Norms of intentionality: norms that don’t guide

More than ever, it is in vogue to argue that no norms either play a role in or directly follow from the theory of mental content. In this paper, I present an intuitive theory of intentionality (including a theory of mental content) on which norms are constitutive of the intentional properties of attitude and content in order to show that this trend is misguided. Although this theory of intentionality—the teleological theory of intentional representation—does involve a commitment to representational norms, these norms are not problematic in the way critics have suggested they would be. In particular, these norms do not guide thinking by motivating intentional agents to (intentionally) accord with them; as a result, no obvious vicious regress threatens the theory. In the final section of this paper, I argue that accepting this teleological theory of intentionality need not commit one to thinking that intentionality is the product of natural selection.     

Multi-wave Prospective Examination of the Stress-Reactivity Extension of Response Styles Theory of Depression in High-Risk Children and Early Adolescents

The current study tested the stress-reactivity extension of response styles theory of depression (Nolen-Hoeksema Journal of Abnormal Psychology 100:569–582, 1991) in a sample of high-risk children and early adolescents from a vulnerability-stress perspective using a multi-wave longitudinal design. In addition, we examined whether obtained results varied as a function of either age or sex. During an initial assessment, 56 high-risk children (offspring of depressed parents; ages 7–14) completed measures assessing rumination and depressive symptoms. Children were subsequently given a handheld personal computer which signalled them to complete measures assessing depressive symptoms and negative events at six randomly selected times over an 8-week follow-up interval. In line with hypotheses, higher levels of rumination were associated with prospective elevations in depressive symptoms following the occurrence of negative events. Sex, but not age, moderated this association. Rumination was more strongly associated with elevations in depressive symptoms following the occurrence of negative events in girls than in boys.     

Perfectionism: The good,the bad,and the creative

The influence of adaptive and maladaptive perfectionism on creativity was examined. Initially, six measures of creativity were administered, including creative self-perceptions, behavior, and performance measures. Adaptive perfectionism was weakly positively related to creativity, whereas maladaptive perfectionism was unrelated to creativity across five of the six measures. A follow-up study assessed whether initial findings could be generalized to an everyday problem-solving task. Results indicated that adaptive perfectionism was related to higher quality but not originality of solutions. Further, a curvilinear relationship in the shape of an inverted “U” occurred between adaptive perfectionism and four of eight creativity measures. Overall, adaptive perfectionism was consistently, albeit weakly, related to creativity across various types of measures, whereas maladaptive perfectionism was not related to creativity.     

Effects of speed of word processing on semantic access: the case of bilingualism

Bilingual speakers generally manifest slower word recognition than monolinguals. We investigated the consequences of the word processing speed on semantic access in bilinguals. The paradigm involved a stream of English words and pseudowords presented in succession at a constant rate. English-Welsh bilinguals and English monolinguals were asked to count the number of letters in pseudowords and actively disregard words. They were not explicitly told that pairs of words in immediate succession were embedded and could either be semantically related or not. We expected that slower word processing in bilinguals would result in semantic access indexed by semantic priming. As expected, bilinguals showed significant semantic priming, indexed by an N400 modulation, whilst monolinguals did not. Moreover, bilinguals were slower in performing the task. The results suggest that bilinguals cannot discriminate between pseudowords and words without accessing semantic information whereas monolinguals can dismiss English words on the basis of subsemantic information.     

Counting to ten milliseconds: low-anger, but not high-anger, individuals pause following negative evaluations

Low-anger individuals are less reactive, both emotionally and behaviourally, to a large variety of situational primes to anger and aggression. Why this is so, from an affective processing perspective, has been largely conjectural. Four studies (total N=270) sought to link individual differences in anger to tendencies exhibited in basic affective processing tasks. On the basis of motivational factors and considerations, it was hypothesised that negative evaluations would differentially activate a psychological alarm system at low levels of anger, resulting in a pause that should be evident in the speed of making subsequent evaluations. Just such a pattern was evident in all studies. By contrast, high-anger individuals did not pause following their negative evaluations. In relation to this affective processing tendency, at least, dramatically different effects were observed among low- versus high-anger individuals. Implications for the personality-processing literature, theories of trait anger, and fast-acting regulatory processes are discussed.     

