Reconciling the Feelings‐as‐Information and Hedonic Contingency Models of How Mood Influences Systematic Information Processing1

Recent research suggests that moods influence the way people process information in applied settings. There is an ongoing debate, however, about the mechanisms by which mood influences the way information is processed. The present research explored the possibility that task goals, hedonic expectations of the task, and mood interact to predict systematic information processing. The present study hypothesized and found, using a thought‐listing measure of systematic information processing, that (a) consistent with the feelings‐as‐information model, individuals in an unpleasant mood process information systematically, regardless of task goals and hedonic expectations; (b) also consistent with the feelings‐as‐information model, individuals in a pleasant mood fail to process information systematically under a performance task goal, regardless of hedonic expectations; and (c) consistent with the hedonic contingency model, individuals in a pleasant mood process information systematically under an enjoyment task goal for tasks expected to be pleasant, but not for tasks expected to be unpleasant.     

Incorporating Principles from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy into Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia: A Case Example

Although traditional cognitive behavioral treatments for insomnia have demonstrated efficacy for many individuals with primary and comorbid insomnia, not all individuals benefit from treatment and some experience a subsequent relapse of insomnia. Furthermore, many individuals experience difficulty in implementing the sleep restriction and stimulus control strategies, especially over the long-term. The current article describes ways in which principles from a newer type of behavior therapy, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), can be integrated with traditional behavioral treatment strategies for insomnia. A major goal of ACT is to increase willingness to experience unpleasant thoughts, feelings, and physical sensations, and to promote engagement in personally-valued behaviors while non-judgmentally observing these unpleasant experiences. ACT has the potential to enhance the behavioral treatment of insomnia by fostering willingness to experience short-term discomfort (e.g., fatigue) that occurs while implementing sleep restriction and stimulus control strategies. A case example is presented to illustrate how these principles from ACT can be integrated with behavioral techniques in the treatment of insomnia.     

Psychological momentum: intuitive physics and naive beliefs

The present research examines psychological momentum (PM), a perceived force that lay intuition suggests influences performance. PM theory is proposed to account for how momentum perceptions arise, and four studies demonstrate the influence of lay intuitions about PM on expectations regarding performance outcomes. Study 1 establishes that individuals share intuitions about the types of events that precipitate PM, and Study 2 finds that defeating a rival increases momentum perceptions. Study 3 provides evidence for the lay belief that as more PM accumulates during a prior task, there should be more residual momentum left to carry over to a subsequent task, and Study 4 finds that an individual whose PM is interrupted is expected to have greater difficulty completing a task than is an individual whose steady progress is interrupted. Discussion focuses on linkages between PM and related constructs.     

The Effect of Counterconditioning on Evaluative Responses and Harm Expectancy in a Fear Conditioning Paradigm

In fear conditioning, extinction targets harm expectancy as well as the fear response, but it often fails to eradicate the negative affective value that is associated with the conditioned stimulus. In the present study, we examined whether counterconditioning can serve to reduce evaluative responses within fear conditioning. The sample consisted of 70 nonselected students, 12 of whom were men. All participants received acquisition with human face stimuli as the conditioned stimuli and an unpleasant white noise as the unconditioned stimulus. After acquisition, one third of the sample was allocated to an extinction procedure. The other participants received counterconditioning with either a neutral stimulus (neutral tone) or a positive stimulus (baby laugh). Results showed that counterconditioning (with both neutral and positive stimuli), in contrast to extinction, successfully reduced evaluative responses. This effect was found on an indirect measure (affective priming task), but not on self-report. Counterconditioning with a positive stimulus also tended to enhance the reduction of conditioned skin conductance reactivity. The present data suggest that counterconditioning procedures might be a promising approach in diminishing evaluative learning and even expectancy learning in the context of fear conditioning.     

Temporal dynamics of generalization and representational distortion

Individuals generalize differently depending on the extent of their past experiences and what they learn from them. For instance, the peak of generalization can shift from a familiar stimulus to novel ones when the familiar stimulus has been repeatedly discriminated from another, similar stimulus. We examined how the amount of experience students had in discriminating complex sounds impacted their later generalization. As training increased, participants improved at distinguishing sounds, but their tendency to respond to certain novel sounds increased. With additional training, however, this shift dissipated. The results suggest that shifts in generalization may correspond to transitional states of perceptual learning and that learning-related changes in perceptual sensitivities involve more than just incremental increases in feature selectivity.     

