Are implicitly activated associates selectively activated?

What constitutes a word’s associative past? Words differ in how many associates they activate in memory and, following a brief encounter, those with fewer associates are more likely to be recalled in the presence of related cues. The issue addressed in the present article is whether associative set size effects are produced through the selective activation of strong associates or through the activation of both strong and weak associates. The set size of the strongest associates was varied factorially with the set size of the associates of these associates. We assume that associate set size indexes a word’s weaker associates. Experiments 1 and 2 showed that recall varied inversely with both target and associate set sizes. Such results held over variations in study time and participant age. Experiment 3 showed that weak associates of the target had a greater effect on recall when there were more connections among the strongest associates in the set. The findings suggest that activation is not strength selective but includes both weak and strong associates.     

Are self-explanations always beneficial?

We present evidence suggesting that the effect of self-explanations on learning is not always beneficial and, in fact, in some contexts has a detrimental effect. Over eight sessions, fourth-graders engaged in investigation of a database with the goal of identifying causal effects. In a separate task, children in one condition also generated self-explanations regarding the mechanisms underlying the causal effects they believed to be present. In a comparison condition, they did not. On a transfer task, children in the no-explanations condition showed superior causal inference performance. The findings are discussed as reflecting the development of “data-reading” skill with which an emphasis on explanations may interfere.     

Are conservatives happier than liberals? Not always and not everywhere

Prior research has shown that conservatives report higher levels of subjective well-being than liberals (happiness gap). We investigate to what extent this phenomenon exists in different time periods within the United States (Study 1, N = 40,000) and in different countries (Study 2, N = 230,000). Consistent with our hypotheses grounded in the “shared reality” and person-culture fit literature, conservatives were happier and more satisfied with their lives than liberals to the extent that the conservative political ideology prevailed in their socio-cultural context, be it a specific time period in the U.S. or a specific country. These results show that the happiness gap between conservatives and liberals is less universal than previously assumed.     

Are mergers always stressful? Some evidence from the higher education sector

The disappointing outcomes of many mergers and acquisitions (M&As) have been increasingly attributed to the neglect and mismanagement of human aspects of the activity and the stressful and dysfunctional impact that such change events have on the employees involved (Cartwright & Cooper, 1996 Cartwright, S. and Cooper, C. L. 1996. Managing mergers, acquisitions and strategic alliances: Integrating people and cultures, Oxford, , UK: Butterworth Heinemann.  [Google Scholar]). M&As in the Higher Education sector are less common than corporate M&As and have received rather less attention. This study considers the experiences of employees involved in the merger of two UK universities. It highlights the stressful potential of the premerger period and the positive role of consultation and involvement.     

Are all Semitic languages immune to letter transpositions? The case of Maltese

Recent research using the rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) paradigm with English sentences that included words with letter transpositions (e.g., jugde) has shown that participants can readily reproduce the correctly spelled sentences with little cost; in contrast, there is a dramatic reading cost with root-derived Hebrew words (Velan & Frost, Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 14:913-918, 2007, Cognition 118:141-156, 2011). This divergence could be due to (1) the processing of root-derived words in Semitic languages or (2) the peculiarities of the transitional probabilities in root-derived Hebrew words. Unlike Hebrew, Maltese is a Semitic language that does not omit vowel information in print and whose morphology also has a significant non-Semitic (mostly Romance) morphology. Here, we employed the same RSVP technique used by Velan and Frost (Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 14:913-918, 2007, Cognition 118:141-156, 2011), this time with Maltese (and English) sentences. The results showed that Maltese-English bilinguals were able to reproduce the Maltese words-regardless of whether they were misspelled (involving the transposition of two letters from the consonantal root) or not, with no reading cost-just as in English. The apparent divergences between the RSVP data with Hebrew versus Maltese sentences are likely due to the combination of the characteristics of the Hebrew orthographic system with the Semitic morphology.     

Which children benefit from letter names in learning letter sounds?

Typical U.S. children use their knowledge of letters' names to help learn the letters' sounds. They perform better on letter sound tests with letters that have their sounds at the beginnings of their names, such as v, than with letters that have their sounds at the ends of their names, such as m, and letters that do not have their sounds in their names, such as h. We found this same pattern among children with speech sound disorders, children with language impairments as well as speech sound disorders, and children who later developed serious reading problems. Even children who scored at chance on rhyming and sound matching tasks performed better on the letter sound task with letters such as v than with letters such as m and h. Our results suggest that a wide range of children use the names of letters to help learn the sounds and that phonological awareness, as conventionally measured, is not required in order to do so.     

What do men and women want in a partner? Are educated partners always more desirable?

Previous research has shown that males value a potential partner’s physical attractiveness more than females do, whereas females value a potential partner’s socioeconomic status (SES) more than males do. But are men really so unconcerned about a potential partner’s SES? Five studies revealed that men do integrate information about a woman’s SES into their decisions on whether to consider her as a romantic partner or not. Results consistently demonstrated that male participants preferred women with lower SES. Female participants, in contrast, preferred men with higher SES. These sex differences were more pronounced when a long-term romantic relationship rather than a one-night stand was being considered. In addition, men’s lower reported likelihood of romantic contact with a woman with high SES was due to her high educational level rather than her high income. Mediational analyses showed that men perceived a potential partner with high educational level as less likeable and less faithful, and thus reported less likelihood of romantic contact.     

