Creative mood swings: divergent and convergent thinking affect mood in opposite ways

Increasing evidence suggests that emotions affect cognitive processes. Recent approaches have also considered the opposite: that cognitive processes might affect people’s mood. Here we show that performing and, to a lesser degree, preparing for a creative thinking task induce systematic mood swings: Divergent thinking led to a more positive mood, whereas convergent thinking had the opposite effect. This pattern suggests that thought processes and mood are systematically related but the type of relationship is process-specific.     

Unerwünschte Wirkungen, Nebenwirkungen und Fehlentwicklungen

This paper is based on the observation that side effects, unwanted effects and undesirable developments in psychotherapy are still rarely discussed. Following an attempt to classify the phenomena some instruments which allow their assessment are described. Finally, studies indicating results about the frequency of the individual phenomena and their correlates are summarized. Focusing on side effects and unwanted effects of psychotherapy should start early and persist continuously throughout psychotherapeutic training.     

The T?lz Temporal Topography Study: Mapping the visual field across the life span. Part I: The topography of light detection and temporal-information processing

Temporal performance parameters vary across the visual field. Their topographical distributions relative to each other and relative to basic visual performance measures and their relative change over the life span are unknown. Our goal was to characterize the topography and age-related change of temporal performance. We acquired visual field maps in 95 healthy participants (age: 10?C90?years): perimetric thresholds, double-pulse resolution (DPR), reaction times (RTs), and letter contrast thresholds. DPR and perimetric thresholds increased with eccentricity and age; the periphery showed a more pronounced age-related increase than the center. RT increased only slightly and uniformly with eccentricity. It remained almost constant up to the age of 60, a marked change occurring only above 80. Overall, age was a poor predictor of functionality. Performance decline could be explained only in part by the aging of the retina and optic media. In Part II, we therefore examine higher visual and cognitive functions.     

Limits to participative leadership: Task,structure and skill as contingencies-a German-British comparison

The research investigated the relationship between managerial decision-making and a set of specified contingent situational factors: decision type, perceived skill requirements and objective skill inputs. The study was based on 663 German and British managers in two interlocking senior management levels of 37 large enterprises. The data were collected by means of Group Feedback Analysis as part of a large study of managerial decision-making in eight countries. The results show a significant (p = <.05) relationship between the choice of decision styles and the postulated contingency variables. Only 1 % of 615 senior managers consistently use a single decision style, more than two-thirds use four or five different styles. Very large variations occur as a function of different decision tasks, perceived skill requirements and objective skill availability. There are differences between the relatively well matched samples of German and British managers, but they are less significant than the broadly similar way in which both samples respond to the particular contingencies under investigation. The results are interpreted in the context of an open systems contingency framework. Their action implications are seen to suggest a link with sociotechnical theory on job design and wider issues of organisational and social policy.     

Pictorial context and the recall of pronoun sentences

Summary Acting on the assumption that pictures affect the processing of sentences only when providing additional information, the authors used pictures, which in an earlier experiment had failed to influence the retention of noun sentences, as illustrations to semantically undefined pronoun sentences, thus establishing a distinct information gradient between sentence and picture. These pronoun sentences were presented to 48 subjects for recall, in four pictorial conditions: without picture, with unambiguous picture, with subject-ambiguous, and with object-ambiguous picture. As hypothesized, picture-less pronoun sentences were more poorly recalled than picture-enriched pronoun sentences. Moreover, sentences accompanied by subject-ambiguous pictures, in which the grammatical subject could not be clearly identified, scored lower than the same sentences with unambiguous or object-ambiguous pictures. The findings invite a communication-theory analysis of the experimental situation, for which Searle's theory of speech acts is invoked.The authors gratefully acknowledge the assistance of Mr. B. Jankowski in the translation of this paper from an original German version.     

No prevalence of right-left over top-bottom spatial codes

Reaction time is known to depend on spatial stimulus-response compatibility in both the horizontal and the vertical dimensions. However, if both dimensions are varied in the same task, horizontal but not vertical compatibility affects performance, even if subjects are instructed to attend to the vertical dimension only (Nicoletti & Umiltà, 1984). Experiment 1 compared the effect of horizontal and vertical instructions in a task with left- versus right-handed key responses placed at a top versus bottom location. A horizontal-prevalence effect was observed only with a horizontal, and not with a vertical, instruction. This suggests that subjects might not have heeded the vertical instruction in the Nicoletti and Umiltà study but instead attended to the horizontal dimension. Experiment 2 did not yield any horizontal prevalence with one-handed responses (joystick movements). This indicates that top-bottom codes become ineffective only if the responses suggest an exclusively horizontal response coding. In sum, results demonstrated multiple spatial coding of stimuli and responses under appropriate conditions and suggest that the right-left codes do not dominate the top-bottom spatial codes.     

Market forces,negotiator frames and transaction outcomes

Although implicit framing differences have been advanced as an explanation of the buyers advantage, two necessary preconditions must be met to sustain this model: a demonstration that negatively-framed negotiators are advantaged in negotiations and that buyer role labels invoke a negative frame. A modification of Neale, Northcraft, Magliozzi and Bazerman s (1986) simulation created a role-neutral setting in which positively-framed negotiators bargained against negatively-framed negotiators, thus testing the first of these preconditions. Experiment 1 found no differences in the outcomes of positively- and negatively-framed negotiators, a finding that could be attributed to relatively low market competitiveness. A second experiment, by creating power imbalanced negotiation markets, sought to increase market distributiveness and strengthen framing effects. Results showed that both high power and negatively-framed negotiators were significantly advantaged, providing conditional support for the implicit framing model, However unlike role, frame interacted with power suggesting that the two variables are not functionally equivalent. These findings are interpreted to suggest that factors other than implicit framing differences account for the buyers advantage. More generally these results suggest that frame is responsive to situational variables and that such variables, by influencing negotiation processes, mediate the relationship between negotiator frames and negotiation outcomes.     

Inverting the Simon effect by intention

Summary The Simon effect indicates that choice reactions can be performed more quickly if the response corresponds spatially to the stimulus - even when stimulus location is irrelevant to the task. Two experiments tested an intentional approach to the Simon effect that assigns a critical role to the cognitively represented action goal (i. e., the intended action effect). It was assumed that the direction of the Simon effect depends on stimulus-goal correspondence, that is, that responses are faster with spatial correspondence of stimulus and intended action effect. Experiment 1 confirmed that the direction of the Simon effect was determined by spatial correspondence of stimulus and intended action effect, the latter having been manipulated by different instructions. Experiment 2 indicated that effects of correspondences unrelated to the action goal (i. e., stimulus to hand location or to anatomical mapping of the hand), contributed additively to the resulting Simon effect. It is discussed how current approaches to the Simon effect can be elaborated to account for these results.     

The role of attention for the Simon effect

Summary It has been claimed that spatial attention plays a decisive role in the effect of irrelevant spatial stimulus-response correspondence (i. e., the Simon effect), especially the way the attentional focus is moved onto the stimulus (lateral shifting rather than zooming). This attentional-movement hypothesis is contrasted with a referential-coding hypothesis, according to which spatial stimulus coding depends on the availability of frames or objects of reference rather than on certain attentional movements. In six experiments, reference objects were made available to aid spatial coding, which either appeared simultaneously with the stimulus (Experiments 1–3), or were continuously visible (Experiments 4–6). In contrast to previous experiments and to the attentional predictions, the Simon effect occurred even though the stimuli were precued by large frames surrounding both possible stimulus positions (Experiment 1), even when the reference object's salience was markedly reduced (Experiment 2), or when the precueing frames were made more informative (Experiment 3). Furthermore, it was found that the Simon effect is not reduced by spatial correspondence between an uninformative spatial precue and the stimulus (Experiment 4), and it does not depend on the location of spatial precues appearing to the left or right of both possible stimulus locations (Experiment 5). This was true even when the precue was made task-relevant in order to ensure attentional focusing (Experiment 6). In sum, it is shown that the Simon effect does not depend on the kind of attentional operation presumably performed to focus onto the stimulus. It is argued that the available data are consistent with a coding approach to the Simon effect which, however, needs to be developed to be more precise as to the conditions for spatial stimulus coding.     

S-R compatibility and response selection

In serial stage models, perception and action are usually thought to be linked to each other by an S-R translation mechanism. However, phenomena of S-R compatibility suggest a more direct relationship between perceptual and action domains. We discuss behavioral and psychophysiological evidence that irrelevant stimulus information automatically activates response codes, but then decays over time.

In a series of reaction time studies and electrophysiological experiments, we investigated both temporal and functional properties of the assumed automatic response activation process. We found that the amount of interference due to irrelevant spatial information depends upon how long its availability precedes that of the information relevant for response selection. This indicates that response activation decays rather quickly. If response-relevant and irrelevant spatial information are simultaneously available, electrophysiological measurements show that automatic activation of the spatially corresponding response rises soon after stimulus onset, but then dissipates and gets replaced by the activation of the response indicated by the relevant stimulus attribute.

We conclude that these findings do not support a pure translation account, but rather suggest the presence of two parallel and (at least partially) independent routes from perception to action: A direct route, allowing for automatic activation of response codes if stimulus and response features overlap, and an indirect route linking S and R codes in an arbitrary manner. Via the direct route responses may be primed independent of task-specific contingencies, while the correct response is selected via the indirect route. This use suggests that (a) the transmission of stimulus information to response stages does not (fully) depend on task relevance and that (b) different stimulus features can be transmitted asynchronously and independently from one another.