Socialization: Insights from Social Cognition

Socialization is the process by which individuals are assisted to become members of their social groups. Findings from social cognition and cross-cultural psychology offer two major insights into the socialization process. First, basic social cognitive principles imply that the immediate environment functions as a socialization agent by activating and inhibiting knowledge structures and thereby shaping cognition and behavior. Second, because the immediate environment factors into cognition and behavior, socialization efforts should involve the modification of the environment for optimal effect. We discuss various examples of socialization through the configuration of the immediate environment, such as rituals and use of physical artifacts. Our review links basic social cognitive mechanisms to socialization processes, which are customarily treated at higher levels of analysis.     

Women as authority figures: The use and nonuse of authority

This paper reports the results of two experiments designed to investigate the effect of sex-role stereotypes on evaluations of authority figures. Female and male subjects read short accounts of various situations in which an authority figure confronted a subordinate who had transgressed in some way and then evaluated the authority figure on a variety of dimensions. Sex of the authority figure and of the subordinate were varied factorially. In Experiment 1, where the authority figure took a hard line with the transgressing subordinate, it was found that a female authority figure being firm with a male subordinate was evaluated most negatively. In Experiment 2, where the authority figure was lenient with the subordinate, it was found that a female authority figure being lenient with a female subordinate was evaluated most negatively. Implications of the results are discussed.     

Cross-modal attentional entrainment: Insights from magicians

Recently, performance magic has become a source of insight into the processes underlying awareness. Magicians have highlighted a set of variables that can create moments of visual attentional suppression, which they call “off-beats.” One of these variables is akin to the phenomenon psychologists know as attentional entrainment. The current experiments, inspired by performance magic, explore the extent to which entrainment can occur across sensory modalities. Across two experiments using a difficult dot probe detection task, we find that the mere presence of an auditory rhythm can bias when visual attention is deployed, speeding responses to stimuli appearing in phase with the rhythm. However, the extent of this cross-modal influence is moderated by factors such as the speed of the entrainers and whether their frequency is increasing or decreasing. In Experiment 1, entrainment occurred for rhythms presented at .67 Hz, but not at 1.5 Hz. In Experiment 2, entrainment only occurred for rhythms that were slowing from 1.5 Hz to .67 Hz, not speeding. The results of these experiments challenge current models of temporal attention.     

Reading other people's mind: Insights from neuropsychology

When trying to make sense of other people's behaviour we usually invoke their mental states, such as their intentions, beliefs or emotions. This mind reading ability has been traditionally investigated in developmental psychology and comparative psychology but is now receiving increasing attention from the cognitive neurosciences. I will show the important role that neuropsychology plays in unravelling the cognitive and neural basis of our mind reading abilities. I will illustrate this by showing how cases of adults with acquired brain lesions can help us tease apart the different mechanisms that underlie mind reading abilities and can help us understand the nature of these mechanisms, especially their relation to language and executive function.     

Corvid caching: Insights from a cognitive model

Caching and recovery of food by corvids is well-studied, but some ambiguous results remain. To help clarify these, we built a computational cognitive model. It is inspired by similar models built for humans, and it assumes that memory strength depends on frequency and recency of use. We compared our model's behavior to that of real birds in previously published experiments. Our model successfully replicated the outcomes of two experiments on recovery behavior and two experiments on cache site choice. Our "virtual birds" reproduced declines in recovery accuracy across sessions, revisits to previously emptied cache sites, a lack of correlation between caching and recovery order, and a preference for caching in safe locations. The model also produced two new explanations. First, that Clark's nutcrackers may become less accurate as recovery progresses not because of differential memory for different cache sites, as was once assumed, but because of chance effects. And second, that Western scrub jays may choose their cache sites not on the basis of negative recovery experiences only, as was previously thought, but on the basis of positive recovery experiences instead. Alternatively, both "punishment" and "reward" may be playing a role. We conclude with a set of new insights, a testable prediction, and directions for future work.     

Managing organizational commitment: Insights from longitudinal research

This article summarizes what is known about the active management of affective organizational commitment (AOC) through a review of 58 studies employing longitudinal research designs. The review yields six broad categories of antecedents that have empirically demonstrated effects on AOC: socialization practices, organizational changes, human resource practices, interpersonal relations, employee–organizational relations, and a residual “other” category. Insights from the review include (a) that perceptions of personal attachment to the organization are among the most substantiated (but tenuous) strategies for enhancing AOC, (b) that theorizing and research efforts have focused almost exclusively on achieving high levels of AOC, and (c) organizations have been reticent to address situations when AOC is low. Implications and recommendations for the theoretical, research and practical advancement of AOC are offered.     

