Are Conservatives Less Likely to be Prosocial Than Liberals? From Games to Ideology,Political Preferences and Voting

Do political preferences reflect individual differences in interpersonal orientations? Are conservatives less other‐regarding than liberals? On the basis of past theorising, we hypothesised that, relative to individuals with prosocial orientations, those with individualistic and competitive orientations should be more likely to endorse conservative political preferences and vote for conservative parties. This hypothesis was supported in three independent studies conducted in Italy (Studies 1 and 2) and the Netherlands (Study 3). Consistent with hypotheses, a cross‐sectional study revealed that individualists and competitors endorsed stronger conservative political preferences than did prosocials; moreover, this effect was independent of the association between need for structure and conservative political preferences (Study 1). The predicted association of social value orientation and voting was observed in both a four‐week (Study 2) and an eight‐month (Study 3) longitudinal study. Taken together, the findings provide novel support for the claim that interpersonal orientations, as measured with experimental games rooted in game theory, are important to understanding differences in ideology at the societal level. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Screening utility of the social anxiety screening scale in Spanish speaking adolescents

The aim of this study was to analyse the screening utility of the Social Anxiety Screening Scale (SASS/EDAS) in a sample of 227 adolescents with social anxiety disorder and 156 Without it (14-17 years). Results showed that the EDAS subscales (Avoidance, Distress and Interference) scores were reliable in terms of internal consistency (alpha > .80). All the subscales discriminated between adolescents with and without the disorder. They also showed a positive and significant correlation with other empirically validated measures of social anxiety. The three subscales indicated relevant sensitivity (69.16-84.14%), specificity (63.46-66.03%) and areas under the curve (.74-.81%). Binary logistic regression analyses indicated the adequate predictive utility of EDAS subscales, with the Distress subscale as the best diagnostic predictor. The data provide empirical evidence of the usefulness of EDAS as a screener for adolescent social anxiety disorder in terms of reliability, convergent and discriminant validity, diagnostic accuracy and clinical usefulness.     

Congruent visual information improves traffic signage

In the last five decades, cognitive scientists and the psychologists of reasoning have dedicated a lot of effort designing usable traffic signs. This study investigated the interference effect produced by the position of the sign elements in traffic signage on response accuracy and reaction time. Sixteen drivers performed a flanker interference reaction time task. Incongruent graphical/space solutions, actually used for the airport stack-type sign, lead to increased reaction time and a reduction in the proportion of correct answers. These results suggest that incongruent visual information should be avoided, as this might impair drivers’ performance. These findings provide important information for the specification of future signage design guidelines and for improving road safety.     

Unified framework for recognition, localization and mapping using wearable cameras

Monocular approaches to simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) have recently addressed with success the challenging problem of the fast computation of dense reconstructions from a single, moving camera. Thus, if these approaches initially relied on the detection of a reduced set of interest points to estimate the camera position and the map, they are currently able to reconstruct dense maps from a handheld camera while the camera coordinates are simultaneously computed. However, these maps of 3-dimensional points usually remain meaningless, that is, with no memorable items and without providing a way of encoding spatial relationships between objects and paths. In humans and mobile robotics, landmarks play a key role in the internalization of a spatial representation of an environment. They are memorable cues that can serve to define a region of the space or the location of other objects. In a topological representation of the space, landmarks can be identified and located according to its structural, perceptive or semantic significance and distinctiveness. But on the other hand, landmarks may be difficult to be located in a metric representation of the space. Restricted to the domain of visual landmarks, this work describes an approach where the map resulting from a point-based, monocular SLAM is annotated with the semantic information provided by a set of distinguished landmarks. Both features are obtained from the image. Hence, they can be linked by associating to each landmark all those point-based features that are superimposed to the landmark in a given image (key-frame). Visual landmarks will be obtained by means of an object-based, bottom-up attention mechanism, which will extract from the image a set of proto-objects. These proto-objects could not be always associated with natural objects, but they will typically constitute significant parts of these scene objects and can be appropriately annotated with semantic information. Moreover, they will be affine covariant regions, that is, they will be invariant to affine transformation, being detected under different viewing conditions (view-point angle, rotation, scale, etc.). Monocular SLAM will be solved using the accurate parallel tracking and mapping (PTAM) framework by Klein and Murray in Proceedings of IEEE/ACM international symposium on mixed and augmented reality, 2007.     

