejection and nonprototypical cases of discrimination.     

Why do I hate thee? Conflict misperceptions and intergroup mistrust

Members of partisan social groups often exaggerate how much their own opinions differ from those of their rivals. In the present two studies, partisans estimated their own and their rivals' attitudes toward different issues related to the social conflict and also made a variety of evaluative judgments about their own and the rival group. The authors found that (a) partisans perceive more disagreement with their rivals about values that are central to their own sides' ideological position than those that are central to their rivals' position and (b) perceptions of disagreement about the partisans' own central values are what predicts partisans' global evaluations of members of the outgroup (e.g., disliking, trait stereotypes, perceived similarity). Furthermore, partisans believed their adversaries were motivated by an opposition to the partisans' own core values rather than by promotion of the adversaries' core values. Discussion concentrates on the theoretical and applied implications of these findings.     

Why do people self-harm?

The accuracy of perceptions about self-harm that are presented in the psychological and psychiatric literature was assessed with a sample of self-harmers. A list of 20 statements containing ten myths and ten accurate statements about self-harm behaviour was incorporated into an internet-based questionnaire. Respondents (n?=?243) rated their extent of agreement with each statement. Factor analysis confirmed the a priori classification of statements as being accurate. Only one item, regarding the relationship of self-harm to previous sexual abuse, did not confirm a priori classification; this statement was considered by self-harmers to be an accurate perception of self-harm. It was concluded that this questionnaire could be a useful aid for group-work training with professionals who are involved in working with people who engage in self-harm.