Interpersonal choice: The advantage on the left or on the right?

This study explored whether body specificity unconsciously influenced preferences for certain people. Participants were presented pictures of the heads of 2 persons who were described as having the similar personality, profession and family background. They were instructed to choose 1 in each pair as the preferred date, preferred friend, more charismatic boss or as the better national leader. The results showed body specificity had an influence on the selection preference on first impression. Participants tended to choose the character on their dominant‐hand side. This study not only provided the first social psychological evidence for the body‐specificity hypothesis, but also first demonstrated a role for body specificity in impression formation and selection preference.     

Staying on or getting off the sidewalk? Testing the Mehrabian-Russell Model on pedestrian behavior

Social and environmental psychology provide a variety of models based on which to understand how built environments can elicit people’s behavioral responses. The Mehrabian-Russell model (MRM), initially presented in 1974, provides a framework that explains avoid–approach behavior towards a place based on a primary emotional response (PER) and affective states elicited by the perceived stimuli from the environment. However, despite the potential applications of the MRM in travel behavior studies, traditional models (e.g., discrete choice models and integrated choice latent variable) do not incorporate this specific psychological process that converts environmental stimuli into behavioral responses. Hence, this paper aims to test the applicability of MRM to urban sidewalks. To fulfill this objective, we developed a two-level structural equation model using latent variables (LV) identified from a confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) based on 1056 in-person surveys on 30 different sidewalks in Bogotá, Colombia. We then evaluated the effect of the PER on declared avoidance as a proxy of behavioral intention. The CFA uncovered three LV equivalent to the three affective dimensions of the MRM—arousal, pleasure, and dominance—followed by a fourth LV, representing the PER, which explains the three previous LVs. This confirms the applicability of these kinds of psychological and environmental models in pedestrian behavior evaluation. We found that PER can explain the declared intention of avoidance towards the sidewalk in an urban setting. Proving that this kind of model can explain the way in which the built environment can elicit pedestrians’ emotional responses and subsequent behaviors, provides information that can be used as input in travel behavior studies focusing on the promotion of active traveling and mode change.     

One or Many? Commentary on Paper by Debra Rothschild

This discussion of Rothschild's case history of a multiple personality disorder (MPD) treatment situates the issue of integration versus multiple self states in terms of cultural values, psychoanalytic theory, and transference–countertransference experience of MPD patients and therapists. Views from autobiographies of multiple personalities are included, and some questions are raised about the relationship of “parts” to traumatic experience: When, and for whom, is integration a treatment goal? When is dissociation a characterological defense, and when do the parts each hold separate traumatic knowledge? How does this question bear on treatment—what gets integrated, the knowledge or the parts? Are termination and integration simultaneous? A recommendation is offered for a wider, more complex view of narrative and historicity in the understanding of narrative reconstruction. A concrete focus on veridicality can be a defense against the overwhelming nature of traumatic experience. A final view is offered which positions the author as more distant from integration as a goal than is Rothschild.     

Sublexical or lexical effects on serial recall of nonwords?

S. E. Gathercole, C. R. Frankish, S. J. Pickering, and S. Peaker (1999) reported 2 experiments in which they manipulated phonotactic properties of nonword stimuli and observed the effects on serial recall. Their results show superior recall for items consisting of more frequent phoneme pairs (biphone frequency). Biphone frequency was counted as the number of 3 phoneme words in which the phoneme pair occurs. In the first experiment of the current article, the authors made the same manipulation while controlling for the number of lexical neighbors and found no effect of biphone frequency. In the second experiment, the authors manipulated neighborhood size while controlling biphone frequency and found a significant effect of neighborhood size. The authors argued that serial recall of nonwords is influenced by lexical rather than sublexical knowledge.     

Hartmann on adaptation: an incomparable or incomprehensible legacy?

Hartmann's essay sets forth ideas of incomparable value as well as incomprehensible density. While he developed many important concepts which have far-ranging clinical utility even today, his attempt to extend psychoanalysis into a general psychology back-fired because it separated psychoanalytic concepts from analytic data. Because of his lack of clinical material or anecdotal illustration, Hartmann's theoretical scaffolding has been frequently misunderstood and misapplied. This paper re-examines Hartmann's essay in light of current clinical and metapsychological issues, and illustrates some of his more important ideas.     

Praise or blame? Affective influences on attributions for achievement

Three experiments showed that mood influences achievement attributions and that cognitive processes underlie these effects. In Experiment 1, happy Ss made more internal and stable attributions for success than failure in typical 'life dilemmas'. In Experiment 2, attributions for real-life exam performance were more internal and stable in a happy than in a sad mood. Dysphoric moods resulted in self-critical rather than self-enhancing attributions, contrary to motivational theories, but consistent with cognitive models and the clinical literature on depression. In Experiment 3 this pattern was repeated with direct self vs. other comparisons, and for self-efficacy judgements. The results are interpreted as supporting cognitive rather than motivational theories of attribution biases. The implications of the results for clinical research, and contemporary affect-cognition theories are considered.     

