Age differences in emotional reactivity: the sample case of sadness

Past studies have suggested that the intensity of subjective reactions to emotion-arousing stimuli remains stable, whereas the magnitude of autonomic reactions declines with age. The goal of the present studies was to investigate whether this evidence will generalize to newly edited films dealing with age-relevant themes such as the loss of loved ones. In Study 1, greater self-reported sadness was found in older than in younger adults in response to all films. Findings of Study 2, which were based on an independent sample, replicated those of Study 1. In addition, 6 indicators of autonomic nervous system activity were assessed. Young and old adults did not differ in their autonomic reactions to the films. This evidence suggests that when older people are exposed to stimuli featuring themes that are relevant to their age group, they show greater subjective and physiological reactions than would be expected on the basis of past research.     

Response styles in the assessment of anger expression

This study demonstrates how mixture distribution item response models can be used to detect different response styles in the clinical assessment of anger expression. Analyses of 3 subscales of the State-Trait Anger Expression Inventory in a clinical sample of 4,497 patients revealed that there are different response styles that manifest themselves in 2- and 3-class solutions. These solutions are robust across subsamples. Response styles reflect both psychologically meaningful biases (i.e., social desirability) and nonmeaningful response category preferences. Person parameters that correct for class membership (and thus, for response styles) are computed and compared with raw scores. The implications of these results for research on clinical assessment are discussed.     

Distinguishing Between Causes and Enabling Conditions—Through Mental Models or Linguistic Cues?

The mental model theory of naive causal understanding and reasoning (Goldvarg & Johnson-Laird, 2001, Cognitive Science, 25, 565–610) claims that people distinguish between causes and enabling conditions on the basis of sets of models that represent possible causal situations. In the tasks used to test this hypothesis, however, the proposed set of models was confounded with linguistic cues that frame which event to assume as given (the enabling condition) and which to consider as responsible for the effect under this assumption (the cause). By disentangling these two factors, we were able to show that when identifying causes and enabling conditions in these tasks, people rely strongly on the linguistic cues but not on the proposed set of models and that this set of models does not even reflect people's typical interpretation of the tasks. We propose an alternative explanation that integrates syntactic and causal considerations.     

Conceptual expansion and creative imagery as a function of psychoticism

The ability to be creative is often considered a unique characteristic of conscious beings and many efforts have been directed at demonstrating a relationship between creativity and the personality construct of psychoticism. The present study sought to investigate this link explicitly by focusing on discrete facets of creative cognition, namely the originality/novelty dimension and the practicality/usefulness dimension. Based on Eysenck's conceptualisation of psychoticism as being characterised by an overinclusive cognitive style, it was expected that higher levels of psychoticism would accompany a greater degree of conceptual expansion and elevated levels of originality in creative imagery, but would be unrelated to the practicality/usefulness of an idea. These hypotheses were confirmed in 80 healthy participants who were contrasted based on their EPQ psychoticism scale scores. Our findings suggest that the link between psychoticism and creativity is based on associative thinking and broader but weak top-down activation patterns rather than on goal-related thinking.     

A multinomial model to assess central characteristics of mental operators

Knowledge about potential operators, about the preconditions of their applicability, and about their effects is essential to interact effectively with the physical world. Four classes of representational units of this knowledge can be distinguished: I) rules, II) structures, III) instances, and IV) episodes. Two important characteristics of these units are the abstractness of content and the directionality of access. A multinomial model is presented that enables the measurement of these characteristics. Three experiments were conducted to validate the parameters of the model. The multinomial model could be fitted very well to the empirical data of each experiment. Moreover, the parameter estimates showed the expected effects. The model allows the investigation of the influence of important variables (for example, knowledge domain, type of instruction, or amount of practice) on characteristics of mental operators without a strong commitment to any specific process theory. Debates regarding the contribution of different kinds of knowledge can be converted into statistical tests of the corresponding model parameters.     

Deceiving oneself about being in control: conscious detection of changes in visuomotor coupling

Previous research has demonstrated that compensatory movements for changes in visuomotor coupling often are not consciously detected. But what factors affect the conscious detection of such changes? This issue was addressed in 4 experiments. Participants carried out a drawing task in which the relative velocity between the actual movement and its visual consequences was perturbed. Unconscious compensatory movements and conscious detection rates were simultaneously recorded. There was an invariant relationship between the extent of the change and its conscious detection that was proportional to the initial drawing velocity. This suggests that conscious change detection relies on a system that integrates visual and motor information-as, for instance, suggested by the internal model theory of motor control. Figural discrepancies increased the detection rates, indicating that additional cues for the what system facilitate conscious change detection.     

