John Rogers – An Appreciation

[John Rogers retired as Editor of the BJHP in March 2011. We are delighted to publish this specially commissioned appreciation of John's work by Sarah Hutton, who has been on the Editorial Board since the founding of the journal in 1993 and who was Chair of the British Society for the History of Philosophy from 1998 to 2004. (Ed.)]     

The influence of extrafoveal emotional faces on prosaccade latencies

Across three experiments we sought to determine whether extrafoveally presented emotional faces are processed sufficiently rapidly to influence saccade programming. Two rectangular targets containing a neutral and an emotional face were presented either side of a central fixation cross. Participants made prosaccades towards an abrupt luminosity change to the border of one of the rectangles. The faces appeared 150 ms before or simultaneously with the cue. Saccades were faster towards cued rectangles containing emotional compared to neutral faces even when the rectangles were positioned 12 degrees from the fixation cross. When faces were inverted, the facilitative effect of emotion only emerged in the ?150 ms SOA condition, possibly reflecting a shift from configural to featural face processing. Together the results suggest that the human brain is highly specialized for processing emotional information and responds very rapidly to the brief presentation of expressive faces, even when these are located outside foveal vision.     

Ethical,and practical issues in applying functional imaging to the clinical management of Alzheimer's disease

This review outlines ethical, legal, and practical issues related to conducting functional imaging research with Alzheimer's disease (AD) patients. Imaging techniques, with an emphasis on functional MRI and positron emission tomography, are compared and contrasted with respect to the manner in which they can be applied to issues of clinical relevance to AD. Methodological difficulties are raised to assist with critical evaluation of current imaging results. Various potential clinical applications of functional imaging are briefly reviewed and discussed with respect to associated ethical conflicts.     

Cognitive ability, expertise, and age differences in following air-traffic control instructions

Differences in cognitive ability and domain-specific expertise may help explain age differences in pilot performance. Pilots heard air-traffic controller messages and then executed them while "flying" in a simulator. Messages varied in length and speech rate. Age was associated with lower accuracy, but the expected Age x Message Difficulty interactions were not obtained. Expertise, as indexed by pilot ratings, was associated with higher accuracy; yet expertise did not reduce age differences in accuracy. The effect of age on communication task accuracy was largely explainable as an age-associated decrease in working memory span, which in turn was explainable as decreases in both speed and interference control. Results are discussed within frameworks of deliberate practice and cognitive mediation of age differences.     

Exposure to community violence and trauma symptoms in late adolescence: comparison of a college sample and a noncollege community sample

This paper presents a comparison for two samples (college and noncollege) of older, urban African-American adolescents of correlations between two measures of exposure to community violence (victim and witness) and four types of psychological trauma symptoms (anger, anxiety, depression, and dissociation). The central issue is the generalizability of previous findings about these relationships obtained from beginning college students of traditional age. The two samples did not differ in the magnitude of either the zero-order correlations or the multiple correlations between the two types of exposure to community violence and the four types of symptoms of trauma. The conclusion is that findings regarding the relationship of exposure to community violence with psychological symptoms of trauma obtained from college students may tentatively be generalized to older adolescents who are not in college.     

Self-Presentational Motivations and Personality Differences in Self-Esteem

ABSTRACT  This article discusses the interpersonal motivations associated with different levels of self-esteem. Although self-esteem literally refers to an intrapsychic attitude, we propose that self-esteem scales often measure a self-presentational orientation. High self-esteem scores are associated with a tendency to present oneself in a self-enhancing fashion that is characterized by willingness to accept risks, focus on outstandingly good qualities, strategic ploys, and calling attention to self. Low self-esteem scores are associated with a tendency to present oneself in a self-protective fashion that is characterized by unwillingness to accept risks, focus on avoiding outstandingly bad qualities, avoidance of many strategic ploys, and reluctance to draw attention to self. Considerable evidence shows that most people rate themselves as above average on self-esteem scales; relatively few people score below any self-esteem scale's conceptual midpoint. Review of past literature yields the following conclusions: (a) Low scores on self-esteem scales are typically the result of neutral and intermediate rather than self-derogatory responses to scale items; (b) behavioral correlates of measured self-esteem sometimes depend on self-presentational variables such as audience presence; and (c) many past findings with self-esteem scales may be interpretable in self-presentational terms.     

The role of attention in the relationship between inspection time and IQ in children.

This study investigated the possibility that the widely reported relationship between IQ and Inspection Time (IT) in children (e.g. Nettlebeck & Young, 1990) may derive from the involvement of various aspects of attention in both IT and psychometric ability tasks. Forty-nine participants, aged approximately 8–11 years, were given a battery of tests designed to measure different aspects of attention, the Colored Progressive Matrices (CPM) intelligence test and a visual IT test. Analysis using multiple regression indicated that, although attention predicted CPM score, IT was still a significant predictor of CPM score after age and the attention measures had been partialled out, indicating that IT scores account for a unique proportion of the variance in CPM scores. Age and IT were significantly (negatively) correlated. This correlation became non-significant once the attention measures had been removed. These results are discussed in relation to previous studies. After a consideration of a number of methodological criticisms, suggestions for further research are outlined.     

Integrated delays to shock as negative reinforcement

Rats were shocked at the rate of two per minute until they pressed a lever. In Experiment I, shocks were delivered at variable-time intervals averaging 30 sec; in Experiment II, shocks were delivered at fixed-time intervals of 30 sec. A response produced an alternate condition for a fixed-time period. The shock frequency following a response, calculated over the whole alternate condition, was two per minute. The pattern of shocks in the alternate condition was controlled so that the first shock occurred at the same time as it would have occurred had the response not been emitted; the remaining shocks were delayed until near the end of the alternate condition. Bar pressing was acquired in both experiments. This finding is not explained by two-factor theories of avoidance and is inconsistent with the notion that overall shock-frequency reduction is necessary for negative reinforcement. The data imply that responding is determined by the integrated delays to each shock following a response versus the integrated delays to shock in the absence of a response.     

Polynomial psychophysics of group risk perception

The Coombs and Huang (1970) distributive theory of perceived risk is reinterpreted as a more robust statistical hypothesis to describe central tendencies of noisy replicates drawn from a homogeneous population. Barron's (1976) sample of 13 business faculty rank-order responses are pooled to obtain a replicated complete 3 × 3 × 3 design which is analyzed by a new stochastic conjoint measurement (SCJM) approach to axiomatic data analysis. SCJM implements statistical analogues of the deterministic Krantz and Tversky (1971) diagnostics for error-free data. SCJM diagnosis based on a series of one-sided nonparametric two-cell comparisons at the α = 0.04 level supports the hypothesis of interaction between the expected-value and number-of-plays attributes of gambles yet contradicts Barron's odd-even effects hypothesis. SCJM diagnosis with two-cell α < 0.04 supports an additive statistical model.