Determinants of task performance and invested effort: a need for closure by relative cognitive capacity interaction analysis

This study examines the simultaneous effects of need for closure (NFC) and relative cognitive capacity on invested effort and task performance within the integrative analysis framework using behavioral data. Two main results were obtained. First, the authors revealed a significant interaction effect between relative cognitive capacity (manipulated through task difficulty) and NFC (manipulated through time pressure, noise, and fear of invalidity as well as assessed by an individual differences measure) on effort investment. Second, contrary to dispositional NFC, manipulations yielded a "dual effect" because they negatively affected task performance as well as invested effort. The latter result was interpreted as an indication that noise and time pressure manipulations also tax cognitive resources. The two main findings are discussed and the authors go further into the divergences between dispositional and manipulated NFC.     

Procedural justice effects on self-esteem under certainty versus uncertainty emotions

Building upon the idea that procedural justice effects are more pronounced when uncertainty is high, we proposed that recall of an uncertainty-eliciting emotion (fear) will render people more responsive to variations in procedural justice than will recall of a certainty-eliciting emotion (disgust). Results from Study 1, (n = 79 undergraduate students) confirmed that a fair procedure (voice condition) enhanced self-esteem relative to an unfair procedure (no voice condition) to a greater extent when people recalled fear than when they recalled disgust. Results from Study 2 (n = 147 undergraduate students) also showed that a fair, relative to an unfair, procedure enhanced self-esteem more strongly when recalling the emotion of fear rather than disgust, but only when these emotions were recalled from a self-immersed than a self-distanced perspective. These findings confirm that discrete emotions that orient people to interpret situations in uncertain versus certain ways are important antecedents of procedural justice effects.     

A comparison of various authoritarianism scales in Belgian Flanders

The present study compared in a Flemish adult sample (N = 480) four recently developed authoritarianism scales as well as the widely used Right‐Wing Authoritarianism (RWA) scale. Results revealed that all these measures were strongly related and that they showed relationships of comparable magnitude with various indicators of right‐wing ideology such as conservatism and racism, as well as with political party preferences. Analyses confirmed the superior fit of a multidimensional model for the scales that are assumed to have an explicit underlying multidimensional structure, but it was also revealed that there was little consensus on what these dimensions exactly mean. Finally, the results indicated serious problems of overlap between cultural conservatism and authoritarianism for some of the scales. Having relied exclusively on an empirical method for comparing the utility of these scales, the use of other criteria for a final assessment of the authoritarianism scales is elaborated upon. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Physical activity and sedentary lifestyle in children as time-limited functions: Usefulness of the principal component analysis method

This study was designed to examine the hourly variation in and the interplay between physical activity and sedentary behavior (SB) in order to highlight key time periods for physical activity interventions for children. Data for physical activity and SB obtained with ActiGraph in 56 boys and 47 girls aged from 8 to 11 years. These data were divided into sixty minute-time samples for moderate-to-vigorous physical activity (MVPA) and SB, and analyzed using a principal component analysis (PCA) and correlation statistics. The PCA provides 10 factors which account for 80.4% of the inertia. Only two of these factors did not display competition between MVPA and SB. Contrary to some reports, a coefficient of correlation of -.68 (p < 10(-4)) was found between daily time spent at MVPA and SB. Some salient traits of children's behaviors were shown through PCA. The results suggested that efficacy of interventions targeting the morning hours (07:00 AM-11:59 AM) and the afternoon period (02:00 PM-05:59 PM) warrants attention.     

Levels of processing with free and cued recall and unilateral temporal lobe epilepsy

This study investigates the role of the temporal lobes in levels-of-processing tasks (phonetic and semantic encoding) according to the nature of recall tasks (free and cued recall). These tasks were administered to 48 patients with unilateral temporal epilepsy (right "RTLE"=24; left "LTLE"=24) and a normal group (n=24). The results indicated that LTLE patients were impaired for semantic processing (free and cued recall) and for phonetic processing (free and cued recall), while for RTLE patients deficits appeared in free recall with semantic processing. It is suggested that the left temporal lobe is involved in all aspects of verbal memory, and that the right temporal lobe is specialized in semantic processing. Moreover, our data seem to indicate that RTLE patients present a retrieval processing impairment (semantic condition), whereas the LTLE group is characterized by encoding difficulties in the phonetic and semantic condition.     