Meta-cognition about biological sex and gender-stereotypic physical appearance: consequences for the assessment of leadership competence

Previous findings are inconsistent with regard to whether men are judged as being more or less competent leaders than women. However, masculine-relative to feminine-looking persons seem to be judged consistently as more competent leaders. Can this different impact of biological sex and physical appearance be due to the disparate availability of meta-cognitive knowledge about both sources? The results of Study 1 indicated that individuals possess meta-cognitive knowledge about a possible biasing influence of persons' biological sex, but not for their physical appearance. In Study 2, participants judged the leadership competence of a male versus female stimulus person with either masculine or feminine physical appearance. In addition, the available cognitive capacity was manipulated. When high capacity was available, participants corrected for the influence of stimulus persons' sex, but they fell prey to this influence under cognitive load. However, the effect of physical appearance was not moderated by cognitive capacity.     

Confusion of space and time in the flash-lag effect

The apparent lagging of a short flash in the relation to a moving object, the flash-lag effect (FLE), has so far been measured mainly in terms of illusory spatial offset. We propose a method of measuring the perceived temporal asynchrony of the FLE separately from its perceived spatial offset. We presented a moving stimulus that changed its colour at a certain moment. The observer indicated, in two different tasks, where and when the colour change occurred in relation to a stationary reference flash. Results show that the perceived time of the colour change was not congruent with the perceived location of the colour change: the colour change is perceived simultaneously with the flash, but is shifted in position. The presentation of the reference in the form of a flash is not critical for the occurrence of the FLE, because the same effect was obtained with a constantly visible reference signal, the position of which or time when it changed its colour were varied. The observer was not able to ignore the irrelevant dimension of the reference signal: the apparent time of the colour change was influenced by the position of the reference signal, and the apparent location of the colour change was influenced by the presentation time of the reference signal. The observer's inability to separate the spatial and temporal aspects of the moving stimulus clearly imposes certain limits on theories that are attempting to explain the FLE exclusively in terms of the perceived space and time.     

The development of distance estimation in optic flow

In three experiments we tested the ability of children aged 8 to 12 years and adults to locate a target in an optic texture flow projected onto the ground. During the exposure phase, a static target (diode) was lit up at 6 m or 8 m on the ground in front of the subject. During the pointing phase, the subject was asked to indicate the perceived location of the target with a laser pointer as soon as the target was switched off. In the first experiment, during both phases the optic texture (environment) was either motionless or approaching the subject. Results showed that target locations were significantly more underestimated within the moving texture than within the still texture. In the second experiment, a detailed error analysis showed that the differences of performance between children and adults were not due to differences in eye height. Errors can be described by a linear fit with the retinal speed of the optic flow surrounding the targets. Distance judgments improved from the age of 8 years onwards. In the last experiment we found the same kind of results with a receding texture and without stimulation in central vision. Results are discussed in terms of subject's capacity to compensate for the effect of linear vection produced by the optic flow.     

A neural network approach to movement pattern analysis

Movements are time-dependent processes and so can be modelled by time-series of coordinates: E.g., each articulation has geometric coordinates; the set of the coordinates of the relevant articulations build a high-dimensional configuration. These configurations--or "patterns"--give reason for analysing movements by means of neural networks: The Kohonen Feature Map (KFM) is a special type of neural network, which (after having been coined by training with appropriate pattern samples) is able to recognize single patterns as members of pattern clusters. This way, for example, the particular configurations of a given movement can be identified as belonging to respective configuration clusters, where the sequence of clusters to which the time-depending configurations belong, characterizes the process as a 2-dimensional trajectory. The advantages of this method are that: the high dimensionality of the original processes is reduced to two dimensional trajectories, the clusters are automatically determined by the network, and all data for further analyses can automatically be transferred into a data base. Thus, the processes can either be visualized and analysed by an expert or again processed by further automatic analysing tools, as has been done with similarity matrices. The disadvantage is that a KFM-training needs a huge amount of information, which normally is not available from experiments. However, the Dynamically Controlled Network DyCoN (a special type of KFM) makes it possible to reduce the amount of original training data substantially--e.g., by adding stochastically generated ones. Currently, DyCoN is used in several projects in order to generally support analyses of processes in sport. It should be emphasized that the presented approach is not meant to improve the understanding or to develop models of human movement but to give a survey of the advantages and methodological aspects of net-based movement analysis.