Dissimilarity and attraction: when difference makes a difference.

Students in 93 university classes described themselves and their instructors on personality tests measuring traits relevant (ascendancy and personal relations) and irrelevant (sociability and cautiousness) to teaching skill. Dissimilarity (instructor being higher than student) on relevant trait dimensions was hypothesized to be instrumental for student satisfaction with an instructor's role performance. When students were classified as similar or dissimilar to their instructors on the personality dimensions, those most attracted to their instructors were those dissimilar on relevant (but not irrelevant) traits. The dissimilarity finding was not an artifact of differences in skill of instructor nor of differences in students' perceptions of their instructors' traits. A three-dimensional system was devised to specify when similarity and dissimilarity should promote attraction.     

Predictors of subjective age before and after cataract surgery: conscientiousness makes a difference

This study contributes to research on subjective age by examining the interplay of felt age with health, functional limitations, and personality. Individuals undergoing cataract surgery (N=134; 38 to 92 years of age) provided data for an assessment period of 6 weeks surrounding their scheduled surgery. Conscientiousness and repeated measurements of health indicators, functional limitations, and felt age were included in the analyses. Results indicated that functional limitations may be more important to the construction of felt age than their underlying health-related causes. Moreover, conscientious participants felt younger before and after surgery. Their functional status was less dependent on health than the functional status of less conscientious participants. This moderator effect is discussed along with health-related pathways leading to felt age.     

Performance-approach and performance-avoidance goals: when uncertainty makes a difference

Performance-avoidance goals (the desire to avoid performing more poorly than others do) have been shown to have consistently deleterious effects on performance but the effects of performance-approach goals (trying to outperform others) are more complex. Two studies examine uncertainty as a moderator of the effect of performance-approach goals on performance. Experiment 1 shows that manipulated performance-approach goals lead to better performance than do performance-avoidance goals in the absence of uncertainty about performance but when participants learn that a coactor disagreed with them about problem solutions, creating uncertainty, performance-approach goals do not differ from performance-avoidance goals in their effect on performance. Experiment 2 shows that uncertainty also moderates the effects of self-set performance-approach goals. Moreover, the same dynamic occurs with another kind of uncertainty: negative competence feedback.     

Developmental changes in inspection time: what a difference a year makes

This paper provides a partial replication and extension of a classic longitudinal study by Nettelbeck and Wilson [J. Exp. Child Psychol. 40 (1985) 1] that compared the relative influence of maturation and task experience on developmental changes in inspection time (IT). In the study reported in this paper 226 children aged between 6 and 9 were tested on an IT task in Year 1 and immediately retested to assess the importance of task familiarity. They were also retested 1 year and 2 years later. Counter to Nettelbeck and Wilson's conclusion, analyses of these data comparing the relative difference made by age maturation and by task experience revealed that task experience has a much bigger effect on children's IT than maturation. The implications of this for wider theoretical interpretations of the relationship between IT and development are discussed.     

Structural equation models for interchangeable dyads: being the same makes a difference

Structural equation modeling (SEM) offers a flexible method for studying the patterns of interdependence in partners' behavior, which lie at the heart of interactions and relationships. Although SEM has been applied to the study of distinguishable dyads, in which partners are distinguishable by type, such as male and female, it has rarely been applied to the study of interchangeable dyads, such as male-male or female-female pairs. The authors integrate a wide range of dyadic interdependence models--including actor-partner interdependence models, mutual-influence models, and common-fate or dyadic personality models--into an SEM framework for use with interchangeable dyads. The authors also address the use of latent variables at both the dyadic and individual levels, whereby substantive relationships in these models can be corrected for errors of measurement. Furthermore, the authors discuss the conceptual underpinnings of dyadic models and give examples of their application.     

