"... As you would have them do unto you": Does imagining yourself in the other's place stimulate moral action?

Philosophers, psychologists, and religious teachers have suggested that imagining yourself in another's place will stimulate moral action. The authors tested this idea in two different situations. In Experiment 1, participants had the opportunity to assign themselves and another research participant to tasks, with one task clearly more desirable than the other. Imagining oneself in the other's place did little to increase the morality (fairness) of the decision. A different form of perspective taking, imagining the other's feelings, increased direct assignment of the other to the desirable task, apparently due to increased empathy. In Experiment 2, participants confronted a different decision: either accept an initial task assignment that would give them highly positive consequences and the other participant nothing or change the assignment so they and the other would each receive moderately positive consequences. In this situation, imagining oneself in the other's place did significantly increase moral action.     

White guilt and racial compensation: the benefits and limits of self-focus

In two studies, the authors investigated guilt as a response to group-based advantage. Consistent with its conceptualization as a self-focused emotion, White guilt was based in self-focused beliefs in racial inequality. Thus, guilt was associated with belief in White privilege (Study 1) and resulted from seeing European Americans as perpetrators of racial discrimination (Study 2). Just as personal guilt is associated with efforts at restitution, White guilt was predictive of support for affirmative action programs aimed at compensating African Americans. White guilt was not, however, predictive of support for noncompensatory efforts at promoting equality, such as affirmative action programs that increase opportunities (Study 2). In contrast, the other-focused emotion of group-based sympathy was a more general predictor of support for different affirmative action policies. Our findings demonstrate the benefits and limits of group-based guilt as a basis of support for social equality and highlight the value of understanding the specific emotions elicited in intergroup contexts.     

Values and behavior: strength and structure of relations

Three studies address unresolved issues in value-behavior relations. Does the full range of different values relate to common, recurrent behaviors? Which values relate more strongly to behavior than others? Do relations among different values and behaviors exhibit a meaningful overall structure? If so, how to explain this? We find that stimulation and tradition values relate strongly to the behaviors that express them; hedonism, power, universalism, and self-direction values relate moderately; and security, conformity, achievement, and benevolence values relate only marginally. Additional findings suggest that these differences in value-behavior relations may stem from normative pressures to perform certain behaviors. Such findings imply that values motivate behavior, but the relation between values and behaviors is partly obscured by norms. Relations among behaviors, among values, and jointly among values and behavior exhibit a similar structure. The motivational conflicts and congruities postulated by the theory of values can account for this shared structure.     

How "fun/importance" fit affects performance: relating implicit theories to instructions

People experience a regulatory fit when they employ means of goal pursuit that fit their regulatory orientation, and this fit increases motivation that can enhance performance. The present studies extend previous research on regulatory fit to the classic motivational variables of fun and importance. They also examine for the first time the effect on performance of the fit between individuals' implicit theories about a task's fun or importance and their strategic engagement of the task as fun or important as induced by task instructions. In all three studies, task performance was better when the external task instructions "fit" rather than did not fit participants' implicit theory for the task. The implications of these findings for understanding the motivational effects of fun and importance are discussed.     

Visual identification and spatial location in Alzheimer's disease

Twelve patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) and 15 healthy elderly control subjects were shown sets of luminance-defined letters, texture-defined letters, luminance-defined squares, and texture-defined squares. They were asked to name the letters or point to the target square on each page. The stimuli were graded into four levels of difficulty based on the amount of contrast between the figure and the background. Performance was measured in terms of the maximum level of difficulty at which the participant correctly identified or located the three figures. Contrary to expectations, no significant difference was found between the performance of AD patients and control subjects on texture discrimination tasks vs. luminance discrimination tasks. However, results indicate that AD patients are impaired in performing a task requiring them to locate a texture-defined target of known shape in a noisy background field. By contrast, AD patients show no significant deficit in a task requiring them to locate a texture-defined shape in a known location. This argues that the observed deficit in the location task is not due to a failure in the system that discriminates target texture from background texture (since both location and identification tasks require the same textural discriminations), but rather to an impairment of the system responsible for "finding things" (i.e., locating known targets at unknown locations). This observation suggests that AD patients may suffer selective damage to the dorsal "Where" pathway, which is responsible for localizing objects in space.     