Are women always more interpersonally sensitive than men? Impact of goals and content domain

Two studies examined motivation and content domain as possible influences on sex differences in interpersonal sensitivity. Although much research has found women to excel on tasks measuring interpersonal sensitivity, most of the tasks have measured accuracy in female-relevant domains such as emotion. The present studies measured interpersonal sensitivity, defined as accurate recall of another person, for both female-relevant and male-relevant content domains and also included motivational manipulations intended to influence men and women differently. Study 1 measured accuracy of recalling information in a written vignette about a person, and Study 2 measured accuracy of recalling details about an interaction partner. Both studies supported hypotheses about domain specificity and gender-relevant motivation. However, even for male-stereotypic content and for tasks framed to favor men's motivation to perform well, men's accuracy never exceeded women's.     

Why are the three‐letter codes of a sheriff and a barber identical? understanding and interpreting occupational environments

This article provides career counselors and clients with useful information on understanding occupational environments. Specifically, the focus is on how to handle a situation in which a client's 3‐letter code is identical to 2 clearly divergent occupations.     

Lost properties? Retrieval differences between name codes and semantic codes for familiar people

Summary Two experiments compared decision times for matching tasks involving the names and faces of familiar people. In Experiment 1 category and property judgements were compared when subjects were asked to respond to simultaneously presented stimuli: blocks of either faces or surnames. The results showed that the advantage known to exist for category statements extended to these types of materials. In Experiment 2 the same type of property judgement was compared with a first-name-matching task. The finding was that forename judgements required a longer decision time than property judgements when faces were the presented stimuli, bot not when surnames were used. This result lends further support to the Bruce and Young (1986) model of face recognition. It is additional evidence for sequential access to identity-specific codes and name codes from faces and for the functional separation of these two types of information.Robert Johnston is supported by a grant from the Science and Engineering Research Council     

All else being equal: Are men always higher in social dominance orientation than women?

The belief in the gender invariance of many traits is a view that dominates much of psychology. In social psychology, this position is clearly represented by social dominance theory and the construct of social dominance orientation (SDO) where it is argued that, all else being equal, men will be higher in SDO than women. In other domains, though, these assumptions are being questioned, and researchers are arguing for a gender similarities hypothesis. The argument is that men and women are more similar than different, and where there are effects for gender, these are small. In this investigation, men and women are compared under similar cultural (Study 1), ideological, (Study 2) and status (Study 3) contexts to examine whether, all else being equal, men really are higher in SDO than women. In an additional study (Study 4), a meta‐analysis is conducted aggregating the effect sizes of the previous studies. Results demonstrated either no effect for gender or an interaction between gender and the relevant social context and only a small effect size of gender—findings that disconfirm the ceteris paribus assumption of social dominance theory. In conclusion, the implications of the findings for understanding gender effects in social psychology are discussed. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Are all letters really processed equally and in parallel? Further evidence of a robust first letter advantage

This present study examined accuracy and response latency of letter processing as a function of position within a horizontal array. In a series of 4 Experiments, target-strings were briefly (33 ms for Experiments 1 to 3, 83 ms for Experiment 4) displayed and both forward and backward masked. Participants then made a two alternative forced choice. The two alternative responses differed just in one element of the string, and position of mismatch was systematically manipulated. In Experiment 1, words of different lengths (from 3 to 6 letters) were presented in separate blocks. Across different lengths, there was a robust advantage in performance when the alternative response was different for the letter occurring at the first position, compared to when the difference occurred at any other position. Experiment 2 replicated this finding with the same materials used in Experiment 1, but with words of different lengths randomly intermixed within blocks. Experiment 3 provided evidence of the first position advantage with legal nonwords and strings of consonants, but did not provide any first position advantage for non-alphabetic symbols. The lack of a first position advantage for symbols was replicated in Experiment 4, where target-strings were displayed for a longer duration (83 ms). Taken together these results suggest that the first position advantage is a phenomenon that occurs specifically and selectively for letters, independent of lexical constraints. We argue that the results are consistent with models that assume a processing advantage for coding letters in the first position, and are inconsistent with the commonly held assumption in visual word recognition models that letters are equally processed in parallel independent of letter position.     

What do letter migration errors reveal about letter position coding in visual word recognition?

Dividing attention across multiple words occasionally results in misidentifications whereby letters apparently migrate between words. Previous studies have found that letter migrations preserve within-word letter position, which has been interpreted as support for position-specific letter coding. To investigate this issue, the authors used word pairs like STEP and SOAP, in which a letter in 1 word could migrate to an adjacent letter in another word to form an illusory word (STOP). Three experiments show that both same-position and adjacent-position letter migrations can occur, as well as migrations that cross 2 letter positions. These results argue against position-specific letter coding schemes used in many computational models of reading, and they provide support for coding schemes based on relative rather than absolute letter position.     

Are Dispositions Reducible?

The traditional analysis of dispositions as conditionals is subject to in-superable difficulties. Recently David Lewis has offered a new, reformed analysis intended to meet objections to the old accounts while remaining reductionist about causal powers. I argue that it succeeds in meeting only some of the objections to its predecessors. For the reductionist programme to succeed, more is needed than the correct analysis of dispositions. If dispositional properties are to be reduced, then the world must contain a reduction base. Prima facie this is not the case: the dispositions of medium-sized objects are only reducible to dispositional properties of the structural parts of the objects. The physically ultimate constituents of matter, sub-atomic particles, are simple, and have no properties that could serve as the grounding of their dispositions. Reductionists make three major responses to this argument, which I evaluate. I conclude that the world does not contain anything to which dispositions could be reduced.