What's in a word? A parametric study of semantic influences on visual word recognition

To what extent does semantic information play a functional role in visual word recognition? Theories of word recognition vary in the importance assigned to semantic information in visual lexical decision, with past research suggesting that the nature of the foils is a crucial determinant of semantic reliance. Here, we explored the conditions under which semantic variables influence lexical decision. Normal readers performed visual lexical decision tasks in which imageability and semantic priming were manipulated, with nonword foils varying systematically in their orthographic and phonological similarity to the real words. The effects of imageability and semantic priming increased in magnitude as nonword foils became progressively more wordlike. These findings provide a clear illustration of the flexible use of semantic information to support normal visual word recognition.     

Can an anger face also be scared? Malleability of facial expressions

Do people always interpret a facial expression as communicating a single emotion (e.g., the anger face as only angry) or is that interpretation malleable? The current study investigated preschoolers' (N = 60; 3-4 years) and adults' (N = 20) categorization of facial expressions. On each of five trials, participants selected from an array of 10 facial expressions (an open-mouthed, high arousal expression and a closed-mouthed, low arousal expression each for happiness, sadness, anger, fear, and disgust) all those that displayed the target emotion. Children's interpretation of facial expressions was malleable: 48% of children who selected the fear, anger, sadness, and disgust faces for the "correct" category also selected these same faces for another emotion category; 47% of adults did so for the sadness and disgust faces. The emotion children and adults attribute to facial expressions is influenced by the emotion category for which they are looking. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved).     

Texting and Driving: Is It Just Moral Panic?

Significant public efforts have been mounted to stop the perceived epidemic of texting and driving, especially among younger drivers. However, despite the taken-for-granted nature of these fears, cell phones are reported as a contributing factor in only about 1% of all crashes. This study examines 11 years of crash data from Kentucky to demonstrate that despite the exponential growth of cell phones in American culture, cell phone-related crashes have remained stable over time, and they represent far less of a public health risk than most people are led to believe. The conclusions are presented in the context of moral panic theory.     

What is anger provoking? A psychophysical study of perceived causes of anger

From a pool of nearly 900 situations, anonymously described by young people from prepuberty to adolescence as anger provoking, 60 situations were randomly drawn. Twelve advanced students of psychology independently rated the similarity between each possible pair of situations with respect to the perceived cause of anger. The resultant averaged similarity matrix was subjected to factor analysis, and ten factors were deemed an optimal solution, both psychologically and statistically. The factor structure is described and discussed, and other findings of situational dimensions, not made explicit by the factor analysis, are also discussed.     

Feelings or cognitions? Moral cognitions and emotions as longitudinal predictors of prosocial and aggressive behaviors

There is debate regarding the roles of sociomoral cognitions and emotions in understanding moral development. The short-term longitudinal relations among perspective taking, sympathy, prosocial moral reasoning, prosocial behaviors and aggression in adolescents were examined. Participants were 489 students (M age = 12.28 years, SD = .48; 232 boys) in public and private schools from predominantly middle class families in Valencia, Spain. Students completed measures of perspective taking, sympathy, prosocial moral reasoning, prosocial behaviors, and aggressive behaviors. Overall, structural equation modeling analyses showed that moral reasoning and emotions were interrelated and predicted both prosocial behaviors and aggression. Discussion focuses on the relevance of both social cognitions and emotions in moral development.     

Student or situation? Personality and classroom context as predictors of attitudes about business school cheating

Many business faculties may question why their students cheat. While past research shows that student characteristics predict cheating attitudes and behavior, evidence exists that attributes of classroom contexts also play a part. We investigate how three personality traits (conscientiousness, emotional stability, and openness to experience) and two context variables (classroom culture and pedagogy) affect business students’ attitudes toward cheating. Of the personality variables, only conscientiousness directly predicts cheating attitudes, while both context variables show significant relationships. Interactions indicate that conscientiousness, emotional stability, and openness to experience, in combination with context variables, affect some attitudes toward cheating. We recommend actions that might minimize cheating as well as future research directions.     