An investigation of spatial representation of pitch in individuals with congenital amusia

Spatial representation of pitch plays a central role in auditory processing. However, it is unknown whether impaired auditory processing is associated with impaired pitch–space mapping. Experiment 1 examined spatial representation of pitch in individuals with congenital amusia using a stimulus–response compatibility (SRC) task. For amusic and non-amusic participants, pitch classification was faster and more accurate when correct responses involved a physical action that was spatially congruent with the pitch height of the stimulus than when it was incongruent. However, this spatial representation of pitch was not as stable in amusic individuals, revealed by slower response times when compared with control individuals. One explanation is that the SRC effect in amusics reflects a linguistic association, requiring additional time to link pitch height and spatial location. To test this possibility, Experiment 2 employed a colour-classification task. Participants judged colour while ignoring a concurrent pitch by pressing one of two response keys positioned vertically to be congruent or incongruent with the pitch. The association between pitch and space was found in both groups, with comparable response times in the two groups, suggesting that amusic individuals are only slower to respond to tasks involving explicit judgments of pitch.     

Rose's Prevention Paradox

Geoffrey Rose's ‘prevention paradox’ occurs when a population‐based preventative health measure that brings large benefits to the community – such as compulsory seatbelts, a ‘fat tax’, or mass immunisation – offers little to each participating individual. Although the prevention paradox is not obviously a paradox in the sense in which philosophers understand the term, it does raise important normative questions. In particular, should we implement population‐based preventative health measures when the typical individual is not expected to gain from them? After canvassing other attempts to address the paradox, I argue that what is significant about the prevention paradox is that it involves intra‐personal trade‐offs; the costs and benefits of the choice to implement or not implement a preventative health measure fall on the same individuals. The intra‐personal nature of these trade‐offs has two implications. First, the solutions to the paradox proposed by other authors are deficient. Second, the policy choice to not implement some preventative health measures can be normatively justified.     

Consistent constructs in individuals’ risk taking in decisions from experience

The current research evaluates the consistency of different constructs affecting risk taking in individuals’ experiential decisions across different levels of risk. Specifically, we contrast three major views concerning the psychological constructs that underlie risk taking behavior. The first is the classical economic approach which views risk as the sensitivity to differences in variance. The second is the latent-components approach suggesting the importance of sensitivity to losses and diminishing sensitivity to marginal increases in payoffs. The third approach, risk acceptance, relates to the willingness to accept probable outcomes over certainty. The results of three studies indicate that (1) Individuals do not exhibit consistency in their sensitivity to variance. (2) Consistent diminishing sensitivity is found within the gain and loss domains, but across these domains individuals seem to be consistent only when deciding between constant versus probable outcomes, suggesting that they reliably differ in their risk acceptance. (3) Risk acceptance appears to entail different psychological constructs when the decision problem involves co-occurring gains and losses.     

Autobiographical memories and views of the future: In relation to dysphoria

The present study investigated dysphoric individuals' self‐referential processing of autobiographical memories and future personal events, in relation to specificity and response latency. Dysphoric individuals (n  =  17) and nondysphoric controls (n  =  17) were selected from a larger sample based on self‐reported depression. Participants completed an autobiographical memory task (AMT) and a future event task (FET), using pleasant and unpleasant (anxiety‐relevant, depression‐relevant) emotional word cues. In response to each emotional cue, participants were required to access and write down a specific personal memory and future event, respectively. Consistent with the hypotheses, dysphoric individuals were less specific in describing pleasant and unpleasant experiences (particularly pleasant), irrespective of time condition. As expected, dysphoric individuals' specificity for distinct depression‐relevant and anxiety‐relevant experiences did not differ significantly. As predicted, all participants were less specific in describing future personal events than in recalling personal memories. As predicted, dysphoric individuals took longer to think of pleasant memories and pleasant future experiences than controls but, as expected, groups did not differ significantly on mean reaction times for past and future unpleasant experiences. Overall, the data showed a degree of consistency in participants' past and future‐oriented processing of self‐referential material. Although considerable research has investigated autobiographical memories in relation to emotional disturbance, the present findings suggest that constructing future emotional experiences is also an important aspect of mental health.     

STROOP效应及其反转：无意识和意识知觉

该研究基于Stroop效应确立了意识知觉和无意识知觉间的质的差异,刺激特性(呈现时间)的改变和注意的改变引起了非常类似的行为上的质差模式,二者在决定意识时存在着补偿作用。当色词短暂呈现而被无意识知觉时,被试在对靶颜色进行命名时不能利用色词提供的预期信息,从而反应时出现典型的Stroop效应;而通过增强刺激特性或提高注意水平可以使色词被有意识知觉。从而出现了Stroop效应的反转。     