The effect of different hypertension models on active avoidance learning

This study tested the effects of different hypertension models on active avoidance learning in rats. Three-month-old male Wistar rats were divided randomly into six groups as follows: control (C), sham operated (sham), two kidney-one clip (2K-1C), one kidney-one clip (1K-1C), deoxycorticosterone-salt (DOCA), and N-omega-nitro-L-arginine-methyl ester (L-NAME) groups. Mean arterial blood pressures were significantly higher in four hypertensive groups compared with control and sham groups. The active avoidance training results indicated that hypertension state is associated with learning impairment. Thiobarbituric acid-reactive substances (TBARS) were determined as an indicator of lipid peroxidation in brain and hippocampus. Additionally, brain and hippocampus nitrite levels were studied.     

Word associations in deep dyslexia

Deep dyslexia is an acquired reading disorder resulting in the production of semantic errors during oral reading and an inability to read aloud nonwords. Several researchers have postulated that patients with deep dyslexia have both phonological and semantic access impairments but the data supporting these claims are not convincing. In fact, the hallmark feature of deep dyslexia--the semantic errors--strongly implies that these patients can access semantic information from printed words. We test the integrity of the semantic system in two such patients through auditory and visual word association tasks. The data support the notion that semantics remains intact and that the disorder and associated errors arise through a selection impairment related to failure of inhibitory connections in the phonological lexicon.     

Modulation of tremor amplitude during deep brain stimulation at different frequencies

Rest tremor was quantified in the index finger tip of 16 patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) receiving deep brain stimulation (DBS) of the ventro-intermediate nucleus (Vim) of the thalamus, the subthalamic nucleus (STN), or the internal part of the globus pallidus (GPi) while being off L-dopa for 12h. Clinically, without DBS, tremor amplitude varied from absent to high. Tremor was recorded continuously for about 5 min under three conditions of DBS repeated twice, namely, effective frequency (E), ineffective frequency (I), and no DBS (O). No changes in tremor were observed across conditions in subjects with little or no tremor. However, in subjects with moderate to large amplitude tremor, DBS decreased tremor amplitude to near normal values within a few seconds. Generally, transitions were progressive and occurred with a varying time delay. Occasionally, tremor escaped from control regardless of the stimulation condition considered. In some cases tremor amplitude in one condition appeared to depend on the preceding condition. Finally, the results were reproducible on two consecutive days. We conclude that tremor control with DBS follows specific dynamical rules, which must be compatible with the hypotheses proposed regarding the underlying mechanisms of DBS.     

Apraxia is not associated to a disproportionate naming impairment for manipulable objects

The relevance of gesture knowledge for the semantic representation of manipulable objects was investigated in a series of 15 patients with a focal left-hemisphere lesion. The patients were classified according to the presence/absence of ideomotor and ideational apraxia. We investigated picture naming and word-picture matching (pointing to a picture on verbal command) with stimuli including items from three categories: manipulable objects, non-manipulable objects, and animals. The analysis was performed at group level and at single-patient level. Nine patients were affected by ideational apraxia and nine by ideomotor apraxia: two cases presented ideomotor but not ideational apraxia, and two cases presented the opposite dissociation. Patients affected by ideational apraxia were more severely impaired in all tasks, but did not show a disproportionate impairment with the category of manipulable objects in contrast to the other categories. The presence of ideomotor apraxia did not cause a greater impairment in any task or category. Finally, we observed a patient with ideational apraxia who performed flawlessly in naming and word-picture matching for all the stimuli, including manipulable objects. In conclusion, we did not find a relationship between ideational apraxia and a disproportionate impairment of the semantic knowledge of manipulable objects.