A multisensory interaction effect in the conceptual realm of time

Recent studies on the conceptualization of abstract concepts suggest that the concept of time is represented along a left-right horizontal axis, such that left-to-right readers represent past on the left and future on the right. Although it has been demonstrated with strong consistency that the localization (left or right) of visual stimuli could modulate temporal judgments, results obtained with auditory stimuli are more puzzling, with both failures and successes at finding the effect in the literature. The present study supports an account based on the relative relevance of visual versus auditory-spatial information in the creation of a frame of reference to map time: The auditory location of words interacted with their temporal meaning only when auditory information was made more relevant than visual spatial information by blindfolding participants.     

Leaders as Planners and Movers: Supervisors' Regulatory Modes and Subordinates' Performance

In three field studies, we found that leaders high in both locomotion and assessment tendencies (Studies 1 and 2: evaluated by subordinates; Study 3: evaluated by leaders themselves) elicited higher levels of performance from their subordinates (Studies 1 and 3: as assessed by the subordinates themselves; Study 2: as assessed by their supervisors) than leaders low in one or both of these tendencies. The research supports the notion that locomotion and assessment constitute critical regulatory functions whose conjunction is indispensible for successful performance, whether on the level of the individual (Kruglanski et al., 2000) or the group (Mauro et al., 2009).     

Salience modulation in serial preexposure: implications for perceptual learning

In three experiments rats were given serial preexposure to two flavor stimuli. In Experiment 1, some animals were given exposure to AX followed by the presentation of BX, a forward schedule; the others were given backward preexposure (BX→AX). Conditioning and test trials with the A element showed that salience or effectiveness of A was better protected in the forward than in the backward condition. Experiments 2 and 3 assessed the relevance of this salience modulation mechanism for perceptual learning. In these experiments, generalization of a conditioned aversion from AX to BX was reduced in the forward (but not in the backward) condition only after prolonged exposure, indicating that the establishment of an inhibitory link from B to A is required for successful discrimination. However, generalization to a novel compound stimulus, NX, was reduced in the forward group both after short and long preexposure, suggesting the existence of salience modulation processes that work in parallel with associative inhibition. These results seem to support the existence of a salience modulation mechanism that seems to be beyond the scope of current theories of perceptual learning.     

The impact of the HEXACO personality model in predicting socio-political attitudes: The moderating role of interest in politics

In this paper, the relationships between the HEXACO personality model and socio-political attitudes were investigated. It was hypothesized that the relationship between Honesty-Humility and Social Dominance Orientation (SDO) and that between Openness and Right Wing Authoritarianism (RWA) were moderated by interest in politics. Three hundred and forty-four individuals participated in the study. Results showed that Honesty-Humility affected SDO and Openness affected RWA more strongly among individuals with a higher level of interest in politics. Facet-level analyses revealed that Humility and Experiential Openness were uniquely connected to ideology. These effects were also moderated by interest in politics.     

Effects of category label activation about the elderly

The present research focuses on the study of behavioral effects of non-conscious activation of categories among outgroup (young people) and ingroup members (elderly people). Specifically, non-conscious activation of labels that designate the same group, but with different valence (old vs. elderly), showed an effect on a behavior not directly related to interaction with elderly. The first study with young individuals (N= 62) shows that, after non-conscious activation of a negative label (old), participants displayed longer RTs in the first phase of the task than in the case of positive label (elderly) priming. The second study (N= 40), performed with elderly people, shows a similar result, after non-conscious activation of a negative label (old), elderly people showed longer RTs in the first phase of the task, compared with the group in the non-conscious positive label activation condition. Results concerning the theoretical and practical implications are discussed.     

Factor models of the Beck Depression Inventory-II. Validation with coronary patients and a critique of Ward's model

The objective of this study was to validate in a sample of 205 coronary patients a factor model for the BDI-II, especially a model that would allow for modeling of depressive symptoms after explicitly removing bias related to somatic symptoms of depression that would overlap those of heart disease. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses for ordinal data were conducted. A one-factor model, six correlated two-factor models and, derivatives thereof, seven models with a single General Depression factor and two uncorrelated factors, were analyzed. Exploratory analysis extracted two factors, Somatic-affective and Cognitive. Confirmatory factor analyses showed the worst fit for the one-factor model. Two-factor models were surpassed in goodness of fit by the models of general-factor and group factors. Among these, the General, Somatic-affective and Cognitive (G-Sa-C) model of Beck with students is noteworthy. The reduced General, Somatic and Cognitive (G-S-C) model of Ward showed the worst goodness of fit. Our model surpasses the cutoff criteria of all fit indexes. We conclude that the inclusion of a general-factor and group factors in all the models surpasses the results of G-S-C model and, therefore, questions it. The G-Sa-C model is strengthened.