Do we access meaning when we name Arabic digits? Electrophysiological evidence

In this study, we evaluated whether the naming of Arabic digits required access to semantic information. Participants named pictures and Arabic digits blocked by category or intermixed with exemplars of other categories while behavioural and electrophysiological measures were gathered. Pictures were named slower and Arabic digits faster in the blocked context relative to the mixed context. Around 350–450 ms after the presentation of pictures and Arabic digits, brain waves were more positive in anterior regions and more negative in posterior regions when the blocked context was compared with the mixed context. The pattern of electrophysiological results suggests that pictures and Arabic digits are both processed semantically and they are subject to repetition effects during the naming task.     

Do people really believe they are above average?

A question that has plagued self-enhancement research is whether participants truly believe the overly positive self-assessments they report, or whether better-than-average effects reflect mere hopes or self-presentation. In a test of people’s belief in the accuracy of their self-enhancing trait ratings, participants made a series of bets, each time choosing between betting that they had scored at least as high on a personality test as a random other participant, or betting on a random drawing in which the probability of success was matched to their self-assigned percentile rank on the test. They also reported the point at which they would switch their bet from their self-rating to the drawing, or vice versa. Participants were indifferent between betting on themselves or on the drawing, and it took only a slight change in the drawing’s probability for them to switch their bet, indicating that people truly believe their self-enhancing self-assessments.     

Do elderly couples have a better prospective memory than other elderly people when they collaborate?

A naturalistic study investigated how memory tasks affected group productivity for two individuals working in three kinds of group constellations: old married couples, old non‐friend pairs, and nominal groups of two individuals working on their own. The retrospective memory task was to recall episodic information given on a visit to a university campus. The prospective memory task was to remind the participants of actions to be performed during the visit. The prospective memory tasks were event‐based or time‐based. The delay or retention interval was also manipulated. In addition, an interview on how the elderly handled remembering during daily life was included. The results suggest that: (1) dyads suffered from collaboration relative to the predicted potential, replicating earlier research; old married couples did not reduce the same productivity loss as clearly as friends did in former studies; the couples who claimed that they used a transactive memory system, however, achieved the same productivity as the nominal pairs (i.e. the predicted potential; (2) the task effects produced unexpected results, some of which could be accounted for by the naturalistic setting used. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Do people treat missing information adaptively when making inferences?

When making inferences, people are often confronted with situations with incomplete information. Previous research has led to a mixed picture about how people react to missing information. Options include ignoring missing information, treating it as either positive or negative, using the average of past observations for replacement, or using the most frequent observation of the available information as a placeholder. The accuracy of these inference mechanisms depends on characteristics of the environment. When missing information is uniformly distributed, it is most accurate to treat it as the average, whereas when it is negatively correlated with the criterion to be judged, treating missing information as if it were negative is most accurate. Whether people treat missing information adaptively according to the environment was tested in two studies. The results show that participants were sensitive to how missing information was distributed in an environment and most frequently selected the mechanism that was most adaptive. From these results the authors conclude that reacting to missing information in different ways is an adaptive response to environmental characteristics.     

Do delusions have and give meaning?

Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences - Delusions are often portrayed as paradigmatic instances of incomprehensibility and meaninglessness. Here we investigate the relationship between delusions...     

Predicting a changing taste: Do people know what they will like?

A distinction is made between decision utility, experienced utility, and predicted utility and an experiment is reported addressing people's ability to forecast experienced utility. Subjects in two experiments made predictions of their future liking for stimuli to which they were then exposed daily for one week. The stimuli were ice cream in a pilot study, plain yogurt in the main study, and short musical pieces in both studies. Decreased liking was the modal prediction, even when the true outcome was increased liking, or reduced dislike. There was substantial stability of tastes, but there were also substantial individual differences in the size and even the sign of changes in liking with repeated exposure. There was little or no correlation between the predictions of hedonic change that individuals made and the changes they actually experienced.     

Causal attributions of married couples: when do they search for causes? What do they conclude when they do?

In this study, we examined when and whether married people engage in attributional activity or form causal attributions to explain their partners' behavior. We used an indirect probe to better approximate naturally occurring cognitive activity. We also examined the content of spouses' causal attributions, using both direct and indirect probes. Spouses were asked about frequent as well as infrequent relationship events, and about partner behaviors that had positive or negative impacts on the recipient. Husbands in unsatisfying relationships reported more attributional thoughts than did happily married husbands, whereas wives in the two groups did not differ. Behaviors having negative impacts elicited more attributional activity than did positive behaviors. Behavioral frequency and impact interacted in ways contrary to predictions. Finally, distressed couples were particularly likely to report distress-maintaining attributions and were particularly unlikely to report relationship-enhancing attributions, compared with their nondistressed counterparts.     

What do people value when they negotiate? Mapping the domain of subjective value in negotiation

Four studies support the development and validation of a framework for understanding the range of social psychological outcomes valued subjectively as consequences of negotiations. Study 1 inductively elicited and coded elements of subjective value among students, community members, and practitioners, revealing 20 categories that theorists in Study 2 sorted into 4 underlying subconstructs: Feelings About the Instrumental Outcome, Feelings About the Self, Feelings About the Negotiation Process, and Feelings About the Relationship. Study 3 proposed a new Subjective Value Inventory (SVI) and confirmed its 4-factor structure. Study 4 presents convergent, discriminant, and predictive validity data for the SVI. Indeed, subjective value was a better predictor than economic outcomes of future negotiation decisions. Results suggest the SVI is a promising tool to systematize and encourage research on subjective outcomes of negotiation.     

Beneficiary or benefactor: are people more prosocial when they reflect on receiving or giving?