Aging: a switch from automatic to controlled processing of sounds?

In this article, the authors show that aging differentially affects peoples' ability to automatically and voluntarily process auditory information. Young, middle-aged, and older adults matched behaviorally in an auditory discrimination task showed similar patterns of neural activity indexing the voluntary and conscious detection of deviant (i.e., target) stimuli. In contrast, a negative wave indexing automatic processing (the mismatch negativity) was elicited only in young adults for near-threshold stimuli. These results indicate that aging affects the ability to automatically register small changes in a stream of homogeneous stimuli. However, this age-related decline in automatic detection of small change in the auditor environment can be compensated for by top-down controlled processes.     

The perception of visually presented yaw and pitch turns: assessing the contribution of motion, static, and cognitive cues

Terrestrial gravity restricts human locomotion to surfaces in which turns involve rotationsaround the body axis. Because observers are usually upright, one might expect the effects of gravity to induce differences in the processing of vertical versus horizontal turns. Subjects observed visual scenes of bending tunnels, either statically or dynamically, as if they were moving passively through the visual scene and were then asked to reproduce the turn deviation of the tunnel with a trackball. In order to disentangle inertia-related (earth-centered) from vision-related (body-centered) factors, the subjects were either upright or lying on their right side during the observations. Furthermore, the availability of continuous optic flow, geometrical cues, and eye movement were manipulated in three experiments. The results allowed us to characterize the factors' contributions as follows. Forward turns (pitch down) with all cues were largely overestimated, as compared with backward turns (pitch up). First, eye movements known to be irregular for vertical stimulation were largely responsible for this asymmetry. Second, geometry-based estimations are, to some extent, asymmetrical. Third, a cognitive effect corresponding to the evaluation of navigability for upward and downward turns was found (i.e.,top-down influences, such as the fear of falling often reported), which tended to increase the estimation of turns in the direction of gravity.     

Neurophysiological evidence for disturbances of conflict processing in patients with schizophrenia

Deficits in cognition are a hallmark of schizophrenia. In the present study, the authors investigated the effects of schizophrenia on the neural correlates of conflict processing in a single-trial version of the Stroop task by using event-related brain potentials. Relative to matched controls, patients with schizophrenia showed increased Stroop interference in response time, but this effect was eliminated when the effect of response slowing was controlled. In controls, conflict processing was associated with a negative wave peaking between 400 and 500 ms (N450) and conflict sustained potential (SP) peaking between 600 and 800 ms after stimulus onset. In patients with schizophrenia, the amplitude of the N450 was significantly attenuated and the conflict SP was absent. These results provide evidence for the existence of altered neural processes associated with conflict processing that may be associated with dysfunction of the anterior cingulate and prefrontal cortex in patients with schizophrenia.     

Appraisal process in sheep (Ovis aries): interactive effect of suddenness and unfamiliarity on cardiac and behavioral responses

Appraisal theories state that an emotion results from an individual's evaluation of a stimulating event, which is based on a set of criteria. Each criterion triggers specific expressions that can be modulated by the outcome of other criteria. The authors analyzed the effects of the criteria of suddenness, unfamiliarity, and their combination on behavioral and cardiac responses in lambs (Ovis aries). Lambs were exposed to a visual stimulus that appeared either rapidly or slowly and was either unfamiliar or familiar. Suddenness induced a startle response and an increase in heart rate. Unfamiliarity induced an orientation response. The combination of suddenness and unfamiliarity enhanced both the heart rate increase and the behavioral orientation response. These results support the hypotheses of specificity and modulation of emotional expressions.     

Levels of consciousness and self-awareness: A comparison and integration of various neurocognitive views

Quite a few recent models are rapidly introducing new concepts describing different levels of consciousness. This situation is getting confusing because some theorists formulate their models without making reference to existing views, redundantly adding complexity to an already difficult problem. In this paper, I present and compare nine neurocognitive models to highlight points of convergence and divergence. Two aspects of consciousness seem especially important: perception of self in time and complexity of self-representations. To this I add frequency of self-focus, amount of self-related information, and accuracy of self-knowledge. Overall, I conclude that many novel concepts (e.g., reflective, primary, core, extended, recursive, and minimal consciousness) are useful in helping us distinguish between delicate variations in consciousness and in clarifying theoretical issues that have been intensely debated in the scientific literature--e.g., consciousness in relation to mirror self-recognition and language.