Investigating the role of time in affective forecasting: temporal influences on forecasting accuracy

Using extensive diary data from people taking their driver's license exam, the authors investigated the role of time in affective forecasting accuracy. Replicating existing findings, participants grossly overestimated the intensity and duration of their negative affect after failure and only slightly overestimated the intensity and duration of their positive affect after success. Extending existing findings, participants accurately predicted a decrease of their affective reactions over time but underestimated the speed with which this decrease would occur. In addition, they showed greater forecasting accuracy for positive affect than negative affect when the exam was distant and greater forecasting accuracy for negative affect than positive affect when the exam was close. The motivational processes underlying these findings are being discussed.     

Task influences on the production and comprehension of compound words

Studies of compound word processing have revealed effects of the compound’s constituents in a wide variety of word production and comprehension tasks. Surprisingly, effects of the compound’s constituents were not found in a recent word production study using the picture-naming task. Here, we examined whether these contrasting constituent effects reflect methodological differences or whether they reflect the influence of task-specific characteristics on compound processing. A large set of compounds was used to elicit picture-naming latencies in Experiment 1 and visual lexical decision latencies in Experiment 2. Regression analyses revealed surface frequency effects in picture naming and lexical decision and constituent effects only in lexical decision. These results rule out methodological differences as the basis for the contrasting constituent effects observed between the various tasks and imply that constituent effects are best understood as arising out of task-specific characteristics.     

The impact of post-event information on study-related memories: an exploration of the roles of judgemental anchoring, specific expectations about change, and motivational influences

We explored how well common theories about the impact of post-event information on memories explain recollections that occur naturally in university students' study routines. Instead of starting from a familiar research paradigm, such as those used in hindsight-bias research, the present study used a situation common to university students, and examined how well three candidate explanations--judgemental anchoring, implicit theories of change, and motivational influences--could explain the results we obtained in a long-term memory study that included three sessions, six months apart. We found that about two thirds of the memories of study-related issues were indeed biased, and that the impact of post-event information being used as an anchor is the most plausible explanation for the results. There were also some indications that memory biases might have been due, at least in part, to motivational factors.     

Task performance influences general self-efficacy,even without increases in the skills required to achieve success

ABSTRACT

The current article tests whether task performance influences general self-efficacy without increases in the skills required to achieve success. To do so, an experimental design is applied in which participants predict a random future event, and the relationship between prediction task performance and self-efficacy is observed. This article also tests whether this specific performance/self-efficacy relationship is moderated by (a) perceived illegitimacy of predicting the future and (b) self-assessed ability to predict the future. The results show that prediction task performance indeed influences general self-efficacy, and neither of these two moderators has a significant effect on this relationship. Therefore, performance on a low-stakes task does influence general self-efficacy—at least temporarily. More importantly, task performance is shown to influence self-efficacy even without increases in the skills required to achieve success.     

Emotional influences on memory

This study demonstrates that a complex relationship exists between emotion and memory. Support is given to the idea that emotional memory is dominant over item memory and that emotion memory is an instance of general semantic memory.     

成人在错误信念任务上的表现

考察成人在错误信念(FB)任务上是否存在"知识偏差"效应。实验1重复Birch等的实验程序并未得到与之一致的结果,成人在FB任务上的表现不理想,且无"知识偏差"效应存在。实验2排除琴盒位置及颜色的突出性影响后,结果与实验1相似。成人在FB任务上的不佳表现与成人具有心理理论的事实相悖,说明把通过FB任务作为衡量心理理论的唯一评定标准有待商榷。     

有待继续深入研究的课题

自<医学与哲学>杂志2003年第9期提出过度医疗的问题以来,已引起国内医务界的关注,有关过度医疗的文章,不断见诸于报刊.尽管如此,过度医疗问题的许多方面,远未穷尽,仍有待继续深入研究、剖析和思考.     

Task switching

Everyday life requires frequent shifts between cognitive tasks. Research reviewed in this article probes the control processes that reconfigure mental resources for a change of task by requiring subjects to switch frequently among a small set of simple tasks. Subjects' responses are substantially slower and, usually, more error-prone immediately after a task switch. This 'switch cost' is reduced, but not eliminated, by an opportunity for preparation. It seems to result from both transient and long-term carry-over of 'task-set' activation and inhibition as well as time consumed by task-set reconfiguration processes. Neuroimaging studies of task switching have revealed extra activation in numerous brain regions when subjects prepare to change tasks and when they perform a changed task, but we cannot yet separate 'controlling' from 'controlled' regions.     

Task Skills

The need for ongoing development and use of stan- dardized patient evaluations is discussed. Possible reasons that these are not being used are explored. Finally, a case example demon- strates the use of the Assessment of Occupational Functioning (1st rev.) (Brollier & Watts, 1985).     

Cognitive influences on perceptual processing

These experiments investigate the influence of frequency of occurrence of a visual stimulus (stimulus probability) on encoding processes, in an attempt to discover what sorts of mechanisms allow cognitive processes to modify perceptual processes. Experiments 1 and 2 show that frequently occurring visual letters do not facilitate encoding of visually similar letters. This implies that stimulus probability does not directly affect the feature detectors used in encoding the letters. Four more experiments provide evidence that stimulus probability has its effect on the availability of an abstract code that is generated by the encoding process from the visual input. Results from the experiments with letter stimuli could be interpreted using a model similar to the logogen model of Morton. Experiments with nonsense forms suggest that subjects use abstract codes in dealing with the forms only when the stimuli are constructed from a set of orthogonal features. A secondary finding was that visual quality has an effect that extends past the feature analysis stage and into a stage in which the visual input activities an abstract code. This result calls into question the common practice of interpreting the interaction of a factor with visual quality as evidence that the factor affects visual feature analysis.     

Top-down influences on perceptual grouping

Observers are faster to find and discriminate a target pair of adjacent, same-shaped objects that are within the same perceptual group (within group) versus within adjacent perceptual groups. Manipulating the probability of a within-group pair modulated this grouping effect such that it increased as the percentage of within-group trials (25%, 50%, or 75%) increased. This probability effect was stronger for extrinsic grouping factors (common region and connectedness) than for intrinsic factors (proximity and color similarity). Further experiments, however, suggested that this extrinsic-intrinsic difference was due to differences in overall speed with which the target pair was found. The results are interpreted as indicating that grouping is sensitive to top-down influences as long as there is sufficient time for feedback to operate.     

Social influences on reality-monitoring decisions

A modified Asch (1951) conformity paradigm was used to study the impact of social influence on reality-monitoring decisions about new items. Subjects studied pictures of some objects and imagined others. In a later test phase, they judged whether items had been perceived in the study phase, had been imagined, or were new. Critically, for some items, the subjects were informed of a confederate's response before rendering a judgment. Although the confederate was always correct when they responded to old items, for new items, the confederate responded perceived, imagined, or new, or did not respond (baseline). In two experiments, we show that memory for new items was influenced by an erroneous response of the confederate. Social conformity was reduced by undermining the credibility of the confederate (Experiments 1A and 1B), and the confederate's influence was evident even after there was only a 20-min delay between study and test (Experiment 2), when the subjects were 87% accurate on new baseline items. These experiments reveal the power of social influence on reality-monitoring accuracy and confidence.     

Structural influences on organizational commitment

Relationships of several aspects of organization structure with organizational commitment were examined within a multiple regression framework for 262 public sector employees. As a set, the six structural variables accounted for over 20% (p < .001) of the variation in organizational commitment for the vocationally heterogeneous sample studied. Overall, these results suggest that future model-building efforts should take organization structure into account as one potentially important dimension of influences on organizational commitment.