Beneficiary or benefactor: are people more prosocial when they reflect on receiving or giving?

Research shows that reflecting on benefits received can make people happier, but it is unclear whether or not such reflection makes them more helpful. Receiving benefits can promote prosocial behavior through reciprocity and positive affect, but these effects are often relationship-specific, short-lived, and complicated by ambivalent reactions. We propose that prosocial behavior is more likely when people reflect on being a benefactor to others, rather than a beneficiary. The experience of giving benefits may encourage prosocial behavior by increasing the salience and strength of one's identity as a capable, caring contributor. In field and laboratory experiments, we found that participants who reflected about giving benefits voluntarily contributed more time to their university, and were more likely to donate money to natural-disaster victims, than were participants who reflected about receiving benefits. When it comes to reflection, giving may be more powerful than receiving as a driver of prosocial behavior.     

Expressing embarrassment (or not): Which effects on produced impression on others and on attributed social value?

IntroductionEmbarrassment is a negative but prosocial emotion, which often arises from the transgression of a social norm. Its expression thus plays a crucial role in the social perception.ObjectiveThe aim of this paper is to document this role during both ordinary and extra-ordinary situations (i.e., with stakes).MethodUsing scenarios’ method, 27 participants and 100 recruiters evaluated persons expressing embarrassment or not.ResultsStudy 1 showed that during ordinary situations, nonverbal expression of embarrassment led to make a good impression by signalling desire of appeasement and prosociality. In contrast, Study 2 revealed that during a job interview, verbal expression of embarrassment through defensive tactics was rather negatively perceived.ConclusionThe manipulation of emotions as emotive communication tools will be discussed.     

Listening or telling? Thoughts on responsiblity in clinical ethics consultation

This article reviews the historical and current controversies about the nature of clinical ethics consultation, as a way to focus on the place and responsibility of ethics consultants within the context of clinical conversation — interpreted as a form of dialogue. These matters are approached through a particularly compelling instance of the controversy that involves several major figures in the field. The analysis serves to highlight very significant questions of the nature and constraints of clinical situations, and the moral responsibility and legal accountability that are especially important for clinical ethics consultants.     

Do we hear size or sound? Balls dropped on plates

The aim of this study is to examine whether it is possible to recover directly the size of an object from the sound of an impact. Specifically, the study is designed to investigate whether listeners can tell the size of a ball from the sound when it is dropped on plates of different diameters (on one, two, or three plates in Experiments 1, 2, and 3, respectively). In this paradigm, most of the sound produced is from the plate rather than the ball. Listeners were told neither how many different balls or plates were used nor the materials of the balls and plates. Although listeners provided reasonable ball size estimates, their judgments were influenced by the size of the plate: Balls were judged to be larger when dropped on larger plates. Moreover, listeners were generally unable to recognize either ball and plate materials or the number of plates used in Experiments 2 and 3. Finally, various acoustic properties of the sounds are shown to be correlated with listeners' judgments.     

Category effects on estimates of stimuli: perception or reconstruction?

The present study examined a common category effect that has been reported in the literature: the tendency for estimates of individual stimuli to be biased toward the central value of the presented set of stimuli. Both encoding and reconstruction accounts of this central-tendency effect are considered. Plain vertical lines and vertical lines embedded in the Müller-Lyer illusion were estimated while still in view or from memory. Although bias due to the Müller-Lyer illusion remained constant across the two conditions, bias due to the context set (category) occurred only when stimuli were estimated from memory. The results suggest that the category bias occurs at a later stage of processing that the Müller-Lyer effect and offer support for a reconstruction account of category effects on stimulus estimation.     

Social influence on physics and mathematics: local or attributive?

Summary  The article is devoted to the nature of science. To what extent are science and mathematics affected by the society in which they are developed? Philosophy of science has accepted the social influence on science, but limits it only to the context of discovery (a “locational” approach). An opposite “attributive” approach states that any part of science may be so influenced. L. Graham is sure that even the mathematical equations at the core of fundamental physical theories may display social attributes. He has used the investigations of the famous Soviet physicist V. Fock on the General Theory of Relativity which were under the influence of Marxism. The Goal of the article is to demonstrate: 1) Why Soviet science is not an appropriate subject-matter for testing the thesis of social constructivism, 2) That differnt levels of science and different stages in the development of science undergo social influences in different degrees ranging from very significant and unavoidable to absolutely trivial and easy eliminated.     

