Inferences about the authentic self: when do actions say more than mental states?

Three studies involving 478 undergraduates examined the perceived importance of observable actions versus mental states in revealing the "true self"-the authentic and fundamental nature of a target person. Results suggest that when people have only limited information about a target, they believe that an action is more diagnostic of the individual's true self than the accompanying mental state. When participants have knowledge concerning chronic dispositional tendencies of the target, however, they judge that a chronic mental state is more diagnostic of the true self than a chronic action tendency. Considered together, the findings suggest that people conceptualize the true self as a relatively private entity but nevertheless believe that an action of a little-known person may be particularly informative about that individual. Perceived diagnosticity of the true self was partially mediated by inferences concerning the relative stability of actions versus states but not by inferences of volition.     

Reappraising fear: is up-regulation more efficient than down-regulation?

Motivation and Emotion - Catastrophizing thoughts may contribute to the development of anxiety, but functional emotion regulation may help to improve treatment. No study so far directly compared...     

Human feelings: why are some more aware than others?

A recent article reports that human perception of heartbeat timing is mediated by right (non-dominant) anterior insular cortex, and that the activity and the size of this region is directly correlated with individuals' subjective awareness of inner body feelings and emotionality. These results support the somatic-marker hypothesis of consciousness (a modern successor to the James-Lange theory of emotion) and the neuroanatomical concept that human awareness is based on a phylogenetically distinct interoceptive pathway.     

Are we more consistent when talking about ourselves than when behaving? Consistency differences through a questionnaire and an objective task

The present paper aimed to examine questionnaire response patterns and objective task-based test behavioral patterns in order to analyze the differences people show in consistency. It is hypothesized that people tend to be more consistent when talking about themselves (when describing themselves through verbal statements) that when they solve a task (when behaving). Consistency is computed using the pi* statistic (Hernandez, Rubio, Revuelta, & Santacreu, 2006). According to this procedure, consistency is defined as the value and the dimensionality of the latent trait of an individual (theta) remaining invariant through out the test of. Participants who are consistent must show a constant theta and follow a given response pattern during the entire course of the test. A sample of 3,972 participants was used. Results reveal that 68% of participants showed a consistent response pattern when completing the questionnaire. When tackling the task-based test, the percentage was 66%. 45% of individuals showed a consistent pattern in both tests. Implications for personality and individual differences assessment are discussed.     

Group decision making in the planning team process: Myth or reality?

Based upon theories from organizational psychology, this study assessed the relationships among school staff role, participation, and satisfaction during planning Team meetings which decide special education placements and programming. A strong positive relationship was found between staff role and participation. Regular education teachers were lowest in participation and satisfaction whereas school psychologists were ranked the highest on both variables. Other staff roles did not necessarily show a one-to-one relationship between participation and satisfaction levels, yet within roles, the level of satisfaction increased with higher levels of participation. These findings were discussed in the context of interdisciplinary decision making and implementation of the placement team decision.     

Transfer in discrimination learning: Do children mediate more than adults?

A series of four-dimensional, discrimination-learning problems were presented to second-, sixth-, eighth-, and twelfth-grade students (ages 7, 11, 13, and 17 years, respectively). One pretraining problem, using different dimensions, preceded the four experimental problems; these employed identical dimensions and stimulus values. Solutions were selected without dimensional replacement.Blank-trial probes enabled detection of initial predictions. Results clearly indicated that (1) older subjects made dramatically fewer intradimensional predictions (utilizing the solution dimension from the preceding problem) than did younger subjects, (2) all age groups demonstrated systematic changes over problems; these reflected the specific solution sequence experienced, and (3) there were consistent developmental differences in the speed with which subjects noted and utilized regularities across problems.The pattern of data is not congruent with the expectations of mediation theory. However, it is in accord with the transfer hypothesis, which is a recent extension of hypothesis theory. The transfer hypothesis provides a theoretical framework which suggests when we should observe “mediational” behavior (i.e., intradimensional transfer) and when to expect the inverse.     