Silent reading: Insights from second-generation deaf readers

Previous studies indicate that hearing readers sometimes convert printed text into a phonological form during silent reading. The experiments reported here investigated whether second-generation congenitally deaf readers use any analogous recoding strategy. Fourteen congenitally and profoundly deaf adults who were native signers of American Sign Language (ASL) served as subjects. Fourteen hearing people of comparable reading levels were control subjects. These subjects participated in four experiments that tested for the possibilities of (a) recoding into articulation, (b) recoding into fingerspelling, (c) recoding into ASL, or (d) no recoding at all. The experiments employed paradigms analogous to those previously used to test for phonological recoding in hearing populations. Interviews with the deaf subjects provided supplementary information about their reading strategies. The results suggest that these deaf subjects as a group do not recode into articulation or fingerspelling, but do recode into sign.     

Aesthetics and Ethics in Engineering: Insights from Polanyi

Polanyi insisted that scientific knowledge was intensely personal in nature, though held with universal intent. His insights regarding the personal values of beauty and morality in science are first enunciated. These are then explored for their relevance to engineering. It is shown that the practice of engineering is also governed by aesthetics and ethics. For example, Polanyi’s three spheres of morality in science—that of the individual scientist, the scientific community and the wider society—has parallel entities in engineering. The existence of shared values in engineering is also demonstrated, in aesthetics through an example that shows convergence of practitioner opinion to solutions that represent accepted models of aesthetics; and in ethics through the recognition that many professional engineering institutions hold that the safety of the public supersedes the interests of the client. Such professional consensus can be seen as justification for studying engineering aesthetics and ethics as inter-subjective disciplines.     

Effort during visual search and counting: Insights from pupillometry

We investigated the processing effort during visual search and counting tasks using a pupil dilation measure. Search difficulty was manipulated by varying the number of distractors as well as the heterogeneity of the distractors. More difficult visual search resulted in more pupil dilation than did less difficult search. These results confirm a link between effort and increased pupil dilation. The pupil dilated more during the counting task than during target-absent search, even though the displays were identical, and the two tasks were matched for reaction time. The moment-to-moment dilation pattern during search suggests little effort in the early stages, but increasingly more effort towards response, whereas the counting task involved an increased initial effort, which was sustained throughout the trial. These patterns can be interpreted in terms of the differential memory load for item locations in each task. In an additional experiment, increasing the spatial memory requirements of the search evoked a corresponding increase in pupil dilation.These results support the view that search tasks involve some, but limited, memory for item locations, and the effort associated with this memory load increases during the trials. In contrast, counting involves a heavy locational memory component from the start.     

Tobacco Dependence: Insights from Investigations of Self-Reported Smoking Motives

The Wisconsin Inventory of Smoking Dependence Motives (WISDM) assesses 13 theoretically-derived dimensions of smoking motivation. These 13 subscales were intended to index comprehensively the severity of tobacco dependence and provide insight into the disorder. Recent studies indicate that four subscales (Automaticity, Craving, Loss of Control, and Tolerance) represent the core features of tobacco dependence and have been dubbed the Primary Dependence Motives (PDM). The remaining nine subscales, the Secondary Dependence Motives (SDM), may be clinically relevant but index less essential features of dependence.     

Interference resolution: Insights from a meta-analysis of neuroimaging tasks

A quantitative meta-analysis was performed on 47 neuroimaging studies involving tasks purported to require the resolution of interference. The tasks included the Stroop, flanker, go/no-go, stimulus-response compatibility, Simon, and stop signal tasks. Peak density-based analyses of these combined tasks reveal that the anterior cingulate cortex, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, inferior frontal gyrus, posterior parietal cortex, and anterior insula may be important sites for the detection and/or resolution of interference. Individual task analyses reveal differential patterns of activation among the tasks. We propose that the drawing of distinctions among the processing stages at which interference may be resolved may explain regional activation differences. Our analyses suggest that resolution processes acting upon stimulus encoding, response selection, and response execution may recruit different neural regions.