Research shows that reflecting on benefits received can make people happier, but it is unclear whether or not such reflection makes them more helpful. Receiving benefits can promote prosocial behavior through reciprocity and positive affect, but these effects are often relationship-specific, short-lived, and complicated by ambivalent reactions. We propose that prosocial behavior is more likely when people reflect on being a benefactor to others, rather than a beneficiary. The experience of giving benefits may encourage prosocial behavior by increasing the salience and strength of one's identity as a capable, caring contributor. In field and laboratory experiments, we found that participants who reflected about giving benefits voluntarily contributed more time to their university, and were more likely to donate money to natural-disaster victims, than were participants who reflected about receiving benefits. When it comes to reflection, giving may be more powerful than receiving as a driver of prosocial behavior.     

Why do people behave immorally when drunk?

Alcohol intoxication is a major source of antisocial behavior in our society, strongly implicated in various forms of interpersonal aggression. Yet, moral philosophers have paid surprisingly little attention to the literature on alcohol and its effects. In part, this is because philosophers who have adopted a more empirically informed approach to moral psychology have gravitated toward moral sentimentalism, while the literature on alcohol intoxication fits very poorly with the sentimentalist account. Most contemporary research on the psychological effects of alcohol is focused upon variants of the “disinhibition” theory, which suggests that alcohol does not provoke any specific affect, it merely weakens executive control. This research, we argue, lends support to a deontic moral psychology, which identifies our ability to suppress behavioral impulses as a central feature of moral agency.     

Predicting World Cup results: Do goals seem more likely when they pay off?

Bar-Hillel and Budescu (1995) failed to find a desirability bias in probability estimation. The World Cup soccer tournament provided an opportunity to revisit the phenomenon in a context in which desirability biases are notoriously rampant. Participants estimated the probabilities of various teams’ winning their upcoming games. They were promised money if one team—randomly designated by the experimenter—won its upcoming game. Participants assigned a higher probability to a victory by their target team than did other participants, whose promised monetary reward was contingent on the victory of its opponent. Prima facie, this seems to be a desirability bias. However, in a follow-up study that made one team salient, without promising monetary rewards, participants also judged their target team to be more likely to win. On grounds of parsimony, we conclude that what appears to be a desirability bias may just be a salience/marking effect, and—although optimism is a robust and ubiquitous human phenomenon—that wishful thinking still remains elusive.     

Do tough-minded people hold tough-minded attitudes?

Eysenck originally postulated that extraverts would adopt tough-minded social attitudes, although psychoticism is now considered to be of greater importance than extraversion. Previous research has attempted to relate psychoticism to realism-idealism, a principal factor of the Wilson-Patterson Conservatism Scale, and a measure of tough-mindedness acceptable to Eysenck. Results have proved discrepant; authors have used psychoticism scales of uncertain item content and length. The present study examines the relationship between psychoticism, extraversion and realism-idealism, using the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire and the Wilson-Patterson Attitude Inventory. The results provide only weak support for Eysenck’s theory. A more significant relationship was obtained between psychoticism and conservatism, and extraversion and conservatism, although a theoretical rationale for these relationships is lacking.     

What's in a name? access to information from people's names

Abstract

The processing of people's names is contrasted with face recognition and word recognition. The effects of the familiarity of initial and surnames and frequency of surnames (the number of people with the same surname) were investigated in several tasks. It was found that the effects of name familiarity and surname frequency were analogous to the effects of word frequency in tasks which did not require access to memory for individuals (a nationality decision and naming latency). In tasks which do require access to memory for individuals (familiarity decision and a semantic classification), the effect of surname frequency was analogous to the effect of distinctive-ness in face recognition. The results are discussed in terms of a functional model of name processing in which name recognition units mediate between the output of word recognition units and access to identity-specific semantics.     

What do people mean when speaking of evilness?

The term evilness started to become popular in social psychology after the publication in 1999 of the special issue edited by Arthur G. Miller, "Perspectives on evil and violence". It is usually used to define behaviors that are extremely and strongly harmful. However, the concept is still imprecise and needs to be empirically delineated. This article attempts to answer the following questions. What is evilness? What is the difference between aggression and evilness? We conducted several studies with three goals: to analyze how laypersons and experts define evilness, to verify whether laypeople distinguish between different intensities of evilness, and to determine the dimensions that predict aggression and evilness. The results offer preliminary answers to the three questions.     

What gives victims satisfaction when they seek revenge?

The present paper aims to elucidate under what conditions victims of injustice who seek revenge feel satisfied and perceive that everybody got what he or she deserved. Two hypotheses are discussed: The comparative suffering hypothesis states that seeing the offender suffer from fate is sufficient for evoking satisfaction and perceptions of deservingness among victims. The understanding hypothesis states that revenge can only be satisfactory when the offender understands it as a response to his or her prior behavior. These hypotheses were tested in three experimental studies. The comparative suffering hypothesis received only weak support. The understanding hypothesis, on the other hand, received much stronger support: When the offender understood revenge as punishment, revenge led to satisfaction and deservingness among victims. These findings are discussed with regard to the question why people take revenge. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Do speakers have access to a mental syllabary?

The first, theoretical part of this paper sketches a framework for phonological encoding in which the speaker successively generates phonological syllables in connected speech. The final stage of this process, phonetic encoding, consists of accessing articulatory gestural scores for each of these syllables in a “mental syllabary”. The second, experimental part studies various predictions derived from this theory. The main finding is a syllable frequency effect: words ending in a high-frequent syllable are named faster than words ending in a low-frequent syllable. As predicted, this syllable frequency effect is independent of and additive to the effect of word frequency on naming latency. The effect, moreover, is not due to the complexity of the word-final syllable. In the General Discussion, the syllabary model is further elaborated with respect to phonological underspecification and activation spreading. Alternative accounts of the empirical findings in terms of core syllables and demisyllables are considered.