It's the thought that counts: specific brain regions for one component of theory of mind

Evidence from developmental psychology suggests that representing the contents of other people's thoughts and beliefs depends on a component of reasoning about other minds (theory of mind) that is distinct from the earlier-developing mental-state concepts for goals, perceptions, and feelings. To provide converging evidence, the current study investigated the substrate of the late-developing process in adult brains. Three regions--the right and left temporo-parietal junction and the posterior cingulate--responded selectively when subjects read about a protagonist's thoughts, but not when they read about other subjective, internal states or other socially relevant information about a person. By contrast, the medial prefrontal cortex responded equivalently in all of these story conditions, a result consistent with a broader role for medial prefrontal cortex in general social cognition. These data support the hypothesis that the early- and late-developing components of theory of mind rely on separate psychological and neural mechanisms, and that these mechanisms remain distinct into adulthood.     

It's not just the amount that counts: balanced need satisfaction also affects well-being

The basic psychological needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness have been found to have unique additive effects on psychological well-being (see E. L. Deci & R. M. Ryan, 2000). In the present study, the authors extended these findings by examining whether the balance in the satisfaction of these 3 needs is also important. The results of 4 studies showed that people who experienced balanced need satisfaction reported higher well-being than those with the same sum score who reported greater variability in need satisfaction. This finding emerged for multiple measures of needs and adjustment and was independent of neuroticism. Moreover, results were obtained consistently across concurrent, prospective, daily diary, and observer-report study designs. Discussion focuses on the psychological meaning and functional implications of balanced need satisfaction.     

On the regress problem of deciding how to decide

Any decision is made in some way or another. Which way? (Have I worked out enough alternatives to choose from? Which decision rule to apply?) That is a higher-order decision problem, to be dealt with in some way or other. Which way? That is an even higher-order decision problem. There seems to be a regress of decision problems toward higher and higher orders. But in daily life we stop moving to higher-order decision problems—stop the regress—at some finite point. The regress problem of deciding how to decide is the problem of explaining what would make it rational to stop the regress. I will give a new solution in the present paper. The result suggests a new way of looking at standard Bayesian theory and the more recent theory of adaptive rationality.     

It's not that bad: Social challenges to emotional disclosure enhance adjustment to stress

Studies conducted in the United States (n=115) and Spain (n=146) examined how talking about an acute stressor in different social contexts influences cognitive, emotional, and physiological adjustment. In both studies, female college students viewed a video dramatizing a real-life, gang rape scene on two separate days. After the first viewing, participants were randomly assigned to one of four social conditions: no talk, talk alone about their reactions, talk to a validating confederate about their reactions, or talk to a challenging confederate about their reactions. Participants in the challenge condition showed the greatest emotional, cognitive, and physiological benefits across cultures, whereas participants in the validate and talk conditions evidenced only modest benefits. These findings suggest that the social context of disclosure has a strong influence on adjustment processes and that providing an alternative and more sanguine perspective can help individuals recover from acute stressors.     

The intergenerational transmission of ethnic essentialism: how parents talk counts the most

The present study analyzed the role of parents as potential sources of children's essentialist beliefs about ethnicity. We tested 76 parent–child (5‐year‐olds) dyads of Jewish Israeli parents from three social groups, defined by the kindergartens children attended: national religious, secular, or Jewish‐Arab integrated. We assessed parents' and children's beliefs, and parents' usage of ethnic attitudinal and categorization markers in a book‐reading activity. Overall, national religious parents manifested the strongest ethnic essentialism and endorsement of anti‐negotiations with Palestinians, and were the most likely to express negative attitudes and mark ethnic categories in their conversations with their children. Moreover, regression analyses revealed that ethnic categorization in parents' speech was the most reliable predictor of children's ethnic essentialism. Ethnic essentialism is transmitted to children not via explicit communication of intergroup beliefs or attitudes, but rather via the sheer marking of categories in ways that resonate with children's own intuitive ways of conceptualizing the social world.     

A bias to detail: how hand position modulates visual learning and visual memory

In this report, we examine whether and how altered aspects of perception and attention near the hands affect one’s learning of to-be-remembered visual material. We employed the contextual cuing paradigm of visual learning in two experiments. Participants searched for a target embedded within images of fractals and other complex geometrical patterns while either holding their hands near to or far from the stimuli. When visual features and structural patterns remained constant across to-be-learned images (Exp. 1), no difference emerged between hand postures in the observed rates of learning. However, when to-be-learned scenes maintained structural pattern information but changed in color (Exp. 2), participants exhibited substantially slower rates of learning when holding their hands near the material. This finding shows that learning near the hands is impaired in situations in which common information must be abstracted from visually unique images, suggesting a bias toward detail-oriented processing near the hands.     

