Intelligence and susceptibility to persuasion under conditions of active and passive participation

An experiment was conducted to test the prediction that verbal intelligence facilitates opinion change induced by active participation (improvising arguments). Seventy-one subjects were randomly assigned to improvise arguments or read persuasive messages advocating the same point of view (passive, control condition) about one of three topics. A short test of verbal intelligence was administered during the experiment; also, American College Test scores were obtained from the files of all subjects for whom they were available. Analysis of variance (with subjects partitioned into high and low intelligence groups) and correlational analyses supported the above prediction. There was some evidence that quality of the arguments improvised mediated the relationship between intelligence and opinion change, but the results were not totally consistent.     

Emotional participation in musical and non-musical behaviors

Existence of similarities of overall brain activation, specifically during emotional and other common psychological operations (discussed by Lindquist et al.), supports a proposal that emotion participates continuously in dynamic adjustment of behavior. The proposed participation can clarify the relationship of emotion to musical experience. Music, in turn, can help explore such participation.     

Recognition memory for active and passive sentences

Data from three experiments are reported in which recognition memory for active and passive sentences is compared. The results consistently show no difference, a result taken to invalidate syntactic memory hypotheses (e.g., the kernel plus tag and markedness hypotheses) which assume that the stored representation of passive sentences is more complex than that of active sentences. Previous reports of superior recall of active sentences are attributed to a reconstructive bias. One form of propositional hypothesis and a verbatim hypothesis are consistent with the data.This research was supported by Grant MH 19859 from NIMH to the first author, and by Rutgers University Research Council grants to both authors.     

Eye movements and hazard perception in active and passive driving

ABSTRACT

Differences in eye movement patterns are often found when comparing passive viewing paradigms to actively engaging in everyday tasks. Arguably, investigations into visuomotor control should therefore be most useful when conducted in settings that incorporate the intrinsic link between vision and action. We present a study that compares oculomotor behaviour and hazard reaction times across a simulated driving task and a comparable, but passive, video-based hazard perception task. We found that participants scanned the road less during the active driving task and fixated closer to the front of the vehicle. Participants were also slower to detect the hazards in the driving task. Our results suggest that the interactivity of simulated driving places increased demand upon the visual and attention systems than simply viewing driving movies. We offer insights into why these differences occur and explore the possible implications of such findings within the wider context of driver training and assessment.     

Modification of preschool sex-typed behaviors by participation in adult-structured activities

Earlier studies have shown the girls spend more time than boys in activities that are highly structured by adults. Structured activities may encourage feminine sex-typed behaviors such as compliance to adults; low-structure activities may encourage masculine sex-typed behaviors such as independence and assertiveness. In the present study the effects of high or low levels of adult structuring on children's social behavior during preschool free-play activities were tested in a field experiment carried out during an entire semester in one preschool classroom. For the first 15 minutes of free play, children were assigned to high- or low-structure activities. As predicted, when children were in high-structure activities, they exhibited high rates of bids for recognition and compliance to adults; in low-structure activities, they exhibited peer-directed leadership, bids for recognition, and compliance. There were no generalized effects of these treatments on their subsequent free choice of activities or social behavior. The study demonstrates powerful effects of naturally occurring variations in children's play activities on sex-typed social behaviors.     

Definiteness and voice in the interpretation of active and passive sentences

In Experiment I, subjects were given active and passive sentences where the definiteness of nominals is varied and about which uncertainty was expressed, e.g. “I thought that the policeman had been injured by a gangster, but I was mistaken, in fact.”. Their task was to decide what was the target of the mistake by completing freely the sentence in such a way that the account would be corrected. When the nominals are differentially determined (a-the, the-a), the pattern of responses indicates that, for both active and passive, subjects were more likely to conclude that it was the non-definitely marked nominal that had been involved in the mistake rather than the definitely marked one. When both nominals are similarly determined (a-a, the-the), subjects were more likely to indicate the event itself as having been involved in the mistake. This supports the hypothesis that subjects are able to utilize definiteness to determine the relation between presupposed and assertional information. In Experiment II, subjects were given paired active and passive sentences with differentially determined nominals and were required to choose between the two syntactic forms of each pair the one they would prefer to use. The pattern of responses clearly shows that subjects were more likely to choose the voice allowing the hypothesized preferential order “Definitely marked grammatical subject-non-definitely marked grammatical object”. Passive transformational rule is thus interpreted as a particular case of a more general rule specifying the ways in which what is made known (comment) is nested on to what is already assumed to be the case (topic).     

Not just apologizing: The impact of complaint handling on sustained participation behavior in live-streaming shopping

In a live-streaming shopping community, the quality of complaint handling may significantly influence relationship recovery between the consumer and retailer (or streamer) following service failures. Despite the significant progress made in previous works, there are still research gaps in the study of customer complaint handling and customers' post-behavior. Therefore, this study introduced the important variable “swift-guanxi” (SG) to explore the relationship between complaint handling and the sustained participation of customers. Data were collected through both online and offline methods. A structural equation model (SEM) was used to test the relevant hypotheses. The results from assessing these data indicate that the factors of conversational human voice (CHV), reply length (RL) and perceived justice (PJ) all exert a significant influence on SG, which in turn affects the sustained participation behavior (SPB) of customers. In addition, complaint publicization (CP) has a negative impact on this behavior.     

