Crossmodal integration of emotional information from face and voice in the infant brain

We examined 7-month-old infants' processing of emotionally congruent and incongruent face-voice pairs using ERP measures. Infants watched facial expressions (happy or angry) and, after a delay of 400 ms, heard a word spoken with a prosody that was either emotionally congruent or incongruent with the face being presented. The ERP data revealed that the amplitude of a negative component and a subsequent positive component in infants' ERPs varied as a function of crossmodal emotional congruity. An emotionally incongruent prosody elicited a larger negative component in infants' ERPs than did an emotionally congruent prosody. Conversely, the amplitude of infants' positive component was larger to emotionally congruent than to incongruent prosody. Previous work has shown that an attenuation of the negative component and an enhancement of the later positive component in infants' ERPs reflect the recognition of an item. Thus, the current findings suggest that 7-month-olds integrate emotional information across modalities and recognize common affect in the face and voice.     

A meta-analysis on the correlation between the implicit association test and explicit self-report measures

Theoretically, low correlations between implicit and explicit measures can be due to (a) motivational biases in explicit self reports, (b) lack of introspective access to implicitly assessed representations, (c) factors influencing the retrieval of information from memory, (d) method-related characteristics of the two measures, or (e) complete independence of the underlying constructs. The present study addressed these questions from a meta-analytic perspective, investigating the correlation between the Implicit Association Test (IAT) and explicit self-report measures. Based on a sample of 126 studies, the mean effect size was .24, with approximately half of the variability across correlations attributable to moderator variables. Correlations systematically increased as a function of (a) increasing spontaneity of self-reports and (b) increasing conceptual correspondence between measures. These results suggest that implicit and explicit measures are generally related but that higher order inferences and lack of conceptual correspondence can reduce the influence of automatic associations on explicit self-reports.     

Electrophysiological evidence for modulation of lexical processing after repetitive exposure to foreign phonotactic rules

In two experiments we investigate how repeated exposure to native and non-native phonotactic regularities alters the N400, an event-related potential related to lexico-semantic access. Participants underwent a Passive Listening (Experiment 1) or a Categorization Training (Experiment 2) for monosyllabic pseudowords over 3 days. During Passive Listening participants solely listened to the stimuli while for Categorization Training they learned to assign items to two arbitrary categories by feedback. Notably, this task did not rely on phonotactic regularities. Before training, N400 was larger for legal compared to illegal items. Over the 3-day exposure Passive Listening yielded a significant decrease in N400-amplitude for illegal pseudowords, however, this effect was abolished and partially inverted by the Categorization Training. We suggest the decrease in N400-amplitude indicates more efficient discrimination between native and non-native pseudowords since only the former are potential lexical candidates. On the contrary, Categorization Training introduces a ‘protosemantic’ context overriding prelexical selection processes.     

Impaired visual perception of hurtful actions in patients with chronic low back pain

Visually presented biological motion stimuli activate regions in the brain that are also related to musculo-skeletal pain. We therefore hypothesized that chronic pain impairs the perception of visually presented actions that involve body parts that hurt. In the first experiment, chronic back pain (CLBP) patients and healthy controls judged the lifted weight from point-light biological motion displays. An actor either lifted an invisible container (5, 10, or 15 kg) from the floor, or lifted and manipulated it from the right to the left. The latter involved twisting of the lower back and would be very painful for CLBP patients. All participants recognized the displayed actions, but CLBP patients were impaired in judging the difference in handled weights, especially for the trunk rotation. The second experiment involved discrimination between forward and backward walking. Here the patients were just as good as the controls, showing that the main result of the first experiment was indeed specific to the sensory aspects of the task, and not to general impairments or attentional deficits. The results thus indicate that the judgment of sensorimotor aspects of a visually displayed movement is specifically affected by chronic low back pain.     

Freedom Beyond Practical Reason: Duns Scotus on Will-Dependent Relations

Most acts of the will have a complex structure, i.e. wanting A in relation to B (e.g. as a means for an end or as a good for another person or for oneself). Duns Scotus makes the innovative claim that the will itself is responsible for the order of this complex structure. It does this by causing its own will-dependent relations, which he construes as a kind of mind-dependent relations (relationes rationis). By means of these relations, the will can arrange the terms of its will-acts independently of any arrangement proposed by the intellect. This not only allows the structure of one's will-act to diverge from the structure proposed by the intellect's final practical judgement; the structure of the will-act need not even have been considered by the intellect at all. One could, therefore, even will an inconceivable state of affairs. I argue that this theory, which scholars have virtually ignored, is fundamental to Scotus's account of divine, angelic, and human freedom, and that it follows necessarily from his voluntarist understanding of freedom. For Scotus, if the will could not structure its acts independently of the intellect, it would not be free.¹¹Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Hoger Instituut voor Wijsbegeerte (Leuven), the Cornell Summer Colloquium in Medieval Philosophy, and at UCLA. I am grateful for the discussion with those present on these occasions. Special thanks are due to Joshua Benson, Francis Feingold, Gloria Frost, Michael Gorman, Bonnie Kent, Calvin Normore, and Nick Kahm for helpful comments.     

