Does affect induce self-focused attention?

Despite growing evidence that depression is linked with self-focused attention, little is known about how depressed individuals become self-focused or, more generally, about what arouses self-focus in everyday life. Two experiments examined the hypothesis that affect itself induces self-focused attention. In Experiment 1, moods were manipulated with an imagination mood-induction procedure. Sad-induction Ss became higher in self-focus than did neutral-induction Ss. Experiment 2 replicated this effect for sad moods by means of a musical mood-induction procedure and different measures of self-focus. However, Experiment 2 failed to support the hypothesis that happy moods induce self-focus. The results have implications for mood-induction research, self-focused attention, and recent models of depression.     

Is gratitude a moral affect?

Gratitude is conceptualized as a moral affect that is analogous to other moral emotions such as empathy and guilt. Gratitude has 3 functions that can be conceptualized as morally relevant: (a) a moral barometer function (i.e., it is a response to the perception that one has been the beneficiary of another person's moral actions); (b) a moral motive function (i.e., it motivates the grateful person to behave prosocially toward the benefactor and other people); and (c) a moral reinforcer function (i.e., when expressed, it encourages benefactors to behave morally in the future). The personality and social factors that are associated with gratitude are also consistent with a conceptualization of gratitude as an affect that is relevant to people's cognitions and behaviors in the moral domain.     

Does stimulus appearance affect learning?

We examined the learning process with 3 sets of stimuli that have identical symbolic structure but differ in appearance (meaningless letter strings, arrangements of geometric shapes, and sequences of cities). One hypothesis is that the learning process aims to encode symbolic regularity in the same way, largely regardless of appearance. Another is that different types of stimuli bias the learning process to operate in different ways. Using the experimental paradigm of artificial grammar learning, we provided a preliminary test of these hypotheses. In Experiments 1 and 2 we measured performance in terms of grammaticality and found no difference across the 3 sets of stimuli. In Experiment 3 we analyzed performance in terms of both grammaticality and chunk strength. Again we found no differences in performance. Our tentative conclusion is that the learning process aims to encode symbolic regularity independent of stimulus appearance.     

Does positive affect influence health?

This review highlights consistent patterns in the literature associating positive affect (PA) and physical health. However, it also raises serious conceptual and methodological reservations. Evidence suggests an association of trait PA and lower morbidity and of state and trait PA and decreased symptoms and pain. Trait PA is also associated with increased longevity among older community-dwelling individuals. The literature on PA and surviving serious illness is inconsistent. Experimentally inducing intense bouts of activated state PA triggers short-term rises in physiological arousal and associated (potentially harmful) effects on immune, cardiovascular, and pulmonary function. However, arousing effects of state PA are not generally found in naturalistic ambulatory studies in which bouts of PA are typically less intense and often associated with health protective responses. A theoretical framework to guide further study is proposed.     

Are self-deceivers enhancing positive affect or denying negative affect? Toward an understanding of implicit affective processes

Self-deception is an important construct in social, personality, and clinical literatures. Although historical and clinical views of self-deception have regarded it as defensive in nature and operation, modern views of this individual difference variable instead highlight its apparent benefits to subjective mental health. The present four studies reinforce the latter view by showing that self-deception predicts positive priming effects, but not negative priming effects, in reaction time tasks sensitive to individual differences in affective priming. In all studies, individuals higher in self-deception displayed stronger positive priming effects, defined in terms of facilitation with two positive stimuli in a consecutive sequence, but self-deception did not predict negative priming effects in the same tasks. Importantly, these effects occurred both in tasks that called for the retrieval of self-knowledge (Study 1) and those that did not (Studies 2–4). This broad pattern supports substantive views of self-deception rather than views narrowly focused on self-presentation processes. Implications for understanding self-deception are discussed.     

Does perceptual belongingness affect lightness constancy?