Color makes a difference: two-dimensional object naming in literate and illiterate subjects

Previous work has shown that illiterate subjects are better at naming two-dimensional representations of real objects when presented as colored photos as compared to black and white drawings. This raises the question if color or textural details selectively improve object recognition and naming in illiterate compared to literate subjects. In this study, we investigated whether the surface texture and/or color of objects is used to access stored object knowledge in illiterate subjects. A group of illiterate subjects and a matched literate control group were compared on an immediate object naming task with four conditions: color and black and white (i.e., grey-scaled) photos, as well as color and black and white (i.e., grey-scaled) drawings of common everyday objects. The results show that illiterate subjects perform significantly better when the stimuli are colored and this effect is independent of the photographic detail. In addition, there were significant differences between the literacy groups in the black and white condition for both drawings and photos. These results suggest that color object information contributes to object recognition. This effect was particularly prominent in the illiterate group.     

Movement and working memory: Patterns and positions in space

Five experiments are reported in which subjects were asked to remember short, visually presented sequences of whole body movement patterns, words, and spatial positions. The items were recalled in order in a memory span paradigm. During presentation of the items to be remembered subjects simply watched, or they carried out a concurrent activity involving articulatory suppression, movement to external spatial targets, or body-related movement. When the movement patterns to be remembered were familiar to subjects, movement span was not disrupted by articulatory suppression or movement to spatial targets but was disrupted by body-related movement. This movement suppression task, however, did not interfere with performance on a spatial span task or on verbal span. It is concluded that the memory for patterns of limb movement differs from memory for movement to spatial targets and that accounts of visuo-spatial processes in working memory involve the latter type of movement.     

Motor imagery in spinal cord injury patients: Moving makes the difference

Both real action control and execution and motor imagery abilities require knowledge of the spatial location of body parts, in other words efference copy information and feedbacks from the sensory system (Frith et al., 2000, Philos. Trans. R. Soc. Lond. B. Biol. Sci., 355, 1771). Spinal cord injuries induce severe motor disability, due to a damage of the descending motor pathways (Cramer et al., 2007, Exp. Brain. Res., 177, 233). Patients' motor imagery competences are variably reported as either normal or defective (Decety & Boisson, 1990, Eur. Arch. Psychiatry Clin. Neurosci., 240, 39; Lacourse et al., 1999, Behav. Brain Sci., 104, 73). We explored biomechanical constraint effects in Spinal Cord Injury (SCI) patients, as they are considered the most reliable indexes of motor imagery abilities (Parsons, 1987b, Cogn. Psychol., 19, 178). Sixteen spinal cord injuries patients and 16 neurologically unimpaired subjects have been administered with (1) the Hand Laterality Task (HLT), in which subjects were asked to judge the laterality of a rotated hand; and (2) the Mirror Letter Discrimination Task (MLD), in which subjects were asked to judge if a rotated character was in its correct upright position or mirror‐reversed form. Our patients did not present the effect of stimulus orientation, neither did they show any effect related to biomechanical constraints. Based on these data, the hypothesis is that SCI patients' performance may be ascribed to the use of a different strategy to solve the tasks, based on memory rather than on mental rotation.     

Attention to adjacent and separate positions in space: An electrophysiological analysis

Some theories of visuospatial attention propose that attention can be divided between separated zones of space that exclude the intervening region, whereas other theories state that the focus of attention must encompass aunitary, continuous zone. These contrasting viewswere evaluated in an experiment 9n which subjects were required to monitor two of four stimulus locations for targets; the two relevant locations were adjacent in one condition and were separated by an intervening irrelevant location in a second condition . To assess the distribution of attention across the relevant and irrelevant locations, event-related brain potentials(ERPa)were recorded to taskirrelevant “probe” stimuli that were occasionally presented at the individual stimulus locations. When the relevant locations were adjacent, probes presented at irrelevant locations elicited smaller sensory-evoked electrophysiological responses than probes presented at relevant locations, consistent with an attentional suppression of inputs from the unattended locations. When the relevant locations were separated by an irrelevant location, however, the sensory responses evoked by probes presented at this intervening irrelevant location were not suppressed, and target detection performance became slower and less accurate. These results suggest that attentionforms a unitary zone that may expand to encompass multiple relevant locations but must also include the area between them; as a result, irrelevant information arising from intervening locations is not suppressed and perceptual processing is compromised.     