Do egalitarians always help the disadvantaged more than the advantaged? Testing a value‐norm conflict hypothesis in Malaysia

Do egalitarians always express greater compassion toward the disadvantaged than toward the advantaged? A closer look at existing scholarship on the topic suggests that they likely do. Here, we investigated whether such tendency is also apparent within interdependent, high power distance cultures where the high‐status privilege prevails. Given the emphasis on harmony in social relations in interdependent cultures, we reasoned that egalitarians might experience a dissonance between their private equity values and a societal norm prescribing high‐status privilege, which we refer to as the value‐norm conflict. We therefore proposed and found evidence in Malaysia (N = 273) that egalitarians succumbed to the normative high‐status privilege in their culture: They displayed greater compassion towards higher than lower status victims, but only when the political cost of doing so was low. Interestingly, anti‐egalitarians displayed equitable levels of compassion for high‐ and low‐status victims, but only when the political cost for taking such action also was low. Hence, we show that even egalitarians can, at times, favor the privileged and that anti‐egalitarians can act equitably, so long as the political cost of doing so is trivial for them.     

What determines creative association? Revealing two factors which separately influence the creative process when solving the Remote Associates Test

The Remote Associates Test is a well‐established measure, frequently used to assess individuals’ creative abilities, as a function of the ability to elicit remote associates. The nature of the involved associative processes is still poorly understood. This hampers a deeper understanding of the creative process, rendering it difficult to determine what factors are controlled for, when the RAT is employed. We report an experiment that sheds further light on the nature of the associative process by manipulating (a) the frequency with which a pair of items are associated as associative strength, and (b) the probability of reaching the answer given the strength and the spread. Experimental results indicate a clear and surprisingly separate influence of frequency and probability on accuracy and response times. Frequency and probability both are thus factors that need to be included in the modeling process and controlled for when using the RAT to assess creativity.     

The measurement of locus of control: assessing more than meets the eye?

Ambiguities in the conceptions and measurement of locus of control were investigated in this study. Specifically, some psychometric properties of several widely used measures of perceived behavior-outcome contingency, interpersonal power, and social self-efficacy were assessed. To different degrees, the results indicated that all three measures of perceived behavior-outcome contingency lacked convergent and discriminant validity. Implications for interpreting past research, directions for future investigations, and limitations of the present study are discussed.     

The preparation of actions and parameters of action: A fixed or variable process?

Some information processing models consider the selection of an action plan (deciding what to do) and the parameterization of the action (deciding how to do it) as separate stages in movement preparation. Further, these models consider the stages to occur in a fixed order, whereby the selection of an action precedes the parameterization of the action. Five experiments are reported that tested this position. The first four experiments adopted a variation of Rosenbaum's (1980) precuing technique such that, under varying conditions, different amounts and types of advance information were provided to the subject, leaving only the unspecified action or parameter to be supplied following the imperative signal. The critical finding from each study was that the time to specify an action and the time to specify a parameter were equivalent. In experiment 5, similar results were obtained using a response priming paradigm (Rosenbaum and Kornblum 1982). The results of all five studies failed to support a fixed-order model of movement preparation and are more consistent with a variable-order model. The implications of these findings for other models of movement preparation are discussed.     

The development of children's action memory: When do actions speak louder than words?

Summary Although acting consistently has been found to improve memory, the reasons for this are unclear. In this investigation, we tested whether acting improves recall by integrating separate elements within an action into an organized whole and whether this process may be strategic. First graders, fourth graders, and college-aged adults listened to, acted out, or watched the performance of action-object phrases and then verbally reported or enacted the phrases. Phrases composed of transitive verbs were expected to be integrated more by action than phrases composed of intransitive verbs, and consequently recalled better, especially by the younger children. Recall increased between first and fourth grades, suggesting that some aspects of action memory may be strategic; however, there was no evidence that acting improves recall by means of integration. The pattern of results suggested that the nature of an action's outcome may contribute to the enactment effect.     

Predicting World Cup results: Do goals seem more likely when they pay off?