Women are more sensitive than men to prior trial events on the Stop‐signal task

Sexual dimorphism in the brain and cognition is a topic of widespread interest. Many studies of sex differences have focused on visuospatial and verbal abilities, but few studies have investigated sex differences in executive functions. We examined two key components of executive function – response inhibition and response monitoring – in healthy men (n = 285) and women (n = 346) performing the Stop‐signal task. In this task, participants are required to make a key press to a stimulus, unless a tone is presented at some delay following the initial stimulus presentation; on these infrequent trials, participants are instructed to inhibit their planned response. Response inhibition was assessed with an estimate of the latency needed to inhibit a response (stop‐signal reaction time), and response monitoring was measured by calculating the degree to which participants adjusted their reaction times based on the immediately preceding trial (e.g., speeding following correct trials and slowing following errors). There were no sex differences in overall accuracy or response inhibition, but women showed greater sensitivity to trial history. Women sped up more than men following correct ‘Go’ trials, and slowed down more than men following errors. These small but statistically significant effects (Cohen's d = 0.25–0.3) suggest more flexible adjustments in speed–accuracy trade‐offs in women and greater cognitive flexibility associated with the responsive control of action.     

非任务相关条件下社会权力对愤怒表情加工的影响

之前的研究表明权力能够影响愤怒表情的加工，但是并不清楚当愤怒刺激是非目标任务刺激时(非任务相关条件下)，权力是否影响以及如何影响愤怒表情的加工。本研究采用事件相关电位技术，首先操纵情绪观察者（被试）和情绪表达者（目标）的权力水平（高VS 低），之后采用修正的oddball范式考察当愤怒刺激是非目标任务刺激时，情绪观察者和表达者的权力水平对愤怒情绪加工的影响。行为结果表明，与高权力个体相比，低权力个体在识别年老面孔目标时成绩更低。脑电结果发现，与高权力个体相比，低权力个体对中性目标刺激和愤怒的非目标刺激均产生了更强的N170波幅，表现出更强的敏感性。该研究结果说明，高权力个体的行为成绩优于低权力个体的行为成绩，即使在非任务相关条件下，与高权力个体相比，低权力个体对愤怒情绪刺激的早期敏感性仍然更强。     

Judgments of moving and intending to move in a timed-response task

Summary Subjects performed a timed-response task in which they attempted to synchronize a rapid flexion of the index finger of their preferred hand with the last of a train of four regularly spaced acoustic clicks. The task was used to stabilize the execution time of a simple voluntary response in order to facilitate psychophysical judgments about the subjects' perception of having responded and of having intended to respond. In the first experiment, male subjects (N = 6) adjusted the appearance time of a reference stimulus (a brief percutaneous pulse to the responding finger) until it appeared to be simultaneous with their perception of having made the response. All subjects adjusted the reference stimulus to appear after response onset during the latter half of the force impulse. This finding suggests that the perception of having responded is based on peripheral feedback from the response. In the second experiment, male subjects (N = 6) performed the same motor task, but adjusted the time of the reference stimulus so that it appeared to be simultaneous with their intention to respond. Two subjects were not able to do the task successfully; the remaining four subjects adjusted the reference stimulus to appear from 101 to 145 ms before response onset. This finding suggests that the intention to respond is perceptually separable from the response itself and occurs at a measurable time before response onset.     

Psychopathy and Event-Related Brain Potentials (ERPs) associated with attention to speech stimuli

Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were used to determine whether low left-hemisphere arousal or unusual cortical responses to speech stimuli might be associated with anomalies in language function that reportedly occur when psychopaths perform lateralized information-processing tasks. ERPs to phonemic stimuli were recorded while 11 psychopathic (P) and 13 nonpsychopathic (NP) male prison inmates performed a Single-Task and a Dual-Task. In the Single-Task, a speech discrimination ‘oddball’ paradigm, the subject was required to respond whenever a target stimulus (the less frequent of two phonemes) occured. In the Dual-Task, he had to respond to target stimuli while simultaneously performing a perceptual-motor (distractor) task. There were no group differences in ERP measures of central arousal (N100) during performance of the Single- and Dual-Tasks. For both groups, the P300 component of the ERP to the target stimulus was smaller and had longer latency during the Dual-Task than during the Single-Task, indicating that in the Dual-Task phonemic discrimination and the perceptual-motor task completed for similar perceptual resources. Overlapping Group P's P300 responses to the target stimulus during the Dual-Task was a vertex and asymmetric (left-hemisphere) positive slow wave (SW), suggesting unusual speech processing in psychopaths under conditions of distraction, perhaps related to reduced sensitivity to the sequential probabilities associated with events presented in an auditory channel. The results were consistent with the hypothesis that psychopaths have limited left-hemisphere resources for processing linguistic stimuli.     