Cappadocian or Augustinian? Adjudicating Debates on Gender in the Resurrection

When the Apostle Paul inquired about the kind of body with which the dead will be raised (1 Cor. 15:35), he provided warrant for theological speculation with respect to the particulars of the resurrected body. A divergence of views about gender in the resurrection arose as early as the fourth century, with Gregory of Nyssa denying the existence of gender in the eschaton and Augustine of Hippo affirming it. In this article, I adjudicate this debate and its recent retrievals by arguing for the Augustinian position on the grounds that it best coheres with the nature of eschatological justice.     

Priming effects on musical chord identification: Facilitation or disruption?

The present study examined whether priming effects on chord identification are facilitative or disruptive, by employing a control (no‐prime) condition in addition to a related‐prime condition and an unrelated‐prime condition. According to the activation hypothesis, which predicts a facilitative effect of musically related chords, responses are expected to be faster in the related‐prime condition than in the control condition. In contrast, according to the schema hypothesis, which supposes a disruptive effect of musically unrelated chords, responses are expected to be slower in the unrelated‐prime condition than in the control condition. No facilitative effect was found in the related‐prime condition, whereas a marked disruptive effect was found in the unrelated‐prime condition. The disruptive effect was more pronounced in the major‐chord condition than in the minor‐chord condition, and more salient at an interonset interval of 1 s than at 3 s or 7 s. These results are interpreted in terms of the schema hypothesis.     

Friendly or just polite? The effect of self-esteem on attributions

Studied the effect of a person's self-esteem on his inferences about another person's feelings toward him. Fifty-six mule and female college student subjects of high or low chronic self-esteem (median split; modified version of Janis and Field's ‘Feelings of Inadequacy Scale’) received either a negative or a positive evaluation of themselves. They were told that the evaluation had been written by another subject who had acted either under ‘sincere’ instructions, which allowed him to give his own opinion, or under ‘role-playing’ instructions, which assigned him to write either a positive or a negative evaluation. The subject's take was to decide under which instruction his evaluation had been written. It was predicted from a self-concistency logic that low self-esteem subjects would attribute negative evaluations to ‘sincere’ and positive evaluations to ‘role-playing’ instructions, while high self-esteem subjects would make the reverse attributions. A significant self-esteem × evaluation positivity interaction (p <.01) supported this prediction.     

Self-Respect or Self-Delusion? Tomasi and Rawls on the Basic Liberties

A central feature of John Tomasi’s ‘Free Market Fairness’ is the emphasis it places upon the good of self-respect. Like Rawls, Tomasi believes that accounts of justice ought to offer support for the self-respect of citizens. Indeed, this is a key way in which Tomasi aspires to engage with the ‘high-liberal’ tradition. Unlike Rawls however, Tomasi argues that this support is best provided by our treating a broader set of economic liberties as basic liberties. In this paper I raise two concerns about this latter claim. Firstly, I trace a number of significant ways in which Tomasi’s discussion of self-respect differs from that of Rawls. Whilst such divergences are not necessarily problematic, I argue that they serve to limit the purchase his account has on left-liberals. Further, I argue that the ideal of self-respect is more deeply ‘hard-wired’ into Rawls’s account of justice than Tomasi recognises. As such, Tomasi fails to address the full range of additional (and important) ways in which Rawls expects his principles of justice to support citizens’ self-respect. I argue that this also limits the force of Tomasi’s claims. Secondly, and more seriously, I argue that there are significant tensions between Tomasi’s discussion of self-respect and his most forceful argument (the ‘greater wealth thesis’) in favour of the market democratic model he proposes. I argue firstly that Tomasi’s account of when (and why) citizens’ self-respect is jeopardised does not allow us to readily distinguish between economic security born of systems of welfare and redistribution, and economic security born of market forces and historical contingency. And more troubling still, is Tomasi’s belief that self-respecting citizens must view themselves as a ‘central cause’ of their situation. Such self-conceptions, I argue, can only coexist alongside the greater wealth thesis if citizens engage in quite naked self-delusions about their causal power. I argue that theorists of justice have good reason to be suspicious of promulgating such delusions and, as such, that this poses a serious problem for a justification of market democracy which aspires to rest upon an appeal to self-respect.     

Constraining or Constructive? The Effects of Examples on Idea Novelty

The tendency to conform to prior examples can be viewed as a form of mental fixation that has negative consequences and limits the scope and quality of designs. Two experiments using the Smith, S. M., Ward, T. B., & Schumacher, J. S. [(1993) Memory & Cognition, 21, 837‐845] toy invention task were conducted to determine whether participants who viewed example toys would subsequently generate toys rated as less novel compared to a control group viewing no examples. Although participants who viewed examples tended to incorporate the example features into their own ideas, the novelty of their ideas was rated as higher than those of the control group. This effect occurred both with no specific instruction regarding the examples (Experiment 1), as well as when specifically instructed to be different from the examples (Experiment 2). These results indicate that examples do not always have a negative impact on creativity, and suggest they may sometimes help lead to more unusual ideas.