Perceived causality as a cue to temporal distance

The three experiments reported show that judgments of elapsed time between events depend on perceived causal relations between the events. Participants judged pairs of causally related events to occur closer together in time than pairs of causally unrelated events that were separated by the same actual time interval. The causality-time relationship was first demonstrated for time judgments about historical events. Causally related events were judged to be significantly closer together in time than causally unrelated events. In two subsequent experiments, perceived causality was manipulated by providing expert information and by asking the participants themselves to imagine causal relationships between the to-be-judged events. Again, substantial and reliable effects of perceived causality were obtained. Our results suggest that people use strength of perceived causality as a cue to infer temporal distance.     

La evaluación de la evidencia en la toma de decisiones complejas

Resumen

En esta investigación se analiza el papel de cómo se representa la evidencia en el proceso de decisión de un miembro de un jurado. Se presenta asimismo un modelo que incorpora una primera etapa inicial de procesamiento en la que se generan ciertas representaciones cognitivas de la evidencia bajo la forma de una historia. Esta etapa inicial viene seguida del cálculo de la decisión evaluando la bondad de ajuste de la representación de la evidencia (la historia) a los distintos tipos de veredicto. Cada uno de los sujetos, extraídos de listas de jurados, proporcionaba su veredicto sobre un juicio de asesinato que se presentaba filmado. A través de una entrevista en profundidad con cada uno de los jurados se obtenían los datos necesarios para el análisis de sus representaciones cognitivas de la evidencia del caso, de los tipos de veredicto presentados en las instrucciones del juez, y de los procedimientos que hubieron de seguir de acuerdo con la ley para llegar a un veredicto final. De acuerdo con nuestra hipótesis, hallamos que la evidencia del juicio se representaba bajo la forma de una historia. Además, las diferencias que se obtuvieron entre jurados respecto de sus representaciones cognitivas se correlacionaron con sus veredictos, aunque otros aspectos del proceso de decisión se correlacionaran (las representaciones de los distintos tipos de veredicto, y la aplicación de las instrucciones respecto del procedimiento para la evaluación de las pruebas). Terminamos concluyendo que una teoría apropiada de la toma de decisiones debe prestar atención a aquellos aspectos cognitivos de la tarea, como por ejemplo los que afectan a la representación de la evidencia.     

Developmental surface dyslexia and dysgraphia: An orthographic processing impairment

This study presents a detailed investigation of a young man in his early twenties who has suffered from a severe spelling impairment since childhood, and currently has a spelling age of only 9 years and 2 months. In contrast with the developmental phonological dyslexics reported by Campbell and Butterworth (1985) and Funnell and Davison (1989), his performance on tests of phonological awareness is good. In addition, he can read and spell non-words competently and, unlike normal 9-year-old children, virtually all of his spelling errors are phonologically appropriate. Further analysis of these errors reveals that he has knowledge of many of the different ways in which a given phoneme can be written, and that he uses phoneme-to-grapheme correspondences at the end of a word that are different from those he uses earlier in a word. However, he finds it difficult to spell words that contain uncommon phoneme-to-grapheme correspondences, which is compatible with the view that he has not developed an orthographic spelling lexicon. Although his oral reading of words is prompt and generally accurate, analysis of his lexical decision performance and the way that he defines homophones indicate that he does not have fully specified lexical entries available for reading either. We suggest that he suffers from a general orthographic processing deficit, and relies instead upon the combination of sub-lexical phonology and a lexicon that contains only partial information about way in which words are spelt. This leads to reasonably competent reading, even of many irregular words, but produces very poor spelling. It is argued that qualitatively different types of developmental dyslexia do genuinely exist, but that reading impairments are likely to be much more pronounced in children who have a phonological rather than an orthographic processing deficit.     

Where Do Social Norms Come From?

ABSTRACT— Where do social norms come from? Part of the answer must surely lie in such norms' ability to support individual adaptive success in local ecologies. This theme is dominant in analyses of social behavior by economic game theorists and behavioral-ecology researchers, but it has been neglected by psychologists. An illustration of the methods and advantages of the adaptationist approach to understanding the emergence of social norms is provided. Some surprising behavioral results from modern industrial societies that reflect social-sharing norms of modern hunter-gatherer societies are consistent with our adaptive analysis.     