Time for Change

Metaphysical theories of change incorporate substantive commitments to theories of persistence. The two most prominent classes of such theories are endurantism and perdurantism. Defenders of endurancestyle accounts of change, such as Klein, Hinchliff, and Oderberg, do so through appeal to a priori intuitions about change. We argue that this methodology is understandable but mistaken—an adequate metaphysics of change must accommodate all experiences of change, not merely intuitions about a limited variety of cases. Once we examine additional experiences of change, particularly those in (special) relativistic circumstances, it becomes clear that only a perdurance account of change is adequate.     

幼儿在联合行动中共同表征能力的发展

为探究幼儿联合行动共同表征能力的发展,实验1通过比较186名3~5岁幼儿在相同任务和不同任务的表现,发现4岁和5岁幼儿在不同任务中的表现比相同任务差;实验2进一步验证幼儿在不同任务中较差的表现源于对自我和同伴的共同表征。结论：3岁幼儿无法在联合任务中同时表征自我和同伴,没有表现出明显的共同表征能力,4岁以上幼儿开始具备稳定的共同表征能力,能够在联合任务中同时表征自己和同伴,由此对自己的行为表现造成干扰。     

Response-repetition effects in task switching with and without response execution

Previous research into the mechanisms of task switching has shown that repeating the same response in a different task context is associated with costs. To investigate whether such response-repetition costs occur even when the first of the two responses is not overtly executed, we used a variant of the change-signal paradigm. Subjects responded to a first stimulus by pressing a left or right response key. In half of the trials, a second stimulus occurred after a variable, adaptively adjusted delay, indicating to abandon the first response, and only respond to the second stimulus using another set of left and right response keys. In Experiment 1, different tasks had to be performed with the first and second stimulus (task-switch condition); in Experiment 2, the same task had to be performed with both stimuli (task-repetition condition). Response-repetition costs were obtained in Experiment 1, and response-repetition benefits in Experiment 2. Importantly, these costs and benefits were obtained even when the first of the two responses had not been overtly executed. The data support the idea that interference of task-specific response codes occurs at the level of abstract response codes. Interference of such response codes occurs even when the responses are not overtly executed.     

Emergent simple discrimination in children: Preference for non-preferred stimuli

Previous research (Smeets, 1991) suggested that when given a new discrimination, children respond on the basis of physical similarity with previously discriminated stimuli. They respond to a stimulus similar to another preferred stimulus (S+ transfer) and respond away from a stimulus similar to another nonpreferred stimulus (S- transfer). When both types of transfer apply to the same stimulus, S+ transfer prevails, S+ Priority Transfer (S+PT). The present study demonstrated that S+PT also occurs when the criterion task consists of two nonpreferred stimuli. When given a choice between two previously nonpreferred stimuli, one similar and one dissimilar to other preferred stimuli, children select the first one. They do not so, however, when a nonpreferred stimulus resembling another preferred stimulus is presented with a new nonpreferred stimulus. These findings suggest that the children's preferences were not based on the physical resemblance with other (non)preferred stimuli but on the functions (S+, S-, S0) of individual stimulus components. A theoretical model is presented that accounts for all experimental data reported in the previous and present study. The model implies that discriminative responding not only results from but also determines the functional properties of individual stimulus elements.     

Anxiety sensitivity and retaliatory aggressive behavior in research volunteers

An important focus of recent aggression research has been to identify personality variables that influence the expression of aggression. One such variable may be anxiety sensitivity (AS). Individuals high in AS fear unpleasant anxiety-related physiological sensations and perhaps physiological arousal in general. Accordingly, people high in AS are motivated to avoid situations that produce these sensations. With respect to aggressive encounters, an intense attack by an opponent involves significant physiological arousal. High anxiety-sensitive individuals may therefore attempt to decrease the intensity of the interaction by responding in a non-aggressive or conciliatory manner. To test this possibility, 112 community volunteers completed a measure of AS and a well-validated laboratory task designed to assess aggressive behavior. As predicted, an inverse relation between AS and extreme aggressive responding was found. Specifically, as AS increases, retaliatory aggression is less likely after intense attack by an opponent.     

How pleasant was your childhood? Beliefs about memory shape inferences from experienced difficulty of recall

People's beliefs about how memory works can affect their inferences from experienced difficulty of recall. Participants were asked to recall either 4 childhood events (experienced as an easy task) or 12 childhood events (experienced as a difficult task). Subsequently, they were led to believe that either pleasant or unpleasant periods of one's life fade from memory. When the recall task was difficult (12 events), participants who believed that memories from unpleasant periods fade away rated their childhood as less happy than participants who believed that memories from pleasant periods fade away. The opposite pattern was observed when the recall task was easy (4 events). This interplay of recall experiences and memory beliefs suggests that the judgmental impact of subjective experiences is shaped by beliefs about their meaning. It also suggests that the recall difficulty in clinical memory work may lead a person to make negative inferences about his or her childhood, provided the person shares the popular belief that memory represses negative information.