Does Avatar Appearance Matter? How Team Visual Similarity and Member–Avatar Similarity Influence Virtual Team Performance

This multimethod study investigated how avatar appearance influences virtual team performance. This study is the first to integrate the framework of social identity model of de‐individuation effects (SIDE) and Self‐Identification theory, using “morphing” techniques. Results were obtained from a 2 (team visual similarity: dissimilar vs. similar team avatars) × 2 (member–avatar similarity: cartoon avatars vs. avatar similar to self) experiment (N = 240). The findings indicated that teams using “morphed team avatars,” which combined both a high degree of team visual similarity and member–avatar similarity in their appearances, performed best on the task, and showed greater social attraction than teams in the other conditions. Moreover, content analysis of the chat conversations revealed that these teams interacted more strategically and expressed a greater motivation to solve the task.     

Metaemotional Intentionality

This article argues against two theories that obscure our understanding of emotions whose objects are other emotions. The tripartite model of emotional intentionality holds that an emotion's relation to its object is necessarily mediated by an additional representational state; I argue that metaemotions are an exception to this claim. The hierarchical model positions metaemotions as stable, epistemically privileged higher‐order appraisals of lower‐level emotions; I argue that this clashes with various features of complex metaemotional experiences. The article therefore serves dual purposes, offering metaemotions as a counterexample to an intuitive thesis about emotional intentionality, and examining their intentional structure in its own right.     

Specifying the determinants of the initiation and maintenance of behavior change: an examination of self-efficacy, satisfaction, and smoking cessation.

Using data from smokers (N = 591) who enrolled in an 8-week smoking cessation program and were then followed for 15 months, the authors tested the thesis that self-efficacy guides the decision to initiate smoking cessation but that satisfaction with the outcomes afforded by quitting guides the decision to maintain cessation. Measures of self-efficacy and satisfaction assessed at the end of the program, 2 months, and 9 months were used to predict quit status at 2, 9, and 15 months, respectively. At each point, participants were categorized as either initiators or maintainers on the basis of their pattern of cessation behavior. Across time, self-efficacy predicted future quit status for initiators, whereas satisfaction generally predicted future quit status for maintainers. Implications for models of behavior change and behavioral interventions are discussed.     

Effects of wakeful resting versus social media usage after learning on the retention of new memories

Communication and information sharing via social media platforms is a common and popular activity. The majority of existing studies indicate that social media usage has detrimental effects on learning and memory. However, it is an open question as to whether social media usage affects memory even after learning. To test this, healthy young adults learned and immediately recalled a vocabulary list. Subsequent to recall, participants either wakefully rested for 8 min or used social media for 8 min. A delayed recall test took place after the wakeful resting condition and the social media condition and again after 1 day. Our results showed that social media usage, compared with wakeful resting, had detrimental effects on memory performance over both retention intervals. We assume that social media usage interfered with memory consolidation of learned vocabularies and suggest that learners opt for wakeful resting over social media usage as a learning-break activity.     

Hierarchies and levels of reality

We examine some assumptions about the nature of ‘levels of reality’ in the light of examples drawn from physics. Three central assumptions of the standard view of such levels (for instance, Oppenheim and Putnam 1958) are (i) that levels are populated by entities of varying complexity, (ii) that there is a unique hierarchy of levels, ranging from the very small to the very large, and (iii) that the inhabitants of adjacent levels are related by the parthood relation. Using examples from physics, we argue that it is more natural to view the inhabitants of levels as the behaviors of entities, rather than entities themselves. This suggests an account of reduction between levels, according to which one behavior reduces to another if the two are related by an appropriate limit relation. By considering cases where such inter-level reduction fails, we show that the hierarchy of behaviors differs in several respects from the standard hierarchy of entities. In particular, while on the standard view, lower-level entities are ‘micro’ parts of higher-level entities, on our view, a system’s macro-level behavior can be seen as a (‘non-spatial’) part of its micro-level behavior. We argue that this second hierarchy is not really in conflict with the standard view and that it better suits examples of explanation in science.     

Infants' representations of three-dimensional occluded objects

Infants' ability to represent objects has received significant attention from the developmental research community. With the advent of eye-tracking technology, detailed analysis of infants' looking patterns during object occlusion have revealed much about the nature of infants' representations. The current study continues this research by analyzing infants' looking patterns in a novel manner and by comparing infants' looking at a simple display in which a single three-dimensional (3D) object moves along a continuous trajectory to a more complex display in which two 3D objects undergo trajectories that are interrupted behind an occluder. Six-month-old infants saw an occlusion sequence in which a ball moved along a linear path, disappeared behind a rectangular screen, and then a ball (ball-ball event) or a box (ball-box event) emerged at the other edge. An eye-tracking system recorded infants' eye-movements during the event sequence. Results from examination of infants' attention to the occluder indicate that during the occlusion interval infants looked longer to the side of the occluder behind which the moving occluded object was located, shifting gaze from one side of the occluder to the other as the object(s) moved behind the screen. Furthermore, when events included two objects, infants attended to the spatiotemporal coordinates of the objects longer than when a single object was involved. These results provide clear evidence that infants' visual tracking is different in response to a one-object display than to a two-object display. Furthermore, this finding suggests that infants may require more focused attention to the hidden position of objects in more complex multiple-object displays and provides additional evidence that infants represent the spatial location of moving occluded objects.