Memory for facial expressions: The power of a smile

Faces with expressions (happy, surprise, anger, fear) were presented at study. Memory for facial expressions was tested by presenting the same faces with neutral expressions and asking participants to determine the expression that had been displayed at study. In three experiments, happy expressions were remembered better than other expressions. The advantage of a happy face was observed even when faces were inverted (upside down) and even when the salient perceptual feature (broad grin) was controlled across conditions. These findings are couched in terms of source monitoring, in which memory for facial expressions reflects encoding of the dispositional context of a prior event.     

A population approach to the study of emotion: diurnal rhythms of a working day examined with the Day Reconstruction Method

To date, diurnal rhythms of emotions have been studied with real-time data collection methods mostly in relatively small samples. The Day Reconstruction Method (DRM), a new survey instrument that reconstructs the emotions of a day, is examined as a method for enabling large-scale investigations of rhythms. Diurnal cycles were observed for 12 emotion adjectives in 909 women over a working day. Bimodal patterns with peaks at noon and evenings were detected for positive emotions; peaks in negative emotions were found at mid-morning and mid-afternoon. A V-shaped pattern was found for tired and an inverted U-shaped pattern for competent. Several diurnal patterns from prior studies were replicated. The DRM appears to be a useful tool for the study of emotions.     

Guest Editorial: The Resistance to Belief

William James's essay The Will to Believe proposed that we are sometimes justified, even obligated, to believe from our strong emotional or passional nature that something is true, even though there may not be total logical, evidential proof—which he also wrote is not to be found in this world. This essay explores situations, using a recent dear-death experience (NDE) example, in which there are reasonable evidence and logic, and yet belief seems to be withheld. I postulate and discuss nonrational influences producing resistance to belief, including the fear of being in error, the fear of rejection from the scientific community, irrational requirements of logicality, avoidance of consequences, and paradigm fixation. I also discuss issues in philosophy of science and epistemology in regard to proof.     

Confluent paranoia in African American psychiatric patients: an empirical study of Ridley's typology

This study examined Ridley's (1984) typology of paranoia in African Americans, which assumes orthogonal dimensions of culture and pathology in symptom expression. Median split of scores on the Cultural Mistrust Inventory and the scale of False Beliefs and Perceptions represented high and low levels of cultural paranoia and pathological paranoia, respectively. The 4 groups of Black patients were nonparanoia, cultural paranoia, pathological paranoia, and confluent paranoia. A Fenigstein Paranoia Scale manipulation check indicated that differences in paranoid symptom expression among the groups were partially supportive of Ridley's model, as were measures of perceptions of hostility and self-esteem. Omnibus tests of between-groups differences were significant for global assessment of functioning and number of symptoms recorded in patients' charts. Predicted pattern testing revealed a significant severity dimension in mean scores across paranoia groups for some measures of clinician-rated functioning but not others. SCID interviewers' ratings of cultural mistrust and number of times restrained (or secluded) were more consistent with a pattern representing a cultural dimension than a severity dimension across paranoia groups. Findings provide limited empirical validation of Ridley's typology of paranoia in African Americans.     

A reason to rhyme: phonological and semantic influences on lexical access

During on-line language production, speakers rapidly select a sequence of words to express their desired meaning. The current study examines whether this lexical selection is also dependent on the existing activation of surface properties of the words. Such surface properties clearly matter in various forms of wordplay, including poetry and musical lyrics. The experiments in this article explore whether language processing more generally is sensitive to these properties. Two experiments examined the interaction between phonological and semantic features for written and verbal productions. In Experiment 1, participants were given printed sentences with a missing word, and were asked to generate reasonable completions. The completions reflected both the semantic and the surface features of the preceding context. In Experiment 2, listeners heard sentence contexts, and were asked to rapidly produce a word to complete the utterance. These spontaneous completions again incorporated surface features activated by the context. The results suggest that lexical access in naturalistic language processing is influenced by an interaction between the surface and semantic features of language.     

On confidence intervals for within-subjects designs

Confidence intervals (CIs) for means are frequently advocated as alternatives to null hypothesis significance testing (NHST), for which a common theme in the debate is that conclusions from CIs and NHST should be mutually consistent. The authors examined a class of CIs for which the conclusions are said to be inconsistent with NHST in within-subjects designs and a class for which the conclusions are said to be consistent. The difference between them is a difference in models. In particular, the main issue is that the class for which the conclusions are said to be consistent derives from fixed-effects models with subjects fixed, not mixed models with subjects random. Offered is mixed model methodology that has been popularized in the statistical literature and statistical software procedures. Generalizations to different classes of within-subjects designs are explored, and comments on the future direction of the debate on NHST are offered.     

Evidence-Based Psychotherapy Means Evidence-Informed,Not Evidence-Driven

Some advocates of empirically-supported treatments (ESTs) argue that practitioners who do not use them are practicing unethically. I argue that it is unethical to try to impose EST criteria on the field of psychotherapy practice when (a) there is considerable controversy over these criteria, (b) there are alternative ways to construe evidence-based practice, and (c) by other criteria many approaches are evidence-based. I consider views of the relationship of science to practice, and other bases for practice such as practical knowledge and ethics. I conclude with a case history of client-centered therapy.     

Constraining theories of embodied cognition

Influences of perceptual and motor activity on evaluation have led to theories of embodied cognition suggesting that putatively complex judgments can be carried out using only perceptual and motor representations. We present an experiment that revisited a movement-compatibility effect in which people are faster to respond to positive words by pulling a lever than by pushing a lever and are faster to respond to negative words by pushing than by pulling. We demonstrate that the compatibility effect depends on people's representation of their selves in space rather than on their physical location. These data suggest that accounting for embodied phenomena requires understanding the complex interplay between perceptual and motor representations and people's representations of their selves in space.     

Effects of syllable-frequency in lexical decision and naming: an eye-movement study

In three experiments we explored task-specific effects of syllable-frequency, following Perea and Carreiras' (1998) findings of a facilitative effect during naming and an inhibitory effect during lexical decision. In Experiment 1, an inhibitory effect of first syllable-frequency on articulation duration suggested a process-specific effect during naming: a facilitative effect on construction of phonological output, but an inhibitory effect on lexical access. Eye-movement recording was used in Experiment 2 to disentangle these two processes. An inhibitory effect on eye-movement parameters during both lexical decision and naming supported the assumption that higher first syllable-frequency inhibits lexical access. Implications of a general inhibitory effect of syllable-frequency for computational models of word recognition, specifically for the multiple-trace memory (MTM) model of polysyllabic word naming (Ans, Carbonnel, & Valdois, 1998), are discussed.     

Variability of momentary pain predicts recall of weekly pain: a consequence of the peak (or salience) memory heuristic

Patients' recall of their recent pain is commonly assessed by both researchers and clinicians. However, concerns have been raised about differences between recalled pain and the average of real-time recordings of pain taken over the same period, in part because of the possibility that memory processes affect how retrospective pain is reported. It was hypothesized that memory processes affect the accuracy of recall, such that those with higher versus lower variability of real-time pain will recall pain at higher levels, relative to their average momentary pain. Sixty-eight chronic pain patients with rheumatologic conditions reported their pain several times a day for 2 weeks and also recalled their weekly pain at the end of each of those 2 weeks. The hypothesis was confirmed and it was concluded that variability of real-time pain affects the recall of pain.