Acting intentionally and the side-effect effect

The concept of acting intentionally is an important nexus where theory of mind and moral judgment meet. Preschool children's judgments of intentional action show a valence-driven asymmetry. Children say that a foreseen but disavowed side effect is brought about "on purpose" when the side effect itself is morally bad, but not when it is morally good. This is the first demonstration in preschoolers that moral judgment influences judgments of whether something was done on purpose (as opposed to judgments of purpose influencing moral judgment). Judgments of intentionality are usually assumed to be purely factual. That these judgments are sometimes partly normative-even in preschoolers-challenges current understanding. Young children's judgments regarding foreseen side effects depend on whether the children process the idea that the character does not care about the side effect. As soon as preschoolers effectively process the theory-of-mind concept "not care that P," children show the side-effect effect.     

Moving farther but faster: an exception to Fitts's law

Fitts's law holds that movement time (MT) increases with longer distances. Here we report a violation of this law: When the target appears in a structured, linear display with placeholders indicating the possible target locations, MT to the most distant target is not longer than MT to the second most distant target, but rather tends to be shorter. Furthermore, the presence of placeholders attenuates the range effect that occurs in the absence of placeholders. These findings suggest that Fitts's law may be limited to egocentric visuomotor action, and that the visual control of hand movements may use allocentric, in addition to egocentric, spatial information.     

Saccadic latency as a function of target duration in a spatial localization task

This study examined a potential confound in the inverse relationship between target duration and saccadic latency reported by Adam, Ketelaars, Kingma, and Hoek in 1993. Eight participants located a briefly flashed target by moving the eyes and the cursor toward its position in a (backward) mask condition and in a no-mask condition. Analysis showed similar saccadic latencies in both conditions, thereby refuting the potentially confounding role of the backward masking procedure. It is tenatively suggested that the longer saccadic latencies noted for shorter target durations may be associated with delayed accumulation of evidence for the detection of the target.     

The role of comorbid disruptive behavior in the clinical expression of pediatric obsessive-compulsive disorder

This study explored the impact of disruptive behavior disorder (DBD) comorbidity on a number of theoretically relevant outcomes among 192 children and adolescents with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Youth were divided into three groups: OCD Only, OCD+DBD comorbidity and OCD+Other comorbidity. Relative to those without a comorbid condition and those with any non-DBD comorbidity, comorbid DBD was associated with greater family accommodation and less symptom resistance. Youth with comorbid DBD exhibited greater OCD symptom severity, OCD-related impairment, anxiety, and internalizing problems than those with no comorbidity. Those with comorbid DBD were over 3.6 times as likely to be taking an atypical antipsychotic medication relative to children without comorbidity. The present results suggest that comorbid DBD contributes to more severe illness presentation above and beyond an OCD diagnosis alone, and may be associated with differing pharmacotherapy prescribing practices.     

Cognitive-behavioral therapy of insomnia: A clinical case series study of patients with co-morbid disorders and using hypnotic medications

Cognitive-behavioral therapy for insomnia (CBTi) has demonstrated considerable efficacy within randomized clinical trials and case-series designs. This case-series study in a community sleep medicine clinic assessed the effectiveness of an eight-session CBTi protocol chronic insomnia patients who were allowed to continue their use of hypnotics (intent-to-treat n = 48), administered by a clinical psychology doctoral student receiving training and supervision in CBTi by a behavioral sleep medicine certified clinician. Outcome measures included daily sleep diaries, self-report measures on insomnia severity, dysfunctional beliefs and attitudes about sleep, daytime sleepiness, as well as medication usage. Patients showed significant improvements in sleep onset latency, wake time after sleep onset, sleep efficiency, insomnia severity, and dysfunctional sleep beliefs from pre- to post-treatment. No changes were seen in daytime sleepiness - patients were not excessively sleepy either before or after treatment. Use of sleep medication declined significantly from 87.5% pre-treatment to 54% post-treatment, despite no active efforts to encourage patients to withdraw. Results demonstrate that a CBTi conducted in a community sleep medicine clinic with patients not required to discontinue sleep-related medications can have similar effects as therapy delivered among those not on medication.     

