A paradox for some theories of welfare

Sometimes people desire that their lives go badly, take pleasure in their lives going badly, or believe that their lives are going badly. As a result, some popular theories of welfare are paradoxical. I show that no attempt to defend those theories from the paradox fully succeeds.     

Gaming magazines and the drive for muscularity in preadolescent boys: a longitudinal examination

The development of a drive for muscularity among boys has been linked to various cultural influences, one of which is exposure to mass media depicting the muscular male body ideal. We sought to determine whether self-reported exposure to four ideal-body magazine genres (health/fitness, fashion, sports, and gaming) predicted an increased drive for muscularity 1 year later. A sample of 104 Black and 77 White preadolescent boys (mean age 8.77) participated in a 2-wave longitudinal panel study. Controlling Wave 1 grade, perceived thinness/adiposity, and drive for muscularity, exposure to video gaming magazines predicted a significant increase in Wave 2 drive for muscularity, but only for White boys. Discussion calls for the inclusion of video gaming magazine exposure measures in future research on print media and male body ideals, along with empirical exploration of racial themes in gaming magazines.     

Accommodation, occlusion, and disparity matching are used to guide reaching: a comparison of actual versus virtual environments.

The authors used a virtual environment to investigate visual control of reaching and monocular and binocular perception of egocentric distance, size, and shape. With binocular vision, the results suggested use of disparity matching. This was tested and confirmed in the virtual environment by eliminating other information about contact of hand and target. Elimination of occlusion of hand by target destabilized monocular but not binocular performance. Because the virtual environment entails accommodation of an image beyond reach, the authors predicted overestimation of egocentric distances in the virtual relative to actual environment. This was confirmed. The authors used -2 diopter glasses to reduce the focal distance in the virtual environment. Overestimates were reduced by half. The authors conclude that calibration of perception is required for accurate feedforward reaching and that disparity matching is optimal visual information for calibration.     

Out with .05, in with Replication and Measurement: Isolating and Working with the Particular Effect Sizes that are Troublesome for Inferential Statistics

It is difficult to obtain adequate power to test a small effect size with a set criterion alpha of 0.05. Probably an inferential test will indicate non-statistical significance and not be published. Rarely, statistical significance will be obtained, and an exaggerated effect size calculated and reported. Accepting all inferential probabilities and associated effect sizes could solve exaggeration problems. Graphs, generated through Monte Carlo methods, are presented to illustrate this. The first graph presents effect sizes (Cohen's d) as lines from 1 to 0 with probabilities on the Y axis and the number of measures on the X axis. This graph shows effect sizes of .5 or less should yield non-significance with sample sizes below 120 measures. The other graphs show results with as many as 10 small sample size replications. There is a convergence of means with the effect size as sample size increases and measurement accuracy emerges.     

Patterns of attention to threat across tasks in behaviorally inhibited children at risk for anxiety

Although attention bias towards threat has been causally implicated in the development and maintenance of fear and anxiety, the expected associations do not appear consistently. Reliance on a single task to capture attention bias, in this case overwhelmingly the dot‐probe task, may contribute to this inconsistency. Comparing across attentional bias measures could help capture patterns of behavior that have implications for anxiety. This study examines the patterns of attentional bias across two related measures in a sample of children at temperamental risk for anxiety. Children (Mean_age = 10.19 ± 0.96) characterized as behaviorally inhibited (N = 50) or non‐inhibited (N = 64) via parent‐report completed the dot‐probe and affective Posner tasks to measure attentional bias to threat. Parent‐report diagnostic interviews assessed children's social anxiety. Behavioral inhibition was not associated with performance in the dot‐probe task, but was associated with increased attentional bias to threat in the affective Posner task. Cross‐task convergence was dependent on temperament, such that attention bias across the two tasks was only related in behaviorally inhibited children. Finally, children who were consistently biased across tasks (showing high or low attentional bias scores in both tasks, rather than high in one but low in the other) had higher levels of anxiety. Convergence across attention bias measures may be dependent on individuals' predispositions (e.g. temperament). Moreover, convergence of attention bias across measures may be a stronger marker of information processing patterns that shape socioemotional outcomes than performance in a single task.     

The neural bases of the effects of item-nonspecific proactive interference in working memory

We reanalyzed the behavioral and fMRI data from seven previously published studies of working memory in order to assess the behavioral and neural effects of item-nonspecific proactive interference (PI; attributable to the accrual of antecedent information independent of the repetition of particular items). We hypothesized that item-nonspecific PI, implicated in age-related declines in working memory performance, is mediated by the same mechanism(s) that mediate item-specific PI (occurring when an invalid memory probe matches a memorandum from the previous trial). Reaction time increased across trials as a function of position within the block, a trend that reversed across the duration of each multiblock experiment. The fMRI analyses revealed sensitivity to item-nonspecific PI during the probe epoch in the left anterior inferior frontal gyrus and the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (PFC). They also revealed a negative trend, across trials, in the transient probe-evoked component of the global signal. A common PFC-based mechanism may mediate many forms of PI.     

Orienting and maintenance of gaze to facial expressions in social anxiety

In 2 experiments, the authors tested predictions from cognitive models of social anxiety regarding attentional biases for social and nonsocial cues by monitoring eye movements to pictures of faces and objects in high social anxiety (HSA) and low social anxiety (LSA) individuals. Under no-stress conditions (Experiment 1), HSA individuals initially directed their gaze toward neutral faces, relative to objects, more often than did LSA participants. However, under social-evaluative stress (Experiment 2), HSA individuals showed reduced biases in initial orienting and maintenance of gaze on faces (cf. objects) compared with the LSA group. HSA individuals were also relatively quicker to look at emotional faces than neutral faces but looked at emotional faces for less time, compared with LSA individuals, consistent with a vigilant-avoidant pattern of bias.     

Alcohol and cognitive control: implications for regulation of behavior during response conflict

Alcohol intoxication often leads to dysregulated behavior in contexts characterized by conflict between prepotent response tendencies and incompatible alternative responses. Recent research has identified 2 components of an anterior executive attention system that are essential for adaptive behavior when response conflict exists. Event-related potential (ERP) measures of evaluative and regulative cognitive control were collected to determine if impaired executive attention was responsible for observed behavior deficits when intoxicated. Intoxicated participants displayed task performance deficits on incongruent color-naming trials relative to sober controls. Alcohol did not affect P3 magnitude/latency, indicating that timing and integrity of stimulus evaluation remained intact. In contrast, alcohol did reduce frontal components of ERP that index evaluative and regulative cognitive control processes.