Playing God? Moral agency in an emerging world

Arguments against intervening in nature's ways have been used against many new technologies in the last century. Many of these arguments have employed the metaphor of "playing God." In this essay I briefly review the use of the term "playing God" in recent decades. I then examine the cosmology that lies implicit in this language. My thesis is that the language of "playing God" (or not) overlooks the dynamic, evolutionary nature of world process--the role played by the interdeterminacy of statistical probabilities. I review the notion of "emergent probability" (Lonergan) in order, in the end, to advocate an ethic of risk that both recognizes the dangers of hubris and includes an open and emergent view of creation.     

Are work stressors related to employee substance use? The importance of temporal context assessments of alcohol and illicit drug use

In this study, the author explored the relations of 2 work stressors (work overload and job insecurity) to employee alcohol use and illicit drug use. The primary goal was to explore the importance of temporal context (before work, during the workday, and after work) in the assessment of substance use compared with context-free (overall) assessments. Data were collected from a national sample of U.S. workers (N = 2,790) who took part in a broad cross-sectional survey on workplace health and safety. Consistent with past research, the results fail to support a relation between work stressors and overall measures of alcohol and illicit drug use. However, the results support the relation of work stressors to alcohol and illicit drug use before work, during the workday, and after work. These results provide support for both the stress-induced substance use and stress response dampening propositions of the tension-reduction hypothesis. When exploring the work environment as a potential cause of employee substance use, these results underscore the importance of measures that assess alcohol and illicit drug use in terms of their temporal relation to the workday.     

Does the source of an interpersonal odour affect disgust? A disease risk model and its alternatives

Using self‐report, this paper explored whether a malodour's source (self, liked person, stranger) influences hedonic responding. In Study 1, participants were presented with vignettes describing various encounters with malodours. Negative affect increased when body malodours emanated from a stranger rather than oneself (the source effect). Study 2 replicated this finding using a smell diary, in which participants recorded their hedonic responses to real odours. Study 3 determined that this source effect was not due to a social status or a halo effect. Study 4 examined the role of exposure and attachment. Exposure, but not attachment, best accounted for the source effect. Study 5 examined whether perceived disease risk varied by source and whether this could account for the source effect. The findings suggested that there are two mechanisms by which disgust responses to malodours can be modulated to reflect the disease risk of their source: implicitly, by mere exposure, and explicitly, by knowledge of risk. In the discussion, we argue that avoiding contact with disease‐causing agents is adaptive, and that this is implicitly modulated by exposure, so that the cues for disease emanating from people encountered less frequently are treated with more caution. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Taking the “text” out of context effects in repetition priming of word identification

Repetition priming of masked word identification is reduced when initial exposure to target words is in a text rather than in a word list. We demonstrate that there is nothing special about the text context that reduces priming. In Experiment 1, target words read in normal text or in rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) text--either coherent or scrambled--produced similarly reduced priming, relative to the same words read aloud in a list. In Experiment 2, the delay was decreased between study and test for words presented in text, but they still displayed less priming than did words presented in a study list and tested after an equivalent delay. In Experiment 3, presenting study list words in RSVP to prevent reading each word aloud diminished priming to the same level as that in the text context. We conclude that presenting a target in context prevents it from being encoded and responded to as distinctively as when presented in isolation.     

Shamed into anger? The relation of shame and guilt to anger and self-reported aggression.

The relation of shame and guilt to anger and aggression has been the focus of considerable theoretical discussion, but empirical findings have been inconsistent. Two recently developed measures of affective style were used to examine whether shame-proneness and guilt-proneness are differentially related to anger, hostility, and aggression. In 2 studies, 243 and 252 undergraduates completed the Self-Conscious Affect and Attribution Inventory, the Symptom Checklist 90, and the Spielberger Trait Anger Scale. Study 2 also included the Test of Self-Conscious Affect and the Buss-Durkee Hostility Inventory. Shame-proneness was consistently correlated with anger arousal, suspiciousness, resentment, irritability, a tendency to blame others for negative events, and indirect (but not direct) expressions of hostility. Proneness to "shame-free" guilt was inversely related to externalization of blame and some indices of anger, hostility, and resentment.     

Orthographic effects in the word substitutions of aphasic patients: an epidemic of right neglect dyslexia?

