Cooperation in social dilemmas: free riding may be thwarted by second-order reward rather than by punishment

Cooperation among nonrelatives can be puzzling because cooperation often involves incurring costs to confer benefits on unrelated others. Punishment of noncooperators can sustain otherwise fragile cooperation, but the provision of punishment suffers from a "second-order" free-riding problem because nonpunishers can free ride on the benefits from costly punishment provided by others. One suggested solution to this problem is second-order punishment of nonpunishers; more generally, the threat or promise of higher order sanctions might maintain the lower order sanctions that enforce cooperation in collective action problems. Here the authors report on 3 experiments testing people's willingness to provide second-order sanctions by having participants play a cooperative game with opportunities to punish and reward each other. The authors found that people supported those who rewarded cooperators either by rewarding them or by punishing nonrewarders, but people did not support those who punished noncooperators--they did not reward punishers or punish nonpunishers. Furthermore, people did not approve of punishers more than they did nonpunishers, even when nonpunishers were clearly unwilling to use sanctions to support cooperation. The results suggest that people will much more readily support positive sanctions than they will support negative sanctions.     

Conditioned nausea in rats: Assessment by conditioned disgust reactions, rather than conditioned taste avoidance

The terms conditioned taste avoidance and conditioned taste aversion are often used interchangeably in the literature; however, considerable evidence indicates that they may represent different processes. Conditioned taste avoidance is measured by the amount that a rat drinks in a consumption test that includes both appetitive phases and consummatory phases of responding. However, conditioned taste aversion is more directly assessed using the taste reactivity (TR) test that includes only the consummatory phase of responding. Rats display a conditioned taste aversion as conditioned disgust reactions (gapes, chin rubs, and paw treads) during an intraoral infusion of a nausea-paired flavored solution. Only treatments that produce nausea produce conditioned disgust reactions, but even rewarding drugs produce conditioned taste avoidance. Furthermore, treatments that alleviate nausea prevent the establishment and the expression of conditioned disgust reactions, but they do not necessarily modify conditioned taste avoidance. Considerable evidence exists indicating that these two measures can be independent of one another. The potential of a compound to produce conditioned disgust reactions is a reflection of its nausea-inducing properties. Taste avoidance may be motivated by conditioned fear rather than conditioned nausea, but conditioned disgust is motivated by conditioned nausea. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2008 APA, all rights reserved).     

Faster might not be better: Pictures may not elicit a stronger unconscious priming effect than words when modulated by semantic similarity

It has been suggested that unconscious semantic processing is stimulus-dependent, and that pictures might have privileged access to semantic content. Those findings led to the hypothesis that unconscious semantic priming effect for pictorial stimuli would be stronger as compared to verbal stimuli. This effect was tested on pictures and words by manipulating the semantic similarity between the prime and target stimuli. Participants performed a masked priming categorization task for either words or pictures with three semantic similarity conditions: strongly similar, weakly similar, and non-similar. Significant differences in reaction times were only found between strongly similar and non-similar and between weakly similar and non-similar, for both pictures and words, with faster overall responses for pictures as compared to words. Nevertheless, pictures showed no superior priming effect over words. This could suggest the hypothesis that even though semantic processing is faster for pictures, this does not imply a stronger unconscious priming effect.     

Providing social support may be more beneficial than receiving it: results from a prospective study of mortality

This study examines the relative contributions of giving versus receiving support to longevity in a sample of older married adults. Baseline indicators of giving and receiving support were used to predict mortality status over a 5-year period in the Changing Lives of Older Couples sample. Results from logistic regression analyses indicated that mortality was significantly reduced for individuals who reported providing instrumental support to friends, relatives, and neighbors, and individuals who reported providing emotional support to their spouse. Receiving support had no effect on mortality once giving support was taken into consideration. This pattern of findings was obtained after controlling for demographic, personality, health, mental health, and marital-relationship variables. These results have implications for understanding how social contact influences health and longevity.     

Alternative routes to perspective‐taking: Imagination and rule‐use may be better than simulation and theorising

This article is a commentary on ‘Two routes to perspective: Simulation and rule‐use as approaches to mentalizing’ ( Mitchell, Currie, & Ziegler, 2009 ).     

Information processing speed deficits may be better correlated with the extent of white matter sclerotic lesions in multiple sclerosis than previously suspected

Despite frequent use of the Paced Auditory Serial Addition Test (PASAT; Gronwall, 1977) for examining information processing speed (IPS) deficits in multiple sclerosis (MS), prior literature on the relationship between PASAT performance and severity of brain disease has been contradictory. In the present study, we found that PASAT performance is moderately well correlated with the total area of sclerotic brain lesions in MS patients only if a modified scoring method (mean "dyad" score; Snyder et al., 1993), but not the standard scoring method, is applied. We conclude that the PASAT remains a useful measure of IPS in MS, if a flaw in the typical scoring technique for this test is corrected. In our sample of 41 MS patients, for every one point decrease in mean dyad score, total lesion area increased by 364.08 mm2 on average, after controlling for age, sex, and education. IPS deficits are more severe for patients with greater brain disease, due to increased disruption of the white matter pathways that likely support the parallel distributed processing of complex information by geographically distant brain regions.     

The world may not be just for you but you'd better not say it: On the social value of expressing personal belief in a just world

The expression of personal belief in a just world (PBJW) has been discussed as a criterion of excellence in social judgments. In four experimental studies we hypothesized and found that targets who express high versus low PBJW are judged as more: (i) deserving of success and (ii) suited to socio-organizational expectations. The four studies show that suitability to socio-organizational expectations mediates the relation between PBJW expressed and success deservingness, even after controlling for judgments of likability, status, rationality, optimism, and targets as victims. Studies 2 and 3 show this pattern occurs regardless of target performance appraisal. Study 4 indicates that expressing low PBJW decreases the social value of individuals, but expressing high PBJW does not increase it. We discuss the impact of PBJW expression on people's lives, namely on upward social mobility of members of low-status groups, and the influence of the negativity bias on judgments caused by PBJW expression.