Adolescents’ reactions to the world trade center destruction: A study of political trauma in metropolitan New York

This study examined the emotional response of 110 adolescents living in the New York metropolitan area one month and five months after the destruction of the World Trade Center (WTC) by terrorists. The purpose of the study was to assess emerging hypotheses in political psychology that suggest that there are differential emotional responses to a national trauma that recede in predictable directions. The results followed predictions and indicate that adolescents experienced a higher level of emotions related to the Crisis and Bereavement dimension than affect associated with Vulnerability and that the emotional response decreased during the four-month follow-up period. There was no effect on emotional response from the biological sex or political orientation of the respondents, which is inconsistent with other studies in the literature. The absence of a political orientation effect is explained in terms of the lack of a domestic ideological difference in response to the terrorist attack.     

Existential Beliefs,Social Satisfaction,and Well-Being Among Catholic,Jewish, and Protestant Older Adults

Religiousness, spirituality, and existential beliefs are important sources of well-being yet neither their specific effects nor group variation in them is well understood. In a sample of more than 1,000 older adults, we found that certain existential beliefs or concerns (fear of God, death anxiety, belief in life after death, concerns about being mourned) are correlates of well-being in older adults and differed across religious groups. Protestants reported better well-being than Catholics and Jews. Differences in social satisfaction and existential concerns partially explained these differences, which were not explained by demographics. These results suggest the importance of studying well-being and religion in a way that appreciates the differences among religious groups and further of looking at the specific beliefs of different groups.     

The immunoenhancing effects of humor on secretory IgA and resistance to respiratory infections

Abstract

In three different studies involving exposun to two differcot humorous and comparison videotapes, it was demonstrated that humor arousal signiticantly increases S-IgA in college students. Furthermore significantly more of the subjects exposed to the humor films showed an increese in S-IgA than the subjects exposed to the comparison films. A good sense of humor, measured as a trait, was associated with higher baseline concentrations of S-IgA and with greater increases in S-IgA in response to a humor arousing film. Higher bascline kvels and gains in S-IgA in respoase to humor were associated with lower reported severity of colds in the past twelve months and in the three months following assessment. However, a good sense of humor was related to lesser cold incidence and severity only if it involved appreciation rather than production of humor. While those who actively tell jokes also show higher S-IgA levels, they show greater susceptibility to colds than those who only appreciate humor probably because they sodalize more often under conditions that expose them more to cold infections.     

Aesthetic Concepts,Perceptual Learning,and Linguistic Enculturation: Considerations from Wittgenstein,Language, and Music

Aesthetic non-cognitivists deny that aesthetic statements express genuinely aesthetic beliefs and instead hold that they work primarily to express something non-cognitive, such as attitudes of approval or disapproval, or desire. Non-cognitivists deny that aesthetic statements express aesthetic beliefs because they deny that there are aesthetic features in the world for aesthetic beliefs to represent. Their assumption, shared by scientists and theorists of mind alike, was that language-users possess cognitive mechanisms with which to objectively grasp abstract rules fixed independently of human responses, and that cognizers are thereby capable of grasping rules for the correct application of aesthetic concepts without relying on evaluation or enculturation. However, in this article I use Wittgenstein’s rule-following considerations to argue that psychological theories grounded upon this so-called objective model of rule-following fail to adequately account for concept acquisition and mastery. I argue that this is because linguistic enculturation, and the perceptual learning that’s often involved, influences and enables the mastery of aesthetic concepts. I argue that part of what’s involved in speaking aesthetically is to belong to a cultural practice of making sense of things aesthetically, and that it’s within a socio-linguistic community, and that community’s practices, that such aesthetic sense can be made intelligible.     

The origin of the interaction between learning method and delay in the testing effect: The roles of processing and conceptual retrieval organization

Recent research has demonstrated a relationship between retrieval organization and the efficacy of prior repeated retrieval on delayed tests. The present study asked why repeated study engenders higher recall at a short delay despite lower retrieval organization but produces a decline at a long delay, and why repeated retrieval engenders lower recall at a short delay despite higher retrieval organization but produces stable recall over time. This relationship was examined through the inclusion of two successive recall tests—one immediately after learning method and one a week later. Results replicated the interaction in recall between learning method and delay characterizing the testing effect and, critically, revealed the qualitative differences inherent in the retrieval organization of each method. Specifically, stable recall in repeated retrieval was accompanied by strong and sustained conceptual organization, whereas organization for repeated study was tenuous and weakened across tests. These differences quantitatively were assessed through the use of five targeted analyses: specifically, the examination of cumulative recall curves, the accumulation of organization across time (a curve akin to cumulative recall), item gains and losses across time, changes in the size of categories across time, and the fate of specific clusters of recalled items across time. These differences are discussed within the context of differential processes occurring during learning method.     