When mitigation evidence makes a difference: effects of psychological mitigating evidence on sentencing decisions in capital trials

Little empirical research has addressed the effects of psychological or psychosocial evidence on sentencing decisions. The present study found that death-qualified mock jurors were more likely to sentence a defendant to death without mitigating evidence than in a case with mitigating evidence present. Mock jurors were less likely to assign a death sentence in cases that contained one of the following types of mitigating evidence: The defendant was (i) diagnosed with schizophrenia, not medicated, and suffered from severe delusions and hallucinations, (ii) drug addicted and high at the time of the murder, (iii) diagnosed as borderline mentally retarded during childhood, or (iv) severely physically and verbally abused by his parents during childhood.     

Unemployment and discrimination against youth of immigrant origin in Switzerland: When the name makes the difference

Although the percentage of foreigners residing in Switzerland is as high as 20%, it was not until the nineties that the country set up an official integration policy. Unemployment among immigrants was one of the main reasons that prompted this significant change. The policy accorded priority to newcomers. This article, which draws on two recent studies on integration of youth of immigrant descent conducted at the Swiss Forum for Migration and Population Studies, shows, however, that integration problems also concern established youth; despite holding the same qualifications as the locals, they face discrimination in entering the labour market.     

When the method makes a difference: Antagonistic effects on “automatic evaluations” as a function of task characteristics of the measure

Researchers often employ implicit measures as dependent variables to investigate processes of attitude formation and change. In such studies, experimentally induced differences are typically interpreted as reflecting change in automatic evaluations. We argue that experimentally induced effects on implicit measures may not always reflect genuine changes in evaluative responses, but can be driven by the mechanisms underlying the measurement procedure. In line with this assumption, the present research shows that these mechanisms can produce opposite effects of the same experimental manipulation for otherwise equivalent implicit measures. These results indicate that merely observing experimental effects on implicit measures does not allow direct inferences regarding changes in automatic evaluations. Instead, psychological interpretations of such effects hinge upon the mechanics of how a given measurement procedure responds to variations in the context. Implications for research using implicit measures are discussed.     

“Making it explicit” makes a difference: Evidence for a dissociation of spontaneous and intentional level 1 perspective taking in high-functioning autism

The ability of perspective taking is a fundamental aspect of social cognition. The ability to decide, what another person can or cannot see is referred to as “level 1 perspective taking.” This is thought to be a process that we can make use of intentionally, but which also takes place spontaneously. Autism is characterized by impairments of social interaction, which are thought to be related to deficits in implicit rather than explicit perspective taking. In order to assess both levels of processing with regard to perspective taking, we employed an established task in patients and controls. Our results demonstrate that both groups engage in spontaneous level 1 perspective taking. In contrast to controls, however, patients reacted more slowly if they had to verify the other’s as compared to their own perspective, which shows that participants with high-functioning autism have selective difficulties in explicit, but not implicit, level 1 perspective taking. These findings demonstrate that while spontaneous level 1 perspective taking appears to be intact in autism, this ability is impaired in patients when used explicitly.     

Gaze step distributions reflect fixations and saccades: a comment on

In three experimental tasks Stephen and Mirman (2010) measured gaze steps, the distance in pixels between gaze positions on successive samples from an eyetracker. They argued that the distribution of gaze steps is best fit by the lognormal distribution, and based on this analysis they concluded that interactive cognitive processes underlie eye movement control in these tasks. The present comment argues that the gaze step distribution is predictable based on the fact that the eyes alternate between a fixation state in which gaze is steady and a saccade state in which gaze position changes rapidly. By fitting a simple mixture model to Stephen and Mirman's gaze step data we reveal a fixation distribution and a saccade distribution. This mixture model captures the shape of the gaze step distribution in detail, unlike the lognormal model, and provides a better quantitative fit to the data. We conclude that the gaze step distribution does not directly suggest processing interaction, and we emphasize some important limits on the utility of fitting theoretical distributions to data.