Anxiety-related bias in the classification of emotionally ambiguous facial expressions

High- and low-trait socially anxious individuals classified the emotional expressions of photographic quality continua of interpolated ("morphed") facial images that were derived from combining 6 basic prototype emotional expressions to various degrees, with the 2 adjacent emotions arranged in an emotion hexagon. When fear was 1 of the 2 component emotions, the high-trait group displayed enhanced sensitivity for fear. In a 2nd experiment where a mood manipulation was incorporated, again, the high-trait group exhibited enhanced sensitivity for fear. The low-trait group was sensitive for happiness in the control condition. The mood-manipulated group had increased sensitivity for anger expressions, and trait anxiety did not moderate these effects. Interpretations of the results related to the classification of fearful expressions are discussed.     

Empathic Blushing in Friends and Strangers

Three volunteers watched a previously recorded video of one of them singing, as cheek sensors monitored their blushing. When performers watched videotapes of their performance, they blushed significantly more than strangers, but not more than their own friends, watching with them. Friends and strangers did not differ significantly in blushing, however. Skin conductance arousal responses of performers and friends, but not performers and strangers, or friends of performers and strangers, were correlated. In a second experiment, strangers who sang before watching another person sing blushed more than strangers who did not sing first, or who sang and then watched a neutral video. This suggests that performing the embarrassing act may have predisposed people to blush, perhaps empathically, later. No gender differences were seen in blushing. Embarrassability questionnaire scores did not correlate with blushing. Empathic accuracy, and associative learning, are proposed to account for the results.     

Temperament and Happiness in Children in India

The relation between temperament and happiness was assessed in a sample of 441 children aged 7–14 years drawn from a population in Northern India. Parents assessed their children’s happiness and rated their children’s temperament using the Emotionality, Activity, and Sociability Temperament Survey (EAS). Children self-reported their own happiness using a single-item measure, the Oxford Happiness Scale Short Form, and the Subjective Happiness Scale. Parents’ temperament ratings conformed to the four factor structure proposed by Buss and Plomin (Temperament: early developing personality traits. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Hillsdale, 1984): Emotionality, Activity, Sociability, and Shyness. Temperament accounted for between 4 and 11% of the variance in children’s happiness depending on the measures. Children who were more social and active, and less shy, were happier. This result parallels the well-established relation between happiness and personality in adults and is similar to recent research on happiness and temperament in children; temperament traits akin to extraversion were positively associated with happiness. However, despite that neuroticism and its temperament counterpart are strongly and consistently linked to happiness in adults, the relation between happiness and the temperament trait associated with neuroticism (i.e., Emotionality) was weak. This suggests that the relations between temperament and happiness in children may not completely generalize across cultures.     

Personal Growth and Meaning in Life Among First-Time Mothers and Grandmothers

This cross-sectional study examined personal growth and meaning in life among mothers and grandmothers who recently went through major transitions in a woman’s life. It investigated the contribution of the internal resources of perception of self (self-esteem) and perceived characteristics of the situation (cognitive appraisal of threat, challenge, and self-efficacy) and the external resource of perceived social support, as well as two background variables: age, and frequency of meetings between mothers and grandmothers. Participants were 152 first-time mothers 6–24?months after delivery, and their own mothers who were first-time grandmothers (n?=?152). The results showed differential contributions to meaning in life and personal growth in the two generations, indicating that the proposed variables can indeed explain growth and meaning in life in these life stages. They reveal not only the similarities and differences between the response of mothers and grandmothers to these parallel life transitions, but also how information about one generation may help explain the response of the other. The different patterns of associations which emerged for growth and meaning in life are also discussed.     

Reliability of the Go/No Go Association Task

The Go/No Go Association Task (GNAT; Nosek & Banaji, 2001) is an implicit measure with broad application in social psychology. It has several conceptual strengths to recommend it over other implicit methods, but the belief that it has poor reliability coupled with the absence of a method for calculating this important psychometric property has hindered its wider acceptance and use. Using data obtained from six GNAT studies covering a wide range of content areas, Study 1 compares the properties of different methods for estimating reliability of the GNAT. Study 2 demonstrates a resampling procedure to investigate how reliability varies as a function of block length. Study 1 shows that with appropriately chosen stimuli the GNAT can be a very reliable measure, while Study 2 indicates that as an empirical rule of thumb 50 to 80 trials per block should yield adequate to very good reliability. However, researchers are urged to calculate their own reliability coefficients, to this end we discuss GNAT design issues and provide procedures for calculating GNAT reliability which we hope will enhance the utility of the GNAT as a measure and promote its use in studying implicit cognition.     

Feature-based versus category-based induction with uncertain categories

Previous research has suggested that when feature inferences have to be made about an instance whose category membership is uncertain, feature-based inductive reasoning is used to the exclusion of category-based induction. These results contrast with the observation that people can and do use category-based induction when category membership is known. The present experiments examined the conditions that drive feature-based and category-based strategies in induction under category uncertainty. Specifically, 2 experiments investigated whether reliance on feature-based inductive strategies is a product of the lack of coherence in the categories used in previous research or is due to the use of a decision-only induction procedure. Experiment 1 found that feature-based reasoning remained the preferred strategy even when categories with relatively high internal coherence were used. Experiment 2 found a shift toward category-based reasoning when participants were trained to classify category members prior to feature induction. Together, these results suggest that an appropriate conceptual representation must be formed through experience with a category before it is likely to be used as a basis for feature induction.     

Dopaminergic and prefrontal contributions to reward-based learning and outcome monitoring during child development and aging

In many instances, children and older adults show similar difficulties in reward-based learning and outcome monitoring. These impairments are most pronounced in situations in which reward is uncertain (e.g., probabilistic reward schedules) and if outcome information is ambiguous (e.g., the relative value of outcomes has to be learned). Furthermore, whereas children show a greater sensitivity to external outcome information, older adults focus less on a rapid differentiation of rewarding outcomes. In this article, we review evidence for the idea that these phenomenologically similar impairments in learning and outcome monitoring in children and older adults can be attributed to deficits in different underlying neurophysiological mechanisms. We propose that in older adults learning impairments are the result of reduced dopaminergic projections to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, which lead to less differentiated representations of reward value. In contrast, in children, impairments in learning can be primarily attributed to deficits in executive control, which may be due to a protracted development of the dorsal medial and lateral prefrontal cortices. We think that this framework maps well onto recent neurophysiological models of reward processing and is plausible from a broader developmental perspective.     

Suicide among foreign residents of Japan

The suicide rate of Koreans living in Japan is twice as high as that of Koreans in South Korea. Reasons for this high suicide rate are discussed, including effects of economic crises and discrimination.