Stopping speech suppresses the task-irrelevant hand

Some situations require one to quickly stop an initiated response. Recent evidence suggests that rapid stopping engages a mechanism that has diffuse effects on the motor system. For example, stopping the hand dampens the excitability of the task-irrelevant leg. However, it is unclear whether this ‘global suppression’ could apply across wider motor modalities. Here we tested whether stopping speech leads to suppression of the task-irrelevant hand. We used Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation over the primary motor cortex with concurrent electromyography from the hand. We found that when speech was successfully stopped the motor evoked potential from the task-irrelevant hand was significantly reduced compared to when the participant failed to stop speaking, or responded on non stop signal trials, or compared to baseline. This shows that when speech is quickly stopped, there is a broad suppression across the motor system. This has implications for the neural basis of speech control and stuttering.     

Neuropsychological evidence for case-specific reading: Multi-letter units in visual word recognition

We describe a patient (GK) who shows symptoms associated with Balint's syndrome and attentional dyslexia. GK was able to read words, but not nonwords. He also made many misidentification and mislocation errors when reporting letters in words, suggesting that his word-naming ability did not depend upon preserved position-coded, letter identification. We show that GK was able to read lower-case words better than upper-case words, but upper-case abbreviations better than lower-case abbreviations. Spacing the letters in abbreviations disrupted identification, as did mixing the case of letters within words. These data cannot be explained in terms of letter-based reading or preserved holistic word recognition. We propose that GK was sensitive to the visual familiarity of adjacent letter forms.     

Does interference between self and other perspectives in theory of mind tasks reflect a common underlying process? Evidence from individual differences in theory of mind and inhibitory control

Theory of mind (ToM), the ability to understand that other agents have different beliefs, desires, and knowledge than oneself, has been extensively researched. Theory of mind tasks involve participants dealing with interference between their self-perspective and another agent’s perspective, and this interference has been related to executive function, particularly to inhibitory control. This study assessed whether there are individual differences in self–other interference, and whether these effects are due to individual differences in executive function. A total of 142 participants completed two ToM (the director task and a Level 1 visual perspective-taking task), which both involve self–other interference, and a battery of inhibitory control tasks. The relationships between the tasks were examined using path analysis. Results showed that the self–other interference effects of the two ToM tasks were dissociable, with individual differences in performance on the ToM tasks being unrelated and performance in each predicted by different inhibitory control tasks. We suggest that self–other differences are part of the nature of ToM tasks, but self–other interference is not a unitary construct. Instead, self–other differences result in interference effects in various ways and at different stages of processing, and these effects may not be a major limiting step for adults’ performance on typical ToM tasks. Further work is needed to assess other factors that may limit adults’ ToM performance and hence explain individual differences in social ability.

     

A comparison of blindpulling and blindwalking as measures of perceived absolute distance

Blindwalking has become a common measure of perceived absolute distance and location, but it requires a relatively large testing space and cannot be used with people for whom walking is difficult or impossible. In the present article, we describe an alternative response type that is closely matched to blindwalking in several important respects but is less resource intensive. In the blindpulling technique, participants view a target, then close their eyes and pull a length of tape or rope between the hands to indicate the remembered target distance. As with blindwalking, this response requires integration of cyclical, bilateral limb movements over time. Blind-pulling and blindwalking responses are tightly linked across a range of viewing conditions, and blind-pulling is accurate when prior exposure to visually guided pulling is provided. Thus, blindpulling shows promise as a measure of perceived distance that may be used in nonambulatory populations and when the space available for testing is limited.     

A reaction time advantage for calculating beliefs over public representations signals domain specificity for ‘theory of mind’

In a task where participants’ overt task was to track the location of an object across a sequence of events, reaction times to unpredictable probes requiring an inference about a social agent’s beliefs about the location of that object were obtained. Reaction times to false belief situations were faster than responses about the (false) contents of a map showing the location of the object (Experiment 1) and about the (false) direction of an arrow signaling the location of the object (Experiment 2). These results are consistent with developmental, neuro-imaging and neuropsychological evidence that there exist domain specific mechanisms within human cognition for encoding and reasoning about mental states. Specialization of these mechanisms may arise from either core cognitive architecture or via the accumulation of expertise in the social domain.