The relation between perceptual belongingness and lightness perception has historically been studied in the contrast domain (Benary, 1924 Psychologische Forschung 5 131 - 142). However, scientists have shown that two equal grey patches may differ in lightness when belonging to different reflecting surfaces. We extend this investigation to the constancy domain. In a CRT simulation of a bipartite field of illumination, we manipulated the arrangement of twelve patches: six squares and six diamonds. Patches of the same shape could be placed: (i) all within the same illumination field; or (ii) forming a row across the illumination fields. Furthermore, we manipulated proximity between the innermost patches and the illumination edge. The patches could be (i) touching (forming an X-junction); or (ii) not touching (not forming an X-junction). Observers were asked to perform a lightness match between two additional patches, one illuminated and the other in shadow. We found better lightness constancy when the patches of the same shape formed a row across the fields, with no effect of X-junctions. Since lightness constancy is improved by strengthening the belongingness across the illumination fields, we conclude that belongingness might help the visual system to aggregate the differently illuminated surfaces, and facilitate the scission process.     

Why do categories affect stimulus judgment?

The authors tested a model of category effects on stimulus judgment. The model holds that the goal of stimulus judgment is to achieve high accuracy. For this reason, people place inexactly represented stimuli in the context of prior information, captured in categories, combining inexact fine-grain stimulus values with prior (category) information. This process can be likened to a Bayesian statistical procedure designed to maximize the average accuracy of estimation. If people follow the proposed procedure to maximize accuracy, their estimates should be affected by the distribution of instances in a category. In the present experiments, participants reproduced one-dimensional stimuli. Different prior distributions were presented. The experiments verified that people's stimulus estimates are affected by variations in a prior distribution in such a manner as to increase the accuracy of their stimulus reproductions.     

Does attention affect visual feature integration?

Two questions are investigated in this work: first, whether the integration of color and shape information is affected by attending to the stimulus location, and second, whether attending to a stimulus location enhances the perceptual representation of the stimulus or merely affects decision processes. In three experiments, subjects were briefly presented with colored letters. On most trials, subjects were precued to the stimulus location (valid cue); on some trials, a nonstimulus location was cued (invalid cue). Subjects were less likely to incorrectly combine colors and letter shapes following a valid cue. The attentional facilitation afforded by the cue was not limited to feature integration but also affected the registration of features. However, when the amount of feature information was strictly controlled, attention still affected feature integration. The results indicate that orienting attention to the location of the cue affects the quality of the perceptual representation for features and their integration.     

When does mimicry affect evaluative judgment?

We investigated the effect of subliminally presented happy or angry faces on evaluative judgments when the facial muscles of participants were free to mimic or blocked. We hypothesized and showed that subliminally presented happy expressions lead to more positive judgments of cartoons compared to angry expressions only when facial muscles were not blocked. These results reveal the influence of socially driven embodied processes on affective judgments and have also potential implications for phenomena such as emotional contagion. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved).     

Does verb structure affect sentence comprehension?

Fodor, Garrett, and Bever have reported two experiments suggesting that sentences containing complex verbs are more difficult to comprehend than ones containing simple verbs. However, the tasks they used, paraphrasing and anagram solving, reflect comprehension difficulty only very indirectly. Both of the present experiments compared the difficulty of sentences containing simple and complex verbs using the paraphrasing task and also a task that assesses on-line comprehension difficulty, phoneme monitoring. The paraphrasing task yielded the predicted effect in Experiment 1 but not in Experiment 2. The phoneme monitoring task failed to yield the effect in either experiment. Two alternative accounts were suggested for the present data as well as those of Fodor et al.     

Does place attachment affect social well-being?

Although literature yields some insights on the connection between place and well-being, to date the direct influence of place attachment on the dimensions that characterize social well-being has not been explicitly investigated. The present study, conducted on 443 first-year undergraduates, had one main purposes: exploring the influence of place attachment – measured in relation to two different spatial ranges (neighborhood and city) – on the five components of social well-being. Results showed that place attachment globally affects social well-being, but noteworthy distinctions have to be specified both as to the spatial range investigated and the different dimensions of social well-being. Theoretical implications are discussed.     

Do memorability ratings affect study-time allocation?

This research addresses the relation between predicting future memory performance (judgment of learning, or JOL) and subsequent self-paced study-time allocation. The results of three experiments support the main hypotheses: (1) recall increases with increasing JOL, (2) restudy increases JOL accuracy, and (3) study time is related to JOL. This last relation depends on the length of initial presentation time of the items. When the initial exposure trials were short, the most restudy time was allocated to the items judged hard to recall, but when the initial exposure times were long, the most restudy time was allocated to the uncertain items. Items studied longer were recalled equally well (Experiments 1 and 3) or to a lesser extent (Experiment 2) than items studied for a shorter time. It is hypothesized that during study time, subjects refine their JOLs for the items initially less well discriminated.     

