Sticks and Stones May Break My Bones but Words Relate to Adult Physiology? Child Abuse Experience and Women's Sympathetic Nervous System Response while Self-Reporting Trauma

Child abuse predicts a wide range of long-lasting deleterious outcomes, including disruptions in the biological systems central to emotion arousal and regulation. However, little is known about the specific ways in which child abuse affects adulthood sympathetic reactivity and recovery. This study investigated the association between child abuse experience and adult skin conductance level and habituation in 85 at-risk women as they completed a self-report trauma questionnaire. Childhood emotional abuse was independently associated with blunted skin conductance habituation over the course of survey completion after controlling for other abuse subtypes and current trauma symptoms. These results suggest that women emotionally abused as children experience prolonged emotional arousal and poor physiological regulation of emotion in response to reminders of traumatic experiences.     

Going the distance: Extra-symbolic contributions to the symbolic control of spatial attention

Over the past 30 years, researchers have used symbolic cues such as spatial words and arrows to direct observers' attention to the location of target objects that appear at a single, fixed distance in simple visual environments; however, they have done so by using symbolic cues that provide only partial—directional—information about the spatial location of target objects. Thus, it remains unclear whether observers can only shift their attention broadly in the cued direction in response to these cues or whether they can shift their attention to the specific location of the target by combining an expectation about direction (derived from apprehension of the directional cue) with an expectation about distance (derived from some extra-symbolic cue). The results of two experiments showed that observers do shift their attention to relatively coarse spatial locations by combining expectancies about direction and distance, and that the extent to which observers do so is modulated by the presence of visible markers and the expected distance of the target. These findings are important because they provide the first evidence that extra-symbolic information about distance contributes to the symbolic control of spatial attention.     

Armed and attentive: Holding a weapon can bias attentional priorities in scene viewing

The action-specific perception hypothesis (Witt, Current Directions in Psychological Science 20: 201–206, 2011) claims that the environment is represented with respect to potential interactions for objects present within said environment. This investigation sought to extend the hypothesis beyond perceptual mechanisms and assess whether action-specific potential could alter attentional allocation. To do so, we examined a well-replicated attention bias in the weapon focus effect (Loftus, Loftus, & Messo, Law and Human Behaviour 1, 55–62, 1987), which represents the tendency for observers to attend more to weapons than to neutral objects. Our key manipulation altered the anticipated action-specific potential of observers by providing them a firearm while they freely viewed scenes with and without weapons present. We replicated the original weapon focus effect using modern eye tracking and confirmed that the increase in time looking at weapons comes at a cost of less time spent looking at faces. Additionally, observers who held firearms while viewing the various scenes showed a general bias to look at faces over objects, but only if the firearm was in a readily usable position (i.e., pointed at the scenes rather than holstered at one’s side). These two effects, weapon focus and the newly found bias to look more at faces when armed, canceled out one another without interacting. This evidence confirms that the action capabilities of the observer alter more than just perceptual mechanisms and that holding a weapon can change attentional priorities. Theoretical and real-world implications are discussed.     

Response selection influences inhibition of return

Previous work has suggested that there may be a relationship between the magnitude of inhibition of return (IOR) and the number of possible responses in the perceptual‐motor task. To test this possibility, the present experiment used a display that contained four horizontally aligned cue/target locations. In different blocks of trials, subjects responded to the target either with a one‐response detection key press, a two‐response localisation key press, or a four‐response localisation key press. The results showed the largest magnitude of IOR was found in the one‐response condition and the least in the four‐response condition. These results suggest that IOR may be most effective in inhibiting relatively prepotent responses and the inhibitory effect weakens when responses require more intricate sensorimotor mappings.