Interevent relationships and judgment under uncertainty: structure determines strategy

A fundamental empirical question regarding judgments about events is whether experienced absolute frequencies or relative frequencies are relied on when the likelihood of a particular occurrence is judged. The present research explicates the conditions under which people rely on remembered raw absolute frequencies versus on inferred relative frequencies or proportions when making predictions. Participants saw opinion poll results for candidates prior to an election and, on the basis of these, made judgments concerning the likelihood of each candidate's winning this election. Certain candidates demonstrated a high absolute frequency of winning in the polls, whereas other candidates had high relative win frequencies. The results indicated that adults are cognitively flexible with regard to the inputs used in this judgment. Certain stimulus event configurations induced reasoning by way of absolute frequencies, whereas other configurations elicited judgments based on relative frequencies. More specifically, as the relational complexity of the event structure increased and more inferences were required to make predictions, the tendency to rely on absolute, as opposed to relative, frequencies also increased.     

Category coherence and category-based property induction

One important property of human object categories is that they define the sets of exemplars to which newly observed properties are generalized. We manipulated the causal knowledge associated with novel categories and assessed the resulting strength of property inductions. We found that the theoretical coherence afforded to a category by inter-feature causal relationships strengthened inductive projections. However, this effect depended on the degree to which the exemplar with the to-be-projected predicate manifested or satisfied its category's causal laws. That is, the coherence that supports inductive generalizations is a property of individual category members rather than categories. Moreover, we found that an exemplar's coherence was mediated by its degree of category membership. These results were obtained across a variety of causal network topologies and kinds of categories, including biological kinds, non-living natural kinds, and artifacts.     

Perpetrators’ reactions to perceived interpersonal wrongdoing: The associations of guilt and shame with forgiving,punishing, and excusing oneself

We describe a model in which guilt and shame associate with reactions to wrongdoing among perpetrators of interpersonal harm. Individuals who reported wronging another person (N = 410) completed measures of perceived transgression severity, guilt and shame, and possible reactions to perpetration of wrongdoing (i.e., forgiving, punishing, and excusing oneself). Guilt positively predicted forgiving and punishing oneself, and negatively predicted excusing oneself of blame. Shame, in contrast, negatively predicted forgiving oneself and positively predicted punishing and excusing oneself. The observed patterns of associations between guilt and shame with perpetrators’ reactions to wrongdoing provide further support for the dual-process model of self-forgiveness. Implications for future basic and applied investigations are discussed.     

We want the same thing: projection in judgments of sexual intent

This article details two studies investigating the proximal role of social projection (i.e., assumed similarity) in judgments of sexual intent. Study 1 demonstrates that men and women who have a greater desire for casual sex are more likely to perceive sexual intent in others. Study 2 replicates this finding in a more realistic context and, further, situates judgments of sexual intent squarely into the cognitive domain, as results show that projection of casual sexual motivation is more likely when the target is similar to the perceiver and when the target's motivation is relatively ambiguous to begin with.     

Intrapersonal and interpersonal functions of non suicidal self-injury: associations with emotional and social functioning

Understanding the functions of nonsuicidal self-injury (NSSI) has important implications for the development and refinement of theoretical models and treatments of NSSI. Emotional and social vulnerabilities associated with five common functions of NSSI-emotion relief (ER), feeling generation (FG), self-punishment (SP), interpersonal influence (II), and interpersonal communication (IC)-were investigated to clarify why individuals use this behavior in the service of different purposes. Female participants (n = 162) with a history of NSSI completed online measures of self-injury, emotion regulation strategies and abilities, trait affectivity, social problem-solving styles, and interpersonal problems. ER functions were associated with more intense affectivity, expressive suppression, and limited access to emotion regulation strategies. FG functions were associated with a lack of emotional clarity. Similar to ER functions, SP functions were associated with greater affective intensity and expressive suppression. II functions were negatively associated with expressive suppression and positively associated with domineering/controlling and intrusive/needy interpersonal styles. IC functions were negatively associated with expressive suppression and positively associated with a vindictive or self-centered interpersonal style. These findings highlight the specific affective traits, emotional and social skill deficits, and interpersonal styles that may render a person more likely to engage in NSSI to achieve specific goals.     

Misremembering pictured objects: people of all ages demonstrate the boundary extension illusion

In the boundary extension illusion, subjects recollect more of a photographed scene than was originally shown. In this study, first- and fifth-grade children, young adult college students, and older adults studied 4 one-object or 4 two-object picture stimuli for 15 s each. Immediately after each visual scene was shown, the subjects drew it from memory inside a rectangle that was the same size as the previous picture. This study demonstrated that all age groups, from young children to older adults, were susceptible to the boundary extension illusion. This finding is discussed in terms of Intraub's perceptual schema hypothesis and Johnson's source-monitoring hypothesis.