But I thought I knew that: using confidence estimation as a debiasing technique to improve classroom performance

Our assessments of how much we know about a particular topic can be affected by our confidence in our knowledge. Research in judgement and decision making has shown that people are generally overconfident in their judgements or decisions, and that this bias can be reduced with training. We present two studies designed to assess whether debiasing can be accomplished in a classroom setting and whether it has practical value for students. In Experiment 1 simply providing confidence estimates as questions were answered was enough to debias students in a series of course‐related quizzes. In Experiment 2, weekly quizzes were given in a computer‐administered format. Students were given feedback for each question as it was completed. We found that accuracy on quizzes improved as confidence declined. We also found that students performed better in the course when they received debiasing training. We suggest that debiasing training prompted students to develop and use metacognitive skills that allowed them to assess their knowledge more accurately. Given this, training for these skills has practical value in the classroom. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The stroop effect: It is not the robust phenomenon that you have thought it to be

Five experiments demonstrate that context has a powerful effect on the ease with which people can name (Experiments 1-3) or categorize (Experiments 4-5) a stimulus while ignoring another stimulus, irrelevant or conflicting with the target. Selectivity of attention to the target dimension was gauged through Stroop and Garner effects. When the stimulus values along the target dimension and the to-be-ignored dimension were correlated over the experimental trials, large effects of Stroop and Garner influenced performance. However, when random allocation of values created zero dimensional correlation, the Stroop effects vanished. These results imply that when the nominally irrelevant dimension is in fact correlated with the relevant dimension, participants then attend to the irrelevant dimension and thus open themselves up to Stroop interference. Another variable of context, the relative salience of the constituent dimensions, also affected performance with the more discriminable dimension disrupting selective attention to the less discriminable dimension. The results demonstrate the importance of context in engendering the failure of selective attention and challenge traditional automaticity accounts of the Stroop effect.     

It's not all about me: motivating hand hygiene among health care professionals by focusing on patients

Diseases often spread in hospitals because health care professionals fail to wash their hands. Research suggests that to increase health and safety behaviors, it is important to highlight the personal consequences for the actor. However, because people (and health care professionals in particular) tend to be overconfident about personal immunity, the most effective messages about hand hygiene may be those that highlight its consequences for other people. In two field experiments in a hospital, we compared the effectiveness of signs about hand hygiene that emphasized personal safety ("Hand hygiene prevents you from catching diseases") or patient safety ("Hand hygiene prevents patients from catching diseases"). We assessed hand hygiene by measuring the amount of soap and hand-sanitizing gel used from dispensers (Experiment 1) and conducting covert, independent observations of health care professionals' hand-hygiene behaviors (Experiment 2). Results showed that changing a single word in messages motivated meaningful changes in behavior: The hand hygiene of health care professionals increased significantly when they were reminded of the implications for patients but not when they were reminded of the implications for themselves.     

It's what's on the outside that matters: an advantage for external features in children's word recognition

The relative importance of internal and external letter features of words in children's developing reading was investigated to clarify further the nature of early featural analysis. In Experiment 1, 72 6-, 8-, and 10-year-olds read aloud words displayed as wholes, external features only (central features missing, thereby preserving word shape information), or internal features only (central features preserved). There was an improvement in the processing of external features compared with internal features as reading experience increased. Experiment 2 examined the processing of the internal and external features of words employing a forward priming paradigm with 60 8-, 10-, and 12-year-olds. Reaction times to internal feature primes were equivalent to a nonprime blank condition, whereas responses to external feature primes were faster than those to the other two prime types. This advantage for the external features of words is discussed in terms of an early and enduring role for processing the external visual features in words during reading development.     

Not as gloomy as we thought: reassessing how the public understands probability of precipitation forecasts

Prior research on probability of precipitation (PoP) forecasts showed that many people wrongfully believe that PoP forecasts are derived from a percentage of time, a percentage of a region or the strength of agreement among forecasters. We posit that the wording of interpretation selection tasks matters, because different response options are associated with different metacognitive feelings. We hypothesised that the incorrect PoP interpretations are more often chosen by participants because they are more fluent than the correct PoP interpretation. We assessed the role of fluency in correctness perception (Study 1) and reassessed PoP interpretations with a more fluent correct interpretation (Study 2). Fluency perception was positively related with perception of correctness. Furthermore, participants selected the correct fluent interpretation more often than the correct disfluent one. We have drawn a more optimistic picture of people’s PoP forecasts understanding than that shown before and have discussed the methodological and applied implications.     