Profiling active and passive nonrespondents to an organizational survey

In this field study (N = 405) population profiling was introduced to examine general and specific classes of nonresponse (active vs. passive) to a satisfaction survey. The active nonrespondent group (i.e., purposeful nonresponders) was relatively small (approximately 15%). Active nonrespondents, in comparison with respondents, were less satisfied with the entity sponsoring the survey and were less conscientious. Passive nonrespondents (e.g., forgot), who represented the majority of nonrespondents, were attitudinally similar to respondents but differed with regard to personality. Nonresponse bias does not appear to be a substantive concern for satisfaction type variables--the typical core of an organizational survey. If the survey concerns topics strongly related to Conscientiousness and Agreeableness, the respondent sample may not be representative of the population.     

‘Window’ shopping and browsing opportunities in cyberspace

This article reviews the integral nature of browsing to the shopping experience and then explores the different types of browsing and searching that are supported in the online environment. Browsing contexts and episodes occur when consumers use browsers, URLs, search engines, menu categories and shopping bots to identify merchants and products. Browsing may be both intentional and unintentional, from the consumer's perspective, and controlled or uncontrolled, on the merchant's part. A matrix proposes four different categories of searching: partnership, consumer owned, merchant owned, and no‐one's land. These categories need to be taken into account when designing further research to profile browsing behaviour and to investigate the effect that it has on purchase decisions. Copyright © 2002 Henry Stewart Publications.     

Reaction time and movement time after active and passive smoking

Reaction time and movement time were studied following active and passive smoking in two groups of 20 women. All subjects were tested under a clean air and smoky air condition and the results showed that, while there was no difference between groups for either measure in the clear air condition, the active smokers had faster reaction time and movement time in the smoky air condition. Smoky air had no significant effect on the responses of the passive smoking group.     

Shifts in kinesthesis through time and after active and passive movement.

The position sense of a stationary arm was investigated subsequent to an horizontally adductive movement with axis the shoulder joint. The right arm was the treated arm: it reached a test position actively, using minimal voluntary effort, or passively from each of 10 starting positons. The blind-folded S localized the index finger of the treated arm by attempting to touch it with the index finger of his left hand. The results indicate that subsequent to active movement the final position of a limb is more accurately known than a position resulting from passive movement. A second finding is that concomitant with both forms of limb placement there is a unidirectional drift of perceived limb position over trials.     

Markedness and perspective in the interpretation of the active and passive voice

The subjects were presented with active and passive sentences. For each sentence, they had to choose between two alternative implications. The pattern of choices indicates that in the passive the logical subject was interpreted by the subjects as the focal point of the information asserted by the sentence and as the carrier of overall responsibility for the sentential proposition. In contrast to the passive, there was no clear pattern of preferences for the active. The difference between the two voices was attributed to their markedness asymmetry, the passive being marked and the active unmarked. It is concluded that the active offers a neutral structure for conveying information; a structure available for use when one does not want to superimpose on the information content any stylistic or connotational implications. The passive, on the other hand, suggests special connotations in addition to the basic message.     

Visual tracking of active and passive movements of the hand

Two experiments were performed to evaluate the influence of movement frequency and predictability on visual tracking of the actively and the passively moved hand. Four measures of tracking precision were employed: (a) saccades/cycle, (b) percent of pursuit movement, (c) eye amplitude/arm amplitude, (d) asynchrony of eye and hand at reversal. Active and passive limb movements were tracked with nearly identical accuracy and were always vastly superior to tracking an external visual target undergoing comparable motion. Proprioceptive information about target position appears to provide velocity and position information about target location. Its presence permits the development of central eye-movement programmes that move the eyes in patterns that approximate but do not exactly match, temporally or spatially, the motion of the hand.     

Walking through doorways causes forgetting: active and passive interaction

ABSTRACT

The current study explored the location updating effect when people passively interacted with an environment. This was assessed experimentally by having one person actively navigate through a virtual environment while picking up and putting objects down. A second person passively viewed the movement. Both participants responded to memory probes for objects they encountered. Probes appeared when the active participant moved halfway across a room or immediately after moving into a new room. Consistent with previous research, a location updating effect was found. That is, memory was worse following a shift to a new room. This effect was found for both active and passive participants but was smaller for the passive group. Thus, the shift from one event to another causes information to be harder to remember, reinforcing the importance of event cognition in memory. However, the more involved a person is in the interactive event, the more pronounced the effects.     

Blood pressure reactivity to active and passive behavioral conditions in hypertensives and normotensives

Blood pressure reactivity and passive behavioral tasks was studied in patients with mild essential hypertension and normotensive controls. The passive condition included 10 presentations of a 6 sec, 78 dB, 1000 Hz tone without any response requirements. In the active condition subjects were given an additional 10 tone presentations and asked to press a push-button at tone termination. The absolute and percent increase in systolic blood pressure from rest was greater in hypertensives than normotensives in response to the active condition but similar to the passive condition. It is concluded that patients with hypertension compared to normotensive controls show exaggerated blood pressure reactivity to tasks involving active but not passive coping efforts. Since the tasks used to induce active and passive coping in the present study were identical apart from coping requirements, the notion that the activity dimension in and of itself modulates reactivity differences between patients and controls is supported.