On The Nature of Experiencing Self‐Agency: The Role of Goals and Primes in Inferring Oneself as the Cause of Behavior

People often find themselves in situations where the cause of events may be ambiguous. Surprisingly though, the experience of self‐agency, i.e., perceiving oneself as the causal agent of behavioral outcomes, appears quite natural to most people. How then do these experiences arise? We discuss common models proposing that self‐agency experiences result from the comparison between actual action‐outcomes and the outcomes one explicitly set as a goal. However, recent developments in psychology and neuroscience suggest that our behaviors and the outcomes they produce can be primed and implicitly guided by environmental cues and yet are accompanied by experiences of self‐agency. Hence, we also review research revealing how self‐agency experiences may arise over behavioral outcomes that are implicitly primed before they occur and how such implicitly cued agency experiences may differ from agency experiences that are the result of explicitly set goals. Directions for future research are briefly addressed.     

Academic Activism Revisited

Academics are, or ought to be, engaged in an impartial search for the truth. Many academics also are, but ought not to be, engaged in political activism. I defend a moral duty for academics to refrain from such activism. Ben Jones’ article in this journal rejects such a duty. This article responds to his objections, thereby more carefully formulating when and why political activism is morally problematic, and what burdens it may imply.     

Psychological and Somatic Factors in Patients Undergoing Coronary Artery Bypass Graft Surgery: Towards Building a Psychological Framework

The present study explored the relationships between psychological and somatic factors in patients undergoing Coronary Artery Bypass Graft surgery (CABG). The data-analysis of previous work was extended by adding somatic factors, including feelings of disability, somatic complaints and fatigue. The focus was on their relationships with psychological factors, including anxiety, depression and neuroticism. Prior to surgery and six months postoperatively, 217 patients completed self-report questionnaires. Using the method of structural equation modeling (SEM), the structure of relationships between the somatic, psychological and background factors (i.e., gender, age and medical factors) was explored. A model was developed providing a good fit and accounting for a substantial amount of variance. The structure of relationships revealed that somatic factors lead to anxiety and depression in the preoperative period, whereas anxiety and depression lead to somatic factors in the postoperative period. The structure further strengthened the key position of neuroticism and its overall negative prognostic implications.     

There is a fire burning in my heart: The role of causal attribution in affect transfer

The role of causal attribution in affect transfer of primes was addressed by examining the consequences of explicit evaluation of primes within the framework of the affect misattribution procedure (AMP; Payne, Cheng, Govorun, & Stewart, 2005). We reasoned that affect transfer occurs when primed affect remains diffuse and not bound to a specific object, hence capable of freely colouring subsequent evaluations of ambiguous objects. Accordingly, we propose that when people explicitly evaluate the prime, affect is clearly bound to the prime and becomes less capable of influencing subsequent judgements. Supporting this notion, affect transfer in the AMP was observed when participants ignored the primes, thereby keeping the primed affect relatively unbound. However, this effect disappeared when participants explicitly evaluated the primes before target stimuli were presented. Implications of these findings in determining how and when affect arising from one object carries over to another is discussed.     

Las terapias cognitivo-conductuales: Una revisión

Resumen

En esta revisión, que alcanza hasta finales del 80, se efectúa un repaso de la literatura más relevante en el campo de la CBM. Tras un análisis de los problemas generales de la corriente conductista que han facilitado su aparición así como de otras influencias específicas y de su conexión con diversos sistemas de terapia, se pasa a una breve exposición de los principales procedimientos de intervención terapéutica. Las teorías de «requerimiento» del cambio y el estudio de su epistemología apuntan a un núcleo «interaccionista» en la mayoría de los procedimientos. La necesidad de una concepción operante mediacional en humanos y la discusión de los resultados en los procedimientos de la CBM cierran el estudio.     

Once the money is in sight: Distinctive effects of conscious and unconscious rewards on task performance

Monetary rewards facilitate performance on behavioral and cognitive tasks, even when these rewards are perceived without conscious awareness. Also, recent research suggests that consciously (vs. unconsciously) perceived rewards may prompt people to more strongly concentrate on task stimuli and details. Here we propose that the latter is sometimes dysfunctional, in that it prevents improvements in task performance. We used an Attentional Blink paradigm, in which such enhanced concentration on task stimuli is detrimental to performance. Participants were consciously (supraliminally) or unconsciously (subliminally) exposed to a high-value or low-value coin that they could earn by performing well on an Attentional Blink trial. As hypothesized, high-value rewards increased performance when they were presented subliminally, while this performance benefit vanished when high-value rewards were presented consciously. We discuss this finding in the context of recent research on unconscious goal pursuit.     

Eye tracking unconscious face-to-face confrontations: dominance motives prolong gaze to masked angry faces

In primates, dominance/submission relationships are generally automatically and nonaggressively established in face-to-face confrontations. Researchers have argued that this process involves an explicit psychological stress-manipulation mechanism: Striding with a threatening expression, while keeping direct eye contact, outstresses rivals so that they submissively avert their gaze. In contrast, researchers have proposed a reflexive and implicit modulation of face-to-face confrontation in humans, on the basis of evidence that dominant and submissive individuals exhibit vigilant and avoidant responses, respectively, to facial anger in masked emotional Stroop tasks. However, these tasks do not provide an ecologically valid index of gaze behavior. Therefore, we directly measured gaze responses to masked angry, happy, and neutral facial expressions with a saccade-latency paradigm and found that increased dominance traits predict a more prolonged gaze to (or reluctance to avert gaze from) masked anger. Furthermore, greater non-dominance-related reward sensitivity predicts more persistent gaze to masked happiness. These results strongly suggest that implicit and reflexive mechanisms underlie dominant and submissive gaze behavior in face-to-face confrontations.     

The effectiveness of personalized e-mail newsletters and the role of personal characteristics

Personalizing communication means creating persuasive messages that refer to aspects of a person's self. Although the use of personalization is increasing, research on its effectiveness is limited and the results are mixed. This study examined the persuasiveness of personalized e-mail newsletters in terms of increased attention, cognitive activity, evaluation, attitude, intention, and behavior by means of an experiment (n=109). Participants randomly received either a personalized or a generic newsletter advertising a sports center. Personalization triggered a more positive evaluation of the message; however, it did not influence the other effect variables. The effects were moderated by consumers' need for uniqueness, trust, and privacy concerns, suggesting that personalization is a good strategy to increase message evaluation only among individuals who have a high need for uniqueness.