It's time to rework the blueprints: building a science for clinical psychology

The aims in this article are to connect the conceptual structure of clinical psychological science to what the author believes to be the omnipresent principles of evolution, use the evolutionary model to create a deductively derived clinical theory and taxonomy, link the theory and taxonomy to comprehensive and integrated approaches to assessment, and outline a framework for an integrative synergistic model of psychotherapy. These foundations also provide a framework for a systematic approach to the subject realms of personology and psychopathology. Exploring nature's deep principles, the model revives the personologic concept christened by Henry Murray some 65 years ago; it also parallels the interface between human social functioning and evolutionary biology proposed by Edward Wilson in his concept of sociobiology.     

Haptic probing: perceiving the length of a probe and the distance of a surface probed.

Knowing about the properties of objects by wielding them and knowing about the distances of surfaces by striking them with objects as probes are examples of dynamic or effortful touch. Six experiments focused on the invariant mechanical parameters that couple the time-varying states (displacements, velocities) of hand-held rods to the time-varying torques and forces imposed upon them by wielding and probing. There were three major conclusions. First, when a probe is wielded without contact, perceived probe length is a function of the probe's rotational inertia; however, with contact, perceived probe length is affected by the rotational inertia and the distance of the point of contact from the probe's center of percussion. Second, when a surface is struck with a probe, perceived surface distance is affected by the probe's rotational inertia and the angle of inclination of the probe at contact. Third, under seemingly identical conditions of probing, either probe length or surface distance can be perceived selectively without confusion. Results were discussed in terms of haptic information, haptic attention, and the dynamics of probing.     

Infants perceiving and acting on the eyes: tests of an evolutionary hypothesis

It has been hypothesized that an evolutionarily ancient mechanism underlies the ability of human infants to detect and act upon the direction of eye gaze of another human face. However, the evidence from behavioral studies with infants is also consistent with a more domain-general system responsive to the lateral motion of stimuli regardless of whether or not eyes are involved. To address this issue three experiments with 4-month-old infants are reported that utilize a standard face-cueing paradigm. In the first experiment an inverted face was used to investigate whether the motion of the pupils elicits the cueing effect regardless of the surrounding face context. In the second experiment pupil motion and eye gaze direction were opposed, allowing us to assess their relative importance. In a third experiment, a more complex gaze shift sequence allowed us to analyse the importance of beginning with a period of mutual gaze. Overall, the results were consistent with the importance of the perceived direction of motion of pupils. However, to be effective in cueing spatial locations this motion needs to be preceded by a period of direct mutual gaze (eye contact). We suggest that evolution results in information-processing biases that shape and constrain the outcome of individual development to eventually result in adult adaptive specializations.     

Studies on time: a proposal on how to get out of circularity

The analysis of time is vitiated very often by circularity: several disciplines, such as psychology, linguistics, and neurosciences, analyze time by using concepts or terms which already contain in themselves, or are based, on the experience and notion of time (as when, for example, time is defined as “duration”, or when our ability to estimate durations is explained by resorting to the notion of an internal clock). Some detailed examples of circularity in the analysis of time are given here and examined. A way out of circularity is then given: it is represented by the proposal of attentional semantics (AS) of considering words and their meanings in terms of the aim they serve, and the means and processes developed and implemented in order to achieve that aim. According to AS, the main aim of words is that of indicating to, and eliciting in, the listener or reader a specific conscious experience: namely, the conscious experience referred to by their meanings. Words achieve their main aim by conveying the condensed instructions on the attentional operations one has to perform if one wants to consciously experience what is expressed through and by them. By describing the conscious experiences elicited by words in terms of the attentional operations that are responsible for the production of such conscious experiences, AS offers an a-linguistic counterpart to language, and therefore an effective way out of circularity. Following in footsteps of Mach (Contributions to the analysis of the sensations, 1890), but slightly revising his hypothesis, AS defines time-sensation as the perception of the effort made, or alternatively the nervous energy expended, by the organ of attention when performing a “temporal activity” (for instance, estimating duration), that is, when one’s own attention is focused in a continuous and incremental way on the conscious product of the (“non-temporal”) activity performed by means of another portion of one’s attention.