Dissociable stages of problem solving (II): first evidence for process-contingent temporal order of activation in dorsolateral prefrontal cortex

In a companion study, eye-movement analyses in the Tower of London task (TOL) revealed independent indicators of functionally separable cognitive processes during problem solving, with processes of building up an internal representation of the problem preceding actual planning processes. These results imply that processes of internalization and planning should also be distinguishable in time and space with respect to concomitant brain activation patterns. To investigate this possibility, here we conducted analyses of fMRI data for left and right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) during problem solving in the TOL task by accounting for the trial-by-trial variability of onsets and durations of the different cognitive processing stages. Comparisons between stimulus-locked and response-locked modeling approaches affirmed that activation in left dlPFC was elicited particularly during early processes of internalization, comprising the extraction of goal information and the generation of an internal problem representation, whereas activation in right dlPFC was predominantly attributable to later processes of mental transformations on this representation, that is planning proper. Thus, present data corroborate the proposal that often observed bilateral dlPFC activation patterns during complex cognitive tasks such as problem solving may reflect functionally and, to some extent, even temporally separable processes with opposing lateralizations.     

Adaptive and qualitative changes in encoding strategy with experience: evidence from the test-expectancy paradigm

Three experiments demonstrated learners' abilities to adaptively and qualitatively accommodate their encoding strategies to the demands of an upcoming test. Stimuli were word pairs. In Experiment 1, test expectancy was induced for either cued recall (of targets given cues) or free recall (of targets only) across 4 study-test cycles of the same test format, followed by a final critical cycle featuring either the expected or the unexpected test format. For final tests of both cued and free recall, participants who had expected that test format outperformed those who had not. This disordinal interaction, supported by recognition and self-report data, demonstrated not mere differences in effort based on anticipated test difficulty, but rather qualitative and appropriate differences in encoding strategies based on expected task demands. Participants also came to appropriately modulate metacognitive monitoring (Experiment 2) and study-time allocation (Experiment 3) across study-test cycles. Item and associative recognition performance, as well as self-report data, revealed shifts in encoding strategies across trials; these results were used to characterize and evaluate the different strategies that participants employed for cued versus free recall and to assess the optimality of participants' metacognitive control of encoding strategies. Taken together, these data illustrate a sophisticated form of metacognitive control, in which learners qualitatively shift encoding strategies to match the demands of anticipated tests.     

How awkward! Social anxiety and the perceived consequences of social blunders

Seventy high socially anxious (HSA) and 74 low socially anxious (LSA) participants rated perceived interpersonal and emotional consequences of both (a) autobiographical social blunders recalled from their own lives and (b) imagined blunders presented in standardized hypothetical social scenarios. Ratings of participants' autobiographical blunders were also provided by research assistants who were blind to hypotheses. Results indicated that HSA participants overestimated the negative consequences of their own autobiographical blunders. These negative perceptions among HSA participants extended to imagined blunders, even when participants were instructed to imagine a third party other than themselves as the person committing the blunder. This pattern of results suggests the conclusion that the perceived consequences of social blunders among HSA individuals are driven by the belief that social standards are high, inflexible, or both.     

What Does God Know? Supernatural Agents’ Access to Socially Strategic and Non‐Strategic Information

Current evolutionary and cognitive theories of religion posit that supernatural agent concepts emerge from cognitive systems such as theory of mind and social cognition. Some argue that these concepts evolved to maintain social order by minimizing antisocial behavior. If these theories are correct, then people should process information about supernatural agents' socially strategic knowledge more quickly than non-strategic knowledge. Furthermore, agents' knowledge of immoral and uncooperative social behaviors should be especially accessible to people. To examine these hypotheses, we measured response-times to questions about the knowledge attributed to four different agents--God, Santa Claus, a fictional surveillance government, and omniscient but non-interfering aliens--that vary in their omniscience, moral concern, ability to punish, and how supernatural they are. As anticipated, participants respond more quickly to questions about agents' socially strategic knowledge than non-strategic knowledge, but only when agents are able to punish.