Increasing stimulus intensity does not affect sensorimotor synchronization

When people synchronize taps with isochronously presented stimuli, taps usually precede the pacing stimuli [negative mean asynchrony (NMA)]. One explanation of NMA [sensory accumulation model (SAM), Aschersleben in Brain Cogn 48:66–79, 2002] is that more time is needed to generate a central code for kinesthetic-tactile information than for auditory or visual stimuli. The SAM predicts that raising the intensity of the pacing stimuli shortens the time for their sensory accumulation, thereby increasing NMA. This prediction was tested by asking participants to synchronize finger force pulses with target isochronous stimuli with various intensities. In addition, participants performed a simple reaction-time task, for comparison. Higher intensity led to shorter reaction times. However, intensity manipulation did not affect NMA in the synchronization task. This finding is not consistent with the predictions based on the SAM. Discrepancies in sensitivity to stimulus intensity between sensorimotor synchronization and reaction-time tasks point to the involvement of different timing mechanisms in these two tasks.     

Reconsidering research on self-humanizing: The importance of mean comparative judgments

Self-humanization is defined as the tendency to view oneself as more essentially human than others. Researchers have claimed that people attribute human nature traits more strongly to themselves than to others, but not uniquely human traits. In this article we suggest that such claims are based on the misinterpretation of results. Most studies have not presented mean comparative judgments, making it impossible to determine whether people thought they possessed characteristics less strongly or more strongly than the average person. We found that people (N = 256) in Poland, Italy, and Korea perceived themselves as possessing desirable human nature and uniquely human characteristics more than others, as possessing undesirable uniquely human traits less than others, and as similar to others in terms of undesirable human nature characteristics. It seems that being more human than others means possessing some traits more than others and possessing some traits less than others.     

Asymmetrical Priming Effects: An Exploration of Trilingual German–English–French Lexico-Semantic Memory

The growing number of multilingual speakers poses an interesting question as to the way in which three or more languages are represented in the memory of a language user. The Revised Hierarchical Model (Kroll and Stewart in J Mem Lang 33: 149–174, 1994) or the Sense Model (Finkbeiner et al. in J Mem Lang 51(1), 1–22, 2004) skillfully capture the prediction regarding two languages, with the lexical level being separate and the conceptual one being unified or distributed to a varying degree. In this set of experiments, we employed primed animacy decision tasks to address the lexico-semantic representation of trilingual German–English–French speakers. The comparison of reaction times has revealed priming effects from L1 to L2 and from L2 to L1, both with prime duration of 100 and 50 ms; a priming asymmetry effect between the L2 and L3 language directions; and no interaction between L1 and L3. The aggregated findings point to a hybrid representation, with both compound and coordinate representations being possible.     

Frontal EEG alpha band asymmetry as a predictor of reasoning deficiency in depressed people

Cognitive deficits in depression are mostly apparent in executive functions, especially when integration of information and reasoning is required. In parallel, there are also numerous studies pointing to the frontal alpha band asymmetry as a psychophysiological marker of depression. In this study, we explored the role of frontal alpha asymmetry as a potential factor explaining the cognitive problems accompanying depression. Twenty-six depressed and 26 control participants completed a reasoning task and underwent 5 minutes of electroencephalography recording. In line with the previous studies, depressed people showed difficulties with reasoning but we did not observe the relationship between frontal asymmetry in the alpha band and depression. However, we found that in the depressed group the frontal alpha asymmetry index was characterised by larger variance than in the control group, and it was also a strong predictor of cognitive functioning exclusively in the depressed group. Our results point to the disruption of a psychophysiological balance, reflected in changed frontal alpha asymmetry (into more left-sided frontal asymmetry in the alpha band, reflecting more right-sided cortical activity) as a possible brain correlate of cognitive disturbances present in depressive disorders.     

Freedom as praxis: a comparative analysis of August Cieszkowski and Nikolaj Berdjaev

This essay attempts to elaborate a first thorough comparative analysis of August Cieszkowski and Nikolaj Berdjaev. Although the latter is well known as one of the most important Russian philosophers, the former is hardly known beyond the Polish borders. This general lack of recognition contrasts with the fact that Cieszkowski played a significant role in nineteenth century philosophy in Germany, France, Poland and Russia. A comparative analysis of Cieszkowski and Berdjaev will undergird the idea that Cieszkowski was not merely a ‘marginal’ figure in the history of philosophy. This essay has sought the reasons why Berdjaev considered himself to a large extent as a disciple of Cieszkowski. The stress is put on the central aspects of both philosophers’ thinking: freedom, praxis and the way they relate to morality in general.     

A step at a time: Preliterate children’s simulation of narrative movement during story comprehension

A growing body of work suggests that narrative comprehension involves the simulation of the described events and actions (e.g., Barsalou, 2008, Matlock, 2004). Preliterate children’s ability to simulate a narrative character’s movements is explored here in three studies. Children’s simulations of a character’s movements were found to be constrained by their expectation of the duration of the described activities (i.e., walking vs. driving) and by their expectations about the motivating influence of certain psychological factors (i.e., character being eager or not eager to get to a location). These findings reveal an ability among preliterate children to create impressively rich and dynamic mental representations of narrative events and address, with a novel methodology, an identified need for greater exploration of precursors to narrative comprehension.     

Socio-Medical and Personality Correlates of Psychological Well-Being among People Living with HIV: a Latent Profile Analysis

Applied Research in Quality of Life - The aim of this study was to examine the heterogeneity of the sample of people living with HIV (PLWH) in terms of psychological well-being (PWB) using the...     

The big two dictionaries: Capturing agency and communion in natural language

Four studies developed and validated two dictionaries to capture agentic and communal expressions in natural language. Their development followed the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) approach (Study 1) and we tested their validity with frequency-based analyses and semantic similarity measures. The newly developed Agency and Communion dictionaries were aligned with LIWC categories related to agency and communion (Study 2), and corresponded with subjective ratings (Study 3), confirming their convergent validity. Very low or absent correspondence between proposed dictionaries and unrelated LIWC categories demonstrated their discriminant validity (Study 2). Finally, we applied both dictionaries to language used in advertisements. In correspondence to gender stereotypes, male-dominated jobs were advertised with more agentic than communal words, and female-dominated jobs with more communal than agentic words (Study 4). Both dictionaries represent reliable tools for quantifying agentic and communal content in natural language, and will improve and facilitate future research on agency and communion.     

Lexical or syntactic control of sentence formulation? Structural generalizations from idiom production

To compare abstract structural and lexicalist accounts of syntactic processes in sentence formulation, we examined the effectiveness of nonidiomatic and idiomatic phrasal verbs in inducing structural generalizations. Three experiments made use of a syntactic priming paradigm in which participants recalled sentences they had read in rapid serial visual presentation. Prime and target sentences contained phrasal verbs with particles directly following the verb (pull off a sweatshirt) or following the direct object (pull a sweatshirt off). Idiomatic primes used verbs whose figurative meaning cannot be straightforwardly derived from the literal meaning of the main verb (e.g., pull off a robbery) and are commonly treated as stored lexical units. Particle placement in sentences was primed by both nonidiomatic and idiomatic verbs. Experiment 1 showed that the syntax of idiomatic and nonidiomatic phrasal verbs is amenable to priming, and Experiments 2 and 3 compared the priming patterns created by idiomatic and nonidiomatic primes. Despite differences in idiomaticity and structural flexibility, both types of phrasal verbs induced structural generalizations and differed little in their ability to do so. The findings are interpreted in terms of the role of abstract structural processes in language production.