Does anticipation training affect drivers' risk taking?

Skill and risk taking are argued to be independent and to require different remedial programs. However, it is possible to contend that skill-based training could be associated with an increase, a decrease, or no change in risk-taking behavior. In 3 experiments, the authors examined the influence of a skill-based training program (hazard perception) on the risk-taking behavior of car drivers (using video-based driving simulations). Experiment 1 demonstrated a decrease in risk taking for novice drivers. In Experiment 2, the authors examined the possibilities that the skills training might operate through either a nonspecific reduction in risk taking or a specific improvement in hazard perception. Evidence supported the latter. These findings were replicated in a more ecological context in Experiment 3, which compared advanced and nonadvanced police drivers.     

Why does vantage point affect boundary extension?

To determine if layout affects boundary extension (BE; false memory beyond view boundaries; Intraub & Richardson, 1989), 12 single-object scenes were photographed from three vantage points: central (0°), shifted rightward (45°), and shifted leftward (45°). Size and position of main objects were held constant. Pictures were presented for 15 s each and were repeated at test with their boundaries: (a) displaced inward or outward (Experiment 1: N=120), or (b) identical to the stimulus views (Experiment 2: N=72). When participants adjusted test boundaries to match memory, BE always occurred, but tended to be smaller for 45° views. We propose this reflects the fact that more of the 3-D scene is visible in the 45° views. This suggests that scene representation reflects the 3-D world conveyed by the global characteristics of layout, rather than the 2-D distance between the main object and the boundaries of a picture.     

Does treatment modality affect career counseling effectiveness?

This meta-analysis involved the direct comparison of treatment modalities used in career interventions. In general, interventions that did not involve a counselor were found to be less effective than other modalities. Results also indicated that workshops or structured groups tended to produce better outcomes than non-structured career counseling groups. Furthermore, participants who used a career computer system supplemented by counseling had better outcomes than those who just used a computer system. Many of the comparisons involved comparing counselor-free interventions to other counselor-free interventions; however, this analysis did not find any significant moderators to effect size variation. There was also significant variation in workshops/structured groups and additional research is needed to analyze workshop content and client attributes.     

Does visual speech information affect word segmentation?

We present an experiment in which we explored the extent to which visual speech information affects learners’ ability to segment words from a fluent speech stream. Learners were presented with a set of sentences consisting of novel words, in which the only cues to the location of word boundaries were the transitional probabilities between syllables. They were exposed to this language through the auditory modality only, through the visual modality only (where the learners saw the speaker producing the sentences but did not hear anything), or through both the auditory and visual modalities. The learners were successful at segmenting words from the speech stream under all three training conditions. These data suggest that visual speech information has a positive effect on word segmentation performance, at least under some circumstances.     

Does the Simon effect affect movement execution?

The present work set out to test the prediction of the dual-route response selection account of the Simon effect, which maintains that the Simon effect, and its facilitation and interference components, should show up at the response selection stage irrespective of when it takes place during processing. Previous works have shown that in the case of a movement response, two strategies can be adopted for responding. The main difference between these two response strategies consists of when response selection operations take place. The two experiments reported in the present study showed that when response selection operates clearly before movement initiations, the Simon effect shows up in reaction time and not in movement time.     

When does event valence affect unrealistic optimism?

"Unrealistic optimism" (UO) has been found to be greater for negative (i.e. undesirable) than for positive (i.e. desirable) events. In two studies, we tested whether this "valence effect" is explicable in terms of motivational processes. In each case, participants were students (n = 159 in Study 1, n = 90 in Study 2), UO for the same health event was measured, and valence was manipulated by framing the event either negatively or positively. The degree to which the event would be expected to evoke concern was varied by manipulating the ease with which it could be avoided (Study 1) or the severity of its consequences (Study 2). A similar pattern of results was found in each study: the valence effect was exhibited in the condition where the event would have evoked concern, but not in the condition where it would have evoked little concern. The findings are in accord with an explanation of the valence effect in motivational terms. Implications for health education are discussed.