How much observational data is enough? An empirical test using marital interaction coding

Using three different samples of couples (clinic, nondistressed community, and engaged), we found that 15 minutes was sufficient to witness enough behavior to make reliable (i.e., internally consistent) estimations of most Rapid Marital Interaction Coding System (Heyman & Vivian, 1993) code frequencies. Ten minutes is sufficient for many codes of interest. The ease in which "how much time is necessary" calculations can be made should entice behavioral investigators from a variety of content areas to publish such figures. By empirically investigating a factor that in most fields becomes reified through convention, investigators can conduct observational research that is both maximally efficient and maximally scientifically defensible.     

Effects of Directed Thinking on Intentions to Engage in Beneficial Activities: Actions Versus Reasons1

An important application of psychological principles involves increasing intentions to engage in activities that, although admittedly beneficial, are often not initially appealing (e.g., studying, quitting smoking, dieting). The present study tests the utility of directed thinking as a tool for eliciting intentions to engage in such activities. Undergraduate students were directed to think either about the reasons why people should find studying enjoyable or about the actions that people might take to make studying enjoyable. Regardless of whether they thought as individuals or in cooperating dyads, students who thought about actions later reported greater intentions to spend time studying than did students who thought about reasons. The results have both theoretical and practical significance.     

No-loss gambling shows the speed of the unconscious

This paper investigates the time it takes unconscious vs. conscious knowledge to form by using an improved "no-loss gambling" method to measure awareness of knowing. Subjects could either bet on a transparently random process or on their grammaticality judgment in an artificial grammar learning task. A conflict in the literature is resolved concerning whether unconscious rather than conscious knowledge is especially fast or slow to form. When guessing (betting on a random process), accuracy was above chance and RTs were longer than when feeling confident (betting on the grammaticality decision). In a second experiment, short response deadlines only interfered with the quality of confident decisions (betting on grammaticality). When people are unaware of their knowledge, externally enforced decisions can be made rapidly with little decline in quality; but if given ample time, they await a metacognitive process to complete. The dissociation validates no-loss gambling as a measure of conscious awareness.     

The nature and consequences of topic avoidance in Chinese and Taiwanese close relationships

Two studies examined topic avoidance in Chinese and Taiwanese opposite‐sex friendships and romantic relationships. Five areas of topic avoidance emerged through analytic induction and cluster analysis: negative appraisal, relational issues, sexual issues, politics, and personal experience. Partner protection, negative relational impact, and self inefficacy emerged as the most common reasons for avoidance. Results revealed that friends, relative to romantic partners, engaged in higher levels of topic avoidance. Taiwanese participants, moreover, avoided discussing politics to a greater extent than did mainland Chinese participants. Lacking closeness was the main reason behind avoidance of political discussion. Topic avoidance was also linked to relationship quality, as relational satisfaction negatively predicted relational issue avoidance and topic avoidance breadth (i.e. the number of topics regularly avoided in the relationship). The authors explain these and other findings based on Chinese cultural codes and historically‐embedded concepts that shape interpersonal interaction.     

Relativist Dispositional Theories of Value

Adopting a dispositional theory of value promises to deliver a lot of theoretical goodies. One recurring problem for dispositional theories of value, though, is a problem about nonconvergence. If being a value is being disposed to elicit response R in us, what should we say if it turns out that not everybody is disposed to have R to the same things? One horn of the problem here is a danger of the view collapsing into an error theory—of it turning out, on account of the diversity of agents' relevant dispositions, that nothing is really a value, since nothing is disposed to elicit R in everybody. Alternatively, there is a danger of an objectionable fragmentation of value, according to which there is no such thing as a value simpliciter, but only values_me and values_you, values_us and values_them. I advocate a de se relativist version of a dispositional theory of value. If we go for this sort of de‐se‐ified dispositional theory, we get to keep our theoretical goodies, but we avoid the problem of nonconvergence that leads to a danger of either collapse into an error theory, or else talking‐past, and a loss of common subject matter.     

Assessment of cognitive function across pregnancy using CANTAB: A longitudinal study

Significant changes in endogenous plasma hormone levels are required to sustain pregnancy which provides a unique opportunity to study their effect on cognitive function.     

A nice surprise? Predictive processing and the active pursuit of novelty

Recent work in cognitive and computational neuroscience depicts human brains as devices that minimize prediction error signals: signals that encode the difference between actual and expected sensory stimulations. This raises a series of puzzles whose common theme concerns a potential misfit between this bedrock informationtheoretic vision and familiar facts about the attractions of the unexpected. We humans often seem to actively seek out surprising events, deliberately harvesting novel and exciting streams of sensory stimulation. Conversely, we often experience some wellexpected sensations as unpleasant and to-be-avoided. In this paper, I explore several core and variant forms of this puzzle, using them to display multiple interacting elements that together deliver a satisfying solution. That solution requires us to go beyond the discussion of simple information-theoretic imperatives (such as 'minimize long-term prediction error') and to recognize the essential role of species-specific prestructuring, epistemic foraging, and cultural practices in shaping the restless, curious, novelty-seeking human mind.