Inhibited prime-trial distractor responses solely produce the visual spatial negative priming effect

Responding to a target??s current (probe trial) location is slower when it appears at a former distractor-occupied position (i.e., ignored-repetition [IR] trial), relative to when it arises at a new location (i.e., control trial). This RT(IR) > RT(Control) inequality defines the spatial negative priming (SNP) effect in latency terms. It is uncertain whether the elevated RT(IR) is due to the inhibition of the distractor-occupied location or to the inhibition of this location??s assigned manual response (SNP locus issue). The main aim here was to examine the SNP locus issue. Notably, our SNP design used centrally presented visual events and included having two locations share a common response (many:1 location-to-response mapping) and the use of informative (70?% validity) or uninformative probe-trial response cues. The many:1 mapping trials allowed for the detection of location and response inhibition presence. Results showed that the latter, but not the former, causes inhibitory aftereffects (e.g., SNP) following uninformative response cues. Consistent with this finding, when the informative response cue was valid and was assigned to the many:1 probe response that had just served as the prime distractor response, inhibitory aftereffects were eliminated, when the probe target appeared at the prime distractor position (IR trial) or at a new location (distractor?Cresponse repeat trial). Blocked retrieval of stored distractor-processing representations was proposed as the mechanism for inhibitory aftereffect prevention.     

Observer perceptions of moral obligations in groups with a history of victimization

The authors investigated when observers assign contemporary group members moral obligations based on their group's victimization history. In Experiment 1, Americans perceived Israelis as obligated to help Sudanese genocide victims and as guiltworthy for not helping if reminded of the Holocaust and its descendants were linked to this history. In Experiment 2, participants perceived Israelis as more obligated to help and guiltworthy for not helping when the Holocaust was presented as a unique victimization event compared with when genocide was presented as pervasive. Experiments 3 and 4 replicated the effects of Experiment 1 with Cambodians as the victimized group. Experiment 5 demonstrated that participants perceived Cambodians as having more obligations under high just world threat compared with low just world threat. Perceiving victimized groups as incurring obligations is one just world restoration method of providing meaning to collective injustice.     

Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy improves emotional reactivity to social stress: results from a randomized controlled trial

The high likelihood of recurrence in depression is linked to a progressive increase in emotional reactivity to stress (stress sensitization). Mindfulness-based therapies teach mindfulness skills designed to decrease emotional reactivity in the face of negative affect-producing stressors. The primary aim of the current study was to assess whether Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) is efficacious in reducing emotional reactivity to social evaluative threat in a clinical sample with recurrent depression. A secondary aim was to assess whether improvement in emotional reactivity mediates improvements in depressive symptoms. Fifty-two individuals with partially remitted depression were randomized into an 8-week MBCT course or a waitlist control condition. All participants underwent the Trier Social Stress Test (TSST) before and after the 8-week trial period. Emotional reactivity to stress was assessed with the Spielberger State Anxiety Inventory at several time points before, during, and after the stressor. MBCT was associated with decreased emotional reactivity to social stress, specifically during the recovery (post-stressor) phase of the TSST. Waitlist controls showed an increase in anticipatory (pre-stressor) anxiety that was absent in the MBCT group. Improvements in emotional reactivity partially mediated improvements in depressive symptoms. Limitations include small sample size, lack of objective or treatment adherence measures, and non-generalizability to more severely depressed populations. Given that emotional reactivity to stress is an important psychopathological process underlying the chronic and recurrent nature of depression, these findings suggest that mindfulness skills are important in adaptive emotion regulation when coping with stress.     

The ability to self-tickle following Rapid Eye Movement sleep dreaming

Self-produced tactile stimulation usually feels less tickly--is perceptually attenuated--relative to the same stimulation produced externally. This is not true, however, for individuals with schizophrenia. Here, we investigate whether the lack of attenuation to self-produced stimuli seen in schizophrenia also occurs for normal participants following REM dreams. Fourteen participants were stimulated on their left palm with a tactile stimulation device which allowed the same stimulus to be generated by the participant or by the experimenter. The level of self-tickling attenuation did not differ between REM and non-REM sleep awakening conditions, where presence or absence of an accompanying dream was not controlled for. However, for the female participants, when awakening occurred from an REM sleep dream, self-stimulation ratings were higher than for external stimulation, whereas ratings after NREM sleep unaccompanied by a dream were lower for self-stimulation than for external stimulation. These results indicate deficits in self-monitoring and a confusion between self- and externally generated stimulation accompany REM dream formation.     

Effects of self-evaluation on the P300 event-related potential

The effects of self evaluation on the P300 event-related potential (ERP) were explored with 56 participants (16 men, 40 women; M age = 23.4 yr., SD = 1.2) across three conditions. The conditions included (1) a standard ERP auditory oddball discrimination between a random target (15% occurrence) and standard stimuli (85% occurrence), (2) the oddball task followed by the additional cognitive task of maintaining a mental count of the target tones, and (3) the oddball task followed by the additional cognitive task of self-evaluating whether they felt surprised by the current occurrence of the target tone. The added cognitive requirements for Conditions 2 and 3 required the subjects to maintain a cognitive readiness for the secondary stimulus-related task during their sensory discrimination response for the standard oddball task. During the self-evaluation condition, the P300 amplitude was significantly larger across all recording locations than the regular oddball condition and the cognitive count condition.     

Levels of processing effects on implicit and explicit memory tasks: using question position to investigate the lexical-processing hypothesis

One interpretation of levels of processing effects (LOP) on priming in implicit tests of memory is in terms of deficits in lexical processing during shallow study tasks. In two experiments the extent of lexical processing engaged in during standard shallow encoding tasks was manipulated by placing the encoding question either before or after the target stimulus. Clear evidence was found in explicit memory tasks that placing the question after the target stimulus increased the depth of processing of words presented in shallow encoding tasks. In contrast, there was no evidence of such an effect on the priming observed in implicit memory tasks. The results suggest that the role of lexical processing in LOP effects on priming requires further specification.     

On the role of recognition in decision making

In 2 experiments, the authors sought to distinguish between the claim that recognition of an object is treated simply as a cue among others for the purposes of decision making in a cue-learning task from the claim that recognition is attributed a special status with fundamental, noncompensatory properties. Results of both experiments supported the former interpretation. When recognition had a high predictive validity, it was relied on (solely) by the majority of participants; however, when other cues in the environment had higher validity, recognition was ignored, and these other cues were used. The results provide insight into when, where, and why recognition is used in decision making and also question the elevated status assigned to recognition in some frameworks (e.g., D. G. Goldstein & G. Gigerenzer, 2002).     

Distributed Control in Rapid Sequential Aiming Responses

The preparation and on-line control of short, rapid sequential aiming responses were studied in 3 experiments. Participants (N = 12 in Experiments 1 and 2, and 20 in Experiment 3) produced 3-segment responses (a) within self-initiation, simple reaction time (RT), and choice RT paradigms (Experiment 1); (b) without visual feedback under self-initiation conditions (Experiment 2); and (c) with and without visual feedback under simple RT conditions (Experiment 3). In all conditions in which participants initiated movement in response to an external imperative signal, the 2nd response segment was performed consistently slower than preceding and succeeding response segments. That pattern of segmental movement times was found whether or not visual feedback was available but was not evident when participants self-initiated their responses with or without visual feedback. The findings rule out the possibility that subjects' use of visual feedback is responsible for the slowing of the 2nd response segment under RT conditions and suggest that the programming of rapid sequential aiming responses can be distributed in pre- and postinitiation intervals.