Effortful Control and Interpersonal Behavior in Daily Life

The Cognitive-Affective Processing System (CAPS) was used to examine effortful control (EC) as a moderator of daily interpersonal behavior. Participants (N = 240) were nonclinical young adults who completed a 7-day event-contingent experience sampling study of interpersonal perception and affect. Multilevel linear models indicated that EC moderated within-person covariation of interpersonal warmth and affect activation; high EC individuals reported greater momentary warm behaviors when perceiving others as affectively activated. EC also amplified between-person covariation of interpersonal warmth between self and others; high EC individuals generally responded to perceptions of another's warmth with a greater degree of warm behavior. Varying levels of EC predict responses to interpersonal perceptions and affect in daily life, suggesting an important dimension for interpersonal functioning.     

Holistic face processing can be independent of gaze behaviour: Evidence from the composite face illusion

People tend to perceive identical top halves (i.e. above the nose) of two face stimuli as being different when they are aligned with distinct bottom halves. This composite face illusion is generally considered as the most compelling evidence that facial features are integrated into a holistic representation. Here, we recorded eye‐movements during the composite face illusion in a delayed matching task of top halves of faces. Behavioural results showed a strong composite face effect, participants making more mistakes and taking longer time to match two identical top halves of faces when they were aligned (vs. misaligned) with different bottom halves. Importantly, fixation sites and eye‐movements were virtually identical when the top and bottom parts were aligned (composite illusion) or misaligned (no illusion), indicating that holistic face processing can be independent of gaze behaviour. These findings reinforce the view that holistic representations of individual faces can be extracted early on from information at a relatively coarse scale, independently of overt attention.     

The effects of intergroup context of evaluation on ambivalence toward the ingroup and the outgroup

A study is reported which examines the relations between ambivalence toward the ingroup and the outgroup. The basic assumption was that ambivalent attitudes in intergroup contexts contribute to satisfying two competing motivations of group members, i.e. establishment of positive distinctiveness for the ingroup and conformity to the fairness norm. Participants were asked to evaluate the ingroup and one other group by using unipolar (positively and negatively valenced) affect‐ and cognition‐based items. We predicted an interaction effect of target group (ingroup versus outgroup) and attitude domain (affect‐based versus cognition‐based) on ambivalence. Additional hypotheses were formulated taking separately into account the positive and the negative unipolar items. We expected that on positively valenced items the ingroup would be favoured over the outgroup on both affect‐ and cognition‐based evaluations. Besides, we predicted that on negatively valenced items, the ingroup would be favoured over the outgroup on affect‐based evaluation but not on cognition‐based evaluation. Results indicated support for the predictions and shed light on the moderating role played by attitude domains on both ambivalence and ingroup favouritism. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Learning to Attend and to Ignore Is a Matter of Gains and Losses

ABSTRACT— Efficient goal-directed behavior in a crowded world is crucially mediated by visual selective attention (VSA), which regulates deployment of cognitive resources toward selected, behaviorally relevant visual objects. Acting as a filter on perceptual representations, VSA allows preferential processing of relevant objects and concurrently inhibits traces of irrelevant items, thus preventing harmful distraction. Recent evidence showed that monetary rewards for performance on VSA tasks strongly affect immediately subsequent deployment of attention; a typical aftereffect of VSA (negative priming) was found only following highly rewarded selections. Here we report a much more striking demonstration that the controlled delivery of monetary rewards also affects attentional processing several days later. Thus, the propensity to select or to ignore specific visual objects appears to be strongly biased by the more or less rewarding consequences of past attentional encounters with the same objects.     

Phonotactic regularities in the segmentation of spoken Italian

Five word-spotting experiments explored the role of consonantal and vocalic phonotactic cues in the segmentation of spoken Italian. The first set of experiments tested listeners' sensitivity to phonotactic constraints cueing syllable boundaries. Participants were slower in spotting words in nonsense strings when target onsets were misaligned (e.g., lago in ri.blago) than when they were aligned (e.g., lago in rin.lago) with phonotactically determined syllabic boundaries. This effect held also for sequences that occur only word-medially (e.g., /tl/ in ri.tlago), and competition effects could not account for the disadvantage in the misaligned condition. Similarly, target detections were slower when their offsets were misaligned (e.g., cittá in cittáu.ba) than when they were aligned (e.g., cittá in cittá.oba) with a phonotactic syllabic boundary. The second set of experiments tested listeners' sensitivity to phonotactic cues, which specifically signal lexical (and not just syllable) boundaries. Results corroborate the role of syllabic information in speech segmentation and suggest that Italian listeners make little use of additional phonotactic information that specifically cues word boundaries.     

Working memory and intrusions of irrelevant information in a group of specific poor problem solvers

An important body of evidence has shown that reading comprehension ability is related to working memory and, in particular, to the success in Daneman and Carpenter's (1980) reading and listening span test. This research tested a similar hypothesis for arithmetic word problems, since, in order to maintain and process the information, they require working memory processes. A group of children possessing average vocabulary but poor arithmetic problem-solving skills was compared with a group of good problem solvers, matched for vocabulary, age, and socioeconomic status. Poor problem solvers presented lower recall and a greater number of intrusion errors in a series of tasks testing working memory and memory for problems. The results obtained over a series of six experimental phases, conducted during a 2-school