Of two minds or one? A registered replication of Rydell et al. (2006)

ABSTRACT

Evaluative conditioning (EC) is proposed as a mechanism of automatic preference acquisition in dual-process theories of attitudes (Gawronski, B., & Bodenhausen, G. V. (2006). Associative and propositional processes in evaluation: An integrative review of implicit and explicit attitude change. Psychological Bulletin, 132(5), 692–731. doi:10.1037/0033-2909.132.5.692). Evidence for the automaticity of EC comes from studies claiming EC effects for subliminally presented stimuli. An impression-formation study showed a selective influence of briefly presented primes on implicitly measured attitudes, whereas supraliminally presented behavioural information about the target person was reflected in explicit ratings (Rydell, R. J., McConnell, A. R., Mackie, D. M., & Strain, L. M. (2006). Of two minds forming and changing valence-inconsistent implicit and explicit attitudes. Psychological Science, 17(11), 954–958. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.2006.01811.x) This finding is considered one of the strongest pieces of evidence for dual process theories (Sweldens, S., Corneille, O., & Yzerbyt, V. (2014). The role of awareness in attitude formation through evaluative conditioning. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 18(2), 187–209. doi:10.1177/1088868314527832), and it is therefore crucial to assess its reliability and robustness. The present study presents two registered replications of the Rydell et al. (2006) study. In contrast to the original findings, the implicit measures did not reflect the valence of the subliminal primes in both studies.     

Text Belief Consistency Effects in the Comprehension of Multiple Texts With Conflicting Information

When reading multiple texts about controversial scientific issues, learners must construct a coherent mental representation of the issue based on conflicting information that can be more or less belief-consistent. The present experiment investigated the effects of text–belief consistency on the situation model and memory for text. Students read four texts about a scientific controversy. Learners' situation model was biased towards their beliefs when belief-consistent and belief-inconsistent texts were presented block-by-block. When the texts were presented alternatingly, situation models for belief-consistent and belief-inconsistent texts were equally strong. Moreover, the text base was better for belief-inconsistent texts. These results support the idea that prior beliefs influence the processing of conflicting information in multiple texts differently on the level of the situation model and on the propositional text base. A more balanced situation model of scientific controversies can be promoted by presenting belief-consistent and belief-inconsistent texts in an alternating sequence.     

Character Disposition and Behavior Type: Influences of Valence on Preschool Children's Social Judgments

The authors studied the influences of valence information on preschool children's (n = 47) moral (good or bad), liking (liked or disliked by a friend), and consequence-of-behavior (reward or punishment) judgments. The authors presented 8 scenarios describing the behavior valence, positive valence (help, share), negative valence (verbal insult, physical aggression), and disposition valence (nice or mean) of characters in social interaction with a friend. Overall, character disposition and behavior valence significantly influenced children's judgments. Moral, liking, and consequence-of-behavior judgments varied significantly by character disposition for both positive behavior scenarios. In contrast, there were fewer significant findings as a function of character disposition for negative behavior scenarios, suggesting that the negative behavior cue somewhat diminished the effect of character disposition on children's judgments. The authors discuss preschool students’ coordination of information about valence of behavior and character disposition and the students’ reluctance to judge that misbehavior warrants punitive consequence.     

Social Status and the Desire to Resort to Violence: Using the Example of Uganda's Former Child Soldiers

Committing violent acts can be appealing, fascinating, exciting, and addictive (i.e., appetitive). Cultural settings that accept violence as a means to power and success promote this appetitive form of aggression. Former child soldiers of Uganda with military rank reported committing a greater variety of violent acts compared to those without rank. They experienced aggressive behavior as more positive than both those without rank and controls who had never been involved in armed groups. The relation between the number of individually committed offense types and appetitive aggression is weaker in former child soldiers without rank compared to those with rank. This indicates that the potential for rapid development of appetitive aggression is rewarded with higher social status in war-afflicted communities.