Bar-Hillel and Budescu (1995) failed to find a desirability bias in probability estimation. The World Cup soccer tournament provided an opportunity to revisit the phenomenon in a context in which desirability biases are notoriously rampant. Participants estimated the probabilities of various teams’ winning their upcoming games. They were promised money if one team—randomly designated by the experimenter—won its upcoming game. Participants assigned a higher probability to a victory by their target team than did other participants, whose promised monetary reward was contingent on the victory of its opponent. Prima facie, this seems to be a desirability bias. However, in a follow-up study that made one team salient, without promising monetary rewards, participants also judged their target team to be more likely to win. On grounds of parsimony, we conclude that what appears to be a desirability bias may just be a salience/marking effect, and—although optimism is a robust and ubiquitous human phenomenon—that wishful thinking still remains elusive.     

Inhibiting prepared and ongoing responses: Is there more than one kind of stopping?

Inhibiting movements has been investigated widely using the countermanding (stop signal) paradigm. Although it has been assumed that response inhibition, as measured by the countermanding task, generalizes to all forms of stopping, this has never been tested. In the present study, stopping performance in the countermanding paradigm was compared with stopping performance in a new paradigm in which a continuous-tracking task was used. Although stimulus presentations were matched across paradigms, the two tasks differed in the type of stopping required. In the countermanding paradigm, response inhibition latency was measured prior to response execution-this is, it was inferred from the successful withholding of a go response. In the new paradigm, response inhibition was carried out after response execution-that is, it was measured as the time to begin stopping a continuous tracking response. Results indicated that stopping latencies between the two paradigms were highly correlated, providing strong evidence that stopping an unexecuted response engages the same mechanisms as stopping an ongoing response.     

Interevent differences in event memory: Why are some events more recallable than others?

Interitem differences in the free recall of action events were studied in five experiments. The action events were presented in three different formats: minitasks performed by the subjects in response to verbal instructions from the experimenter (SPTs), minitasks performed by the experimenter (EPTs), and task instructions (TIs). Not only were reliable interevent differences in recall probability demonstrated within each format, but these differences tended to correlate across formats, especially between the SPTs and EPTs; thus, a highly recallable SPT also tended to be a highly recallable EPT. Attempts to explain interitem recall differences in terms of differences in familiarity, vividness, and the availability of environmental cues were largely unsuccessful. An experimental analysis of the action events into action and object components showed the recall probabilities of our events to be mainly dependent on the recall probabilities of their action components, with only a minor dependence on the recall probabilities of their object components.     

Preschoolers’ nonsymbolic arithmetic with large sets: Is addition more accurate than subtraction?

Adult and developing humans share with other animals analog magnitude representations of number that support nonsymbolic arithmetic with large sets. This experiment tested the hypothesis that such representations may be more accurate for addition than for subtraction in children as young as 3½ years of age. In these tasks, the experimenter hid two equal sets of cookies, visibly added to or subtracted from the sets, and then asked 3½-year-olds which set had more cookies. Initial set size was either large (7 or 9) or very large (18 or 30), and the final sets differed by either a high proportion (ratio of 1:2) or a low proportion (difference of 1 cookie). Children’s addition performance exceeded chance, as well as their subtraction performance, across set sizes and proportions, whereas subtraction performance did not exceed chance. Arithmetic performance was also independent of counting ability. Addition performance was remarkably accurate when ratios between outcomes were close to 1, in contrast to previous findings. Interpretations for the asymmetry between addition and subtraction are discussed with respect to the nature of representations for nonsymbolic arithmetic with large sets.     

The boundary conditions for Bohr’s law: when is reacting faster than acting?

In gunfights in Western movies, the hero typically wins, even though the villain draws first. Niels Bohr (Gamow, The great physicists from Galileo to Einstein. Chapter: The law of quantum, 1988) suggested that this reflected a psychophysical law, rather than a dramatic conceit. He hypothesized that reacting is faster than acting. Welchman, Stanley, Schomers, Miall, and Bülthoff (Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B: Biological Sciences, 277, 1667-1674, 2010) provided empirical evidence supporting "Bohr's law," showing that the time to complete simple manual actions was shorter when reacting than when initiating an action. Here we probe the limits of this effect. In three experiments, participants performed a simple manual action, which could either be self-initiated or executed following an external visual trigger. Inter-button time was reliably faster when the action was externally triggered. However, the effect disappeared for the second step in a two-step action. Furthermore, the effect reversed when a choice between two actions had to be made. Reacting is faster than acting, but only for simple, ballistic actions.     

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.