Infants use known verbs to learn novel nouns: Evidence from 15- and 19-month-olds

Fluent speakers’ representations of verbs include semantic knowledge about the nouns that can serve as their arguments. These “selectional restrictions” of a verb can in principle be recruited to learn the meaning of a novel noun. For example, the sentence He ate the carambola licenses the inference that carambola refers to something edible. We ask whether 15- and 19-month-old infants can recruit their nascent verb lexicon to identify the referents of novel nouns that appear as the verbs’ subjects. We compared infants’ interpretation of a novel noun (e.g., the dax) in two conditions: one in which dax is presented as the subject of animate-selecting construction (e.g., The dax is crying), and the other in which dax is the subject of an animacy-neutral construction (e.g., The dax is right here). Results indicate that by 19 months, infants use their representations of known verbs to inform the meaning of a novel noun that appears as its argument.     

Measuring Processing Fluency: One versus Five Items

While there is an ample amount of consumer behavior research that recruits processing fluency as an explanatory construct, the question how to best measure the fluency experience has received little attention. Therefore, there is a lack of consistency in measuring the construct, particularly with regard to the use of single‐item versus multi‐item measures. The current research, thus, aims to investigate how processing fluency can be consistently measured across different experimental fluency manipulations and which type of measure has the highest validity. Based on classic scale development procedures, we propose a reliable and valid multi‐item measure and compare this measure against a single‐item measure in terms of predictive validity. We show that both measures mediate the effect of five established fluency manipulations and that the single‐item measure is sufficient. In addition to providing a measure for future research that can be adapted to different empirical settings, we provide empirical evidence on the replicability of fluency effects and on the theoretical conjecture that people have a uniform fluency experience across different manipulations of fluency.     

Positive affect predicts engagement in healthy behaviors within a day,but not across days

Motivation and Emotion - Identifying causes of healthy behaviors is important for harnessing health benefits. A growing body of experience sampling research suggests that positive emotion may drive...     

Tailoring Gratitude Interventions. How and for Whom Do They Work? The Potential Mediating Role of Reward Processing and the Moderating Role of Childhood Adversity and Trait Gratitude

Outcomes of gratitude interventions are encouraging, but inconsistent across studies. In addition, both mechanisms of change and effect modifiers for these interventions are largely unknown. Recent data point toward potential candidates and suggest reward processing may be a promising mechanism underlying these interventions, while childhood adversity (CA) and trait gratitude may impact on them. However, existing research aimed at investigating these hypotheses is scarce. Building on these, we examined the effectiveness of a gratitude intervention for decreasing depressive symptoms and negative affect and increasing positive affect. We also investigated changes in reward processing following intervention and explored differences in adherence and drop-out between groups. Finally, we investigated the moderating role of CA and trait gratitude.

Participants (N=237, ages between 18–56) were randomly allocated to a gratitude or active control condition (14 days). Following intervention, findings indicated a significant decrease in depressive symptoms and negative affect in both conditions. While positive affect remained stable, a significant time effect emerged for reward processing. CA severity, but not multiplicity, moderated the effectiveness of the intervention, adherence and drop-out. Trait gratitude moderated the effectiveness of the gratitude intervention only on depressive symptoms.

Gratitude interventions may not be the best fit for everyone. Thus, we recommend tailoring interventions, especially in individuals reporting a history of severe CA.

     

General activity as instrumental: application to avoidance training

Some data on Sidman avoidance in the pigeon are presented to illustrate a technique of instrumental training which places minimal restriction upon the form of the reinforced response. The effect of a warning signal is demonstrated, and the course of discrimination-reversal is described.     

A tool for investigating the differential functions of aggressive behavior in the face-to-face and cyber context: Extending the Cyber-Aggression Typology Questionnaire

Aggressive behavior in the face-to-face and cyber contexts is driven by underlying aggression (i.e., functions of aggressive behavior). Common theories of aggression distinguish between reactive (e.g., rage) and proactive (e.g., seeking to achieve power and affiliation) aggression. However, according to the quadripartite violence typology, this distinction conflates aspects of motivational valence with self-regulatory processes. The Cyber-Aggression Typology Questionnaire (CATQ; Runions et al., 2017, Aggress Behav, 43(1), pp. 74–84) overcomes this weakness by identifying four types of cyber-aggression (impulsive-aversive/rage, controlled-aversive/revenge, controlled-appetitive/reward, and impulsive-appetitive/recreation cyber-aggression). However, the CATQ only considers aggression in cyberspace. We extended the CATQ to the face-to-face context by developing a corresponding Face-to-Face Aggression Typology Questionnaire (FATQ). The aim of this study was to investigate factorial and convergent validity and metric measurement invariance between four-factorial cyber and face-to-face aggression. In total, 587 students from six Austrian universities filled out the CATQ, the FATQ, and additional scales during regular university lectures to examine convergent validity. Confirmatory factor analysis supported the four-factor structure of both questionnaires, after excluding inconclusive items from the impulsive-aversive/rage subscale of the FATQ. These items were also removed from the CATQ to obtain two symmetric questionnaires. Metric measurement invariance between the CATQ and the FATQ was confirmed. Convergent validity was largely observed. Our results support an extended four-factor model of aggression. Having two parallel questionnaires, the FATQ and CATQ, enables future studies to investigate commonalities and differences in underlying drivers of aggressive behavior in the cyber and face-to-face contexts.     

Prospective Memory: A New Focus for Research

Prospective memory is required for many aspects of everyday cognition, its breakdown may be as debilitating as impairments in retrospective memory, and yet, the former has received relatively little attention by memory researchers. This article outlines a strategy for changing the fortunes of prospective memory, for guiding new research to shore up the claim that prospective memory is a distinct aspect of cognition, and to obtain evidence for clear performance dissociations between prospective memory and other memory functions. We begin by identifying the unique requirements of prospective memory tasks and by dividing memory's prospective functions into subdomains that are analogous to divisions in retrospective memory (e.g., short- versus long-term memory). We focus on one prospective function, called prospective memory proper; we define this function in the spirit of James (1890) as requiring that we are aware of a plan, of which meanwhile we have not been thinking, with the additional consciousness that we made the plan earlier. We give an operational definition of prospective memory proper and specify how it differs from explicit and implicit retrospective memory and how it might be empirically assessed.