Executive function is necessary for perspective selection,not Level-1 visual perspective calculation: Evidence from a dual-task study of adults

Previous research suggests that perspective-taking and other “theory of mind” processes may be cognitively demanding for adult participants, and may be disrupted by concurrent performance of a secondary task. In the current study, a Level-1 visual perspective task was administered to 32 adults using a dual-task paradigm in which the secondary task tapped executive function. Results suggested that the secondary task did not affect the calculation of perspective, but did affect the selection of the relevant (Self or Other) perspective for a given trial. This is the first direct evidence of a cognitively efficient process for “theory of mind” in adults that operates independently of executive function. The contrast between this and previous findings points to a distinction between simple perspective-taking and the more complex and cognitively demanding abilities more typically examined in studies of “theory of mind”. It is suggested that these findings may provide a parsimonious explanation of the success of infants on ‘indirect’ measures of perspective-taking that do not explicitly require selection of the relevant perspective.     

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.     

For God (or) country: the hydraulic relation between government instability and belief in religious sources of control

It has been recently proposed that people can flexibly rely on sources of control that are both internal and external to the self to satisfy the need to believe that their world is under control (i.e., that events do not unfold randomly or haphazardly). Consistent with this, past research demonstrates that, when personal control is threatened, people defend external systems of control, such as God and government. This theoretical perspective also suggests that belief in God and support for governmental systems, although seemingly disparate, will exhibit a hydraulic relationship with one another. Using both experimental and longitudinal designs in Eastern and Western cultures, the authors demonstrate that experimental manipulations or naturally occurring events (e.g., electoral instability) that lower faith in one of these external systems (e.g., the government) lead to subsequent increases in faith in the other (e.g., God). In addition, mediation and moderation analyses suggest that specific concerns with order and structure underlie these hydraulic effects. Implications for the psychological, sociocultural, and sociopolitical underpinnings of religious faith, as well as system justification theory, are discussed.     

Personality and Defensive Reactions: Fear,Trait Anxiety,and Threat Magnification

ABSTRACT The revised Reinforcement Sensitivity Theory (rRST) of personality ( Gray & McNaughton, 2000 ) maintains that trait individual differences in the operation of defensive systems relate to facets of human personality, most notably anxiety and fear. We investigated this theory in 2 separate studies (total N=270) using a threat scenario research strategy ( Blanchard, Hynd, Minke, Minemoto, & Blanchard, 2001 ). Consistent with rRST, results showed that individuals with high fear questionnaire scores tended to select defensive responses entailing orientation away from threat (e.g., run away) and that fear‐prone individuals also tended to perceive threats as magnified. The extent of this threat magnification mediated the positive association observed between fear and orientation away from threat. Overall, results suggest that interindividual variance in defensive reactions is associated with a variety of existing personality constructs but that further research is required to determine the precise relationship between personality and defensive reactions.     

Perception through a perspective-taking lens: Differential effects on judgment and behavior

In contrast to the view that social perception has symmetric effects on judgments and behavior, the current research explored whether perspective-taking leads stereotypes to differentially affect judgments and behavior. Across three studies, perspective-takers consistently used stereotypes more in their own behavior while simultaneously using them less in their judgments of others. After writing about an African-American, perspective-taking tendencies were positively correlated with aggressive behavior but negatively correlated with judging others as aggressive. Similarly, after writing about an elderly man, perspective-takers walked more slowly and became more conservative, but judged others as less dependent. These divergent effects of perspective-taking on judgment and behavior occurred regardless of whether perspective-taking was manipulated or measured, whether judgments were measured before or after behavior, the stereotype that was activated, and participants’ culture (American, Singaporean). These findings support theorizing that judgments and behavior can diverge when individuals’ social strategies are geared towards establishing and maintaining social bonds, as well as provide insight into how perspective-taking helps individuals manage diversity.