Aphasic patients with reading impairments frequently substitute incorrect real words for target words when reading aloud. Many of these word substitutions have substantial orthographic overlap with their targets and are classified as "visual errors" (i.e., sharing 50% of targets' letters in the same relative position). Fifteen chronic aphasic patients read a battery of words and non-words; non-word reading was poor for all patients, and more than 50% of errors on words involved the substitution of a non-target word. An investigation of the factors conditioning these word substitutions, as well as the production of visual errors, identified a number of similarities to patterns previously reported for patients with right neglect dyslexia, which has been said to occur relatively rarely. These included a strong tendency for errors to overlap targets in initial letter positions, maintenance of target length in errors, and the substitution of words higher in imageability than targets. It is proposed that left hemisphere damage frequently leads to disruption of a level of representation for written words in which letter position is ordinally coded, resulting in exacerbation of a normal processing advantage for early letter positions. A computational model is discussed that incorporates this level of representation and successfully simulates relevant normal and patient data.     

Who am I? Differential effects of three contemplative mental trainings on emotional word use in self-descriptions

In a large-scale longitudinal mental training study, we examined whether learning different contemplative practices can change the emotional content of people’s self-concept as assessed through emotional word use in the Twenty Statement Test. During three 3-month training modules, participants learned distinct practices targeting attentional, socio-affective, or socio-cognitive capacities, or were re-tested. Emotional word use specifically increased after socio-cognitive training including perspective-taking on self and others, compared to attentional and socio-affective compassion-based trainings, and retest-controls. Overall, our findings demonstrate training-induced behavioral plasticity of the emotional self-concept content in healthy adults and could indicate greater emotional granularity. These findings can inform future interventions in mental health, given that alterations in self-referential processing are a common contributing factor in psychopathology.     

Lexical access codes in visual word recognition: are the joint effects of context and stimulus quality diagnostic?

Is it possible to identify when lexical access in visual word recognition is based on an orthographic code and when it is based on a phonological code? Some researchers have argued that the joint effects of semantic context and stimulus quality in lexical decision are diagnostic. Their argument is that when phonological recoding is employed, it serves to keep the effects of stimulus quality and context from interacting. Semantic context and stimulus quality are therefore predicted to have additive effects on RT. In contrast, when lexical access is not mediated by a phonological recoding stage, then the effect of stimulus quality interacts with context, as commonly seen in the literature. A strong test of these claims was devised in which participants were forced to use phonological recoding for the purpose of lexical access. An interaction between context and stimulus quality was observed. This finding is taken as evidence that the joint effects of semantic context and stimulus quality are not diagnostic with respect to the nature of the lexical access code (i.e., orthographic versus phonological) for readers of English.     

Do ‘Objectivist’ Features of Moral Discourse and Thinking Support Moral Objectivism?

Many philosophers think that moral objectivism is supported by stable features of moral discourse and thinking. When engaged in moral reasoning and discourse, people behave ??as if?? objectivism were correct, and the seemingly most straightforward way of making sense of this is to assume that objectivism is correct; this is how we think that such behavior is explained in paradigmatically objectivist domains. By comparison, relativist, error-theoretic or non-cognitivist accounts of this behavior seem contrived and ad hoc. After explaining why this argument should be taken seriously (recent arguments notwithstanding), I argue that it is nevertheless undermined by considerations of moral disagreement. Even if the metaphysical, epistemic and semantic commitments of objectivism provide little or no evidence against it, and even if the alternative explanations of ??objectivist?? traits of moral discourse and thinking are speculative or contrived, objectivism is itself incapable of making straightforward sense of these traits. Deep and widespread moral disagreement or, rather, the mere appearance of such disagreement, strongly suggests that the explanations operative in paradigmatically objective discourse fail to carry over to the moral case. Since objectivism, no less than relativism, non-cognitivism and error-theories, needs non-trivial explanations of why we behave ??as if?? objectivism were correct, such behavior does not presently provide reason to accept objectivism.     

Do We Gossip for Moral Reasons? The Intersection of Moral Foundations and Gossip

Gossip is comprised of evaluative talk about absent others. Although such evaluations may be moral or non-moral, moral judgments often precede the transmission of gossip. This work explored the salience of moral and non-moral motivations to transmit gossip-like information. Two studies explored the relationships between the general tendency to gossip, transmission of, and interest in gossip, five moral foundations (Harm/care, Fairness/reciprocity, Ingroup/loyalty, Authority/respect, Purity/sanctity), their sacredness in relational contexts, and moral and non-moral motives to gossip. Results from Studies 1 (negative gossip - infidelity) and 2 (positive gossip - fidelity) indicated that moral motives to gossip were more important than non-moral motives. The contribution of morality in perpetuating gossip was discussed.     

Does quick to blame mean quick to anger? The role of agreeableness in dissociating blame and anger

Two studies investigated agreeableness, the accessibility of blame, and their potential interactive effects on anger. To measure the chronic accessibility of blame, a choice reaction time task was created that required participants to classify words as blameworthy or not. It was found that for individuals low in agreeableness, blame accessibility was positively related to anger and arguments during the course of daily life, hostile feelings during the course of a semester, and anger in response to a short video involving a blameworthy action. This same straightforward relationship between the accessibility of blame and anger did not characterize those high in agreeableness. The results suggest that agreeableness plays an important role in facilitating (low agreeableness) or inhibiting (high agreeableness) the link between accessible blame and anger.     

Who uses what and how often?: Personality predictors of multiplatform social media use among young adults

To understand who uses social media and how often they do so, we examined the personality traits that predict frequency of using a set of 10 different types of social media (e.g., social networks, blogs, virtual worlds). Using survey data collected from two large-scale samples of young adults (Exploratory Study 1 N = 1586, Confirmatory Study 2 N = 1432), we conducted direct replications of our findings to test whether the observed relationships between social media use and personality traits were reliable. Our replicated findings reveal that sex, age and extraversion are reliable predictors of several types of social media use (e.g., Facebook, Messaging Platforms, Online Forums), while other traits (e.g., agreeableness, Machiavellianism) showed unreliable associations. Our findings also reveal dimensions of multiplatform social media use that categorize the media ecologies of young adults and show significant associations with individual difference measures.     

Moral self and moral emotion expectancies as predictors of anti- and prosocial behaviour in adolescence: A case for mediation?

Previous research has linked (im)moral behaviour with both moral emotion expectancies and the self-importance of moral values, indicating that these two factors influence moral decision making and action. Disentangling the relationship between moral emotion expectancies and self-importance of moral values as predictors of adolescents' anti- and prosocial behaviour was the primary goal of this research. Two hundred five participants (mean age = 14.83 years) completed a semi-structured interview assessing moral emotion expectancies in hypothetical situations and a written questionnaire measuring self-reported prosocial and antisocial behaviour and the self-importance of moral values. Moral emotion expectancies were found to mediate the relationship between the self-importance of moral values and self-reported levels of antisocial behaviour. When predicting levels of prosocial engagement, however, scores of moral value self-importance were the primary variable associated with prosocial behaviour whereas moral emotion expectancies were not involved in this relationship. In addition, a moderating effect of age was found when predicting antisocial behaviour by moral emotion expectancies. Overall, the study confirms and significantly extends previous research on the relationship between adolescents' moral self, moral emotion expectancies and anti- versus prosocial behaviour.     

Working memory affects older adults’ use of context in spoken-word recognition

Many older listeners report difficulties in understanding speech in noisy situations. Working memory and other cognitive skills may modulate older listeners’ ability to use context information to alleviate the effects of noise on spoken-word recognition. In the present study, we investigated whether verbal working memory predicts older adults’ ability to immediately use context information in the recognition of words embedded in sentences, presented in different listening conditions. In a phoneme-monitoring task, older adults were asked to detect as fast and as accurately as possible target phonemes in sentences spoken by a target speaker. Target speech was presented without noise, with fluctuating speech-shaped noise, or with competing speech from a single distractor speaker. The gradient measure of contextual probability (derived from a separate offline rating study) affected the speed of recognition. Contextual facilitation was modulated by older listeners’ verbal working memory (measured with a backward digit span task) and age across listening conditions. Working memory and age, as well as hearing loss, were also the most consistent predictors of overall listening performance. Older listeners’ immediate benefit from context in spoken-word recognition thus relates to their ability to keep and update a semantic representation of the sentence content in working memory.