Deviance in organizational decision making: using unanimous decision rules to promote the positive effects and alleviate the negative effects of deviance

When deviance occurs during group decision making, it can lead to increased innovation and improved decision outcomes. Group members, however, often rate the group climate as lower for having experienced dissent. The current study used a hidden profile framework to investigate the effects of deviance and decision rule on task outcome and group climate. Results found that working under a unanimous decision rule increases the likelihood of shared information improving the overall decision outcome and also alleviates some of the negative consequences associated with deviance. Results have significant implications for both research on group deviance and the application of deviance techniques within organizational settings.     

An internet survey of emotional health,treatment seeking and barriers to accessing mental health treatment among Chinese-speaking international students in Australia

The present internet survey examined the demographic characteristics of Chinese-speaking international students in Australia, psychological distress levels as measured by the Kessler-10 (K-10) Item scale, help-seeking history and preferences, as well as treatment barriers. Of the 144 respondents, 54% reported high psychological distress (mean K-10 score?=?23.96; SD?=?9.03). However, only 9% of those who were highly distressed reported they had sought mental health services in the past year. While the majority preferred help from informal social networks, they tended to favour mental health services over traditional culture-specific forms of help. Common barriers to accessing mental health services reported by respondents with high psychological distress included costs or transportation concerns, limited knowledge of available services, time constraints, the perception that symptoms were not severe enough to warrant treatment, language difficulties and lack of knowledge of symptoms of psychological distress. Although the majority preferred face-to-face treatments over internet treatments, a considerable percentage of respondents were willing to try either treatment modality. Chinese-speaking international students are a high risk group for developing psychological distress, yet they tend to underuse mental health services. Education about the effectiveness of face-to-face and online treatments may increase treatment seeking by this population.     

One-to-one support for crisis intervention using online synchronous instant messaging: evaluating working alliance and client satisfaction

Young people are increasingly turning to online support, especially when traditional mental health services are not immediately available. Using a cross-sectional design, sociodemographic information and self-reported perceptions of the strength of the working alliance and client satisfaction were collected from a sample of participants (n = 78) who were users of a service providing free online support using synchronous instant messaging. The results reported a significant positive relationship between the strength of the working alliance and client satisfaction, suggesting that the strength of the working alliance remains a key component in counselling, even online. Participants, however, scored significantly lower on both the strength of the working alliance and client satisfaction, compared to participants in offline settings as reported in past studies.     

Does the Narrative Style of Video Evidence Influence Judgements About Rape Complainant Testimony?

Four studies investigated lawyers' concerns that the narrative style of police interviews with adult rape complainants reduces the impact of this interview as video evidence. Study 1 (N = 96) compared mock juror perceptions of simulated evidence‐in‐chief either in traditional short‐answer or narrative style and found testimony style was not a predictor of complainant credibility. Studies 2 (N = 104), 3 (N = 102) and 4 (N = 102) examined different variables that change with testimony style—the number of questions asked, overall testimony length and response length. The number of questions asked was the only predictor of complainant credibility; more questions resulted in higher credibility ratings. These findings suggest that lawyers' concerns about narrative style interviewing are unwarranted. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Post-retrieval effects of icv infusions of hemicholinium in mice are dependent on the age of the original memory

CF-1 male mice were trained in an inhibitory avoidance task using a high footshock (1,2 mA, 50 Hz, 1 sec) in order to reduce the influence of extinction on retention performance. At 2, 7, 14, or 30 d after training, the first retention test was performed and hemicholinium (HC-3, 1.0 microg/mice), a specific inhibitor of high-affinity choline uptake in brain cholinergic neurons, was given intracerebroventricularly immediately after. Twenty four hours after treatment, mice were tested in an inhibitory avoidance task during five consecutive days, each 24 h apart. Retention performance was impaired by HC-3 when the first re-exposure took place at 2, 7, or 14 d, but the effect was no longer seen when re-exposure occurred 30 d after training. We did not find spontaneous recovery 21 d after training, when memory was retrieved 2 d after training and HC-3 was given immediately after. Although we cannot definitively discard a retrieval deficit, this lack of spontaneous recovery is in accordance with the storage-deficit interpretation. These results confirm and extend previous ones, suggesting that central cholinergic mechanisms are involved in the hypothetical reconsolidation memory processes of an inhibitory avoidance task in mice and also suggest that this participation depends on the "age" of the original memory trace. This implies that the vulnerability of a reactivated memory to a specific treatment, as the one used in this study, inversely correlates with the age of the original memory, and it is likely to determine memory reconsolidation processes.     

Neural bases of binocular rivalry

During binocular rivalry, conflicting monocular images compete for access to consciousness in a stochastic, dynamical fashion. Recent human neuroimaging and psychophysical studies suggest that rivalry entails competitive interactions at multiple neural sites, including sites that retain eye-selective information. Rivalry greatly suppresses activity in the ventral pathway and attenuates visual adaptation to form and motion; nonetheless, some information about the suppressed stimulus reaches higher brain areas. Although rivalry depends on low-level inhibitory interactions, high-level excitatory influences promoting perceptual grouping and selective attention can extend the local dominance of a stimulus over space and time. Inhibitory and excitatory circuits considered within a hybrid model might account for the paradoxical properties of binocular rivalry and provide insights into the neural bases of visual awareness itself.     

Knowing That P without Believing That P

Most epistemologists hold that knowledge entails belief. However, proponents of this claim rarely offer a positive argument in support of it. Rather, they tend to treat the view as obvious and assert that there are no convincing counterexamples. We find this strategy to be problematic. We do not find the standard view obvious, and moreover, we think there are cases in which it is intuitively plausible that a subject knows some proposition P without—or at least without determinately—believing that P. Accordingly, we present five plausible examples of knowledge without (determinate) belief, and we present empirical evidence suggesting that our intuitions about these scenarios are not atypical.     

Brief pitch-priming facilitates infants’ discrimination of pitch-evoking noise: Evidence from event-related potentials

Pitch is derived by the auditory system through complex spectrotemporal processing. Pitch extraction is thought to depend on both spectral cues arising from lower harmonics that are resolved by cochlear filters in the inner ear, and on temporal cues arising from the pattern of action potentials contained in the cochlear output. Adults are capable of extracting pitch in the absence of robust spectral cues, taking advantage of the temporal cues that remain. However, recent behavioral evidence suggests that infants have difficulty discriminating between stimuli with different pitches when resolvable spectral cues are absent. In the current experiments, we used the mismatch negativity (MMN) component of the event related potential derived from electroencephalographic (EEG) recordings to examine a cortical representation of pitch discrimination for iterated rippled noise (IRN) stimuli in 4- and 8-month-old infants. IRN stimuli are pitch-evoking sounds generated by repeatedly adding a segment of white noise to itself at a constant delay. We created IRN stimuli (delays of 5 and 6 ms creating pitch percepts of 200 and 167 Hz) and high-pass filtered them to remove all resolvable spectral pitch cues. In experiment 1, we did not find EEG evidence that infants could detect the change in the pitch of these IRN stimuli. However, in Experiment 2, after a brief period of pitch-priming during which we added a sine wave component to the IRN stimulus at its perceived pitch, infants did show significant MMN in response to pitch changes in the IRN stimuli with sine waves removed. This suggests that (1) infants can use temporal cues to process pitch, although such processing is not mature and (2) that a short amount of pitch-priming experience can alter pitch representations in auditory cortex during infancy.     

Recognition of Affective Speech Prosody and Facial Affect in Deaf Children with Unilateral Right Cochlear Implants

Cochlear implant (CI) devices provide the opportunity for children who are deaf to perceive sound by electrical stimulation of the auditory nerve, with the goal of optimizing oral communication. One part of oral communication concerns meaning, while another part concerns emotion: affective speech prosody, in the auditory domain, and facial affect, in the visual domain. It is not known whether childhood CI users can identify emotion in speech and faces, so we investigated speech prosody and facial affect in children who had been deaf from infancy and experienced CI users. METHOD: Study participants were 18 CI users (ages 7–13 years) who received right unilateral CIs and 18 age- and gender-matched controls. Emotion recognition in speech prosody and faces was measured by the Diagnostic Analysis of Nonverbal Accuracy. RESULTS: Compared to controls, children with right CIs could identify facial affect but not affective speech prosody. Age at test and time since CI activation were uncorrelated with overall outcome measures. CONCLUSION: Children with right CIs recognize emotion in faces but have limited perception of affective speech prosody.     

Ethnic Differences in Parents' Attitudes toward Girls' Use of Aggression

Few studies have attempted to explain ethnic differences in female aggression. The degree to which ethnic differences exist in the influence of parents' approval of aggression on their preadolescent daughters' use of physical, verbal, and relational aggression was explored in a sample of 97 parent-child dyads. Results indicate that European American parents were more disapproving of their daughters' aggressive behavior than were African American parents. Parents' attitude toward aggression was predictive of European American girls' use of physical and verbal aggression and African American girls' use of relational aggression. Implications for aggression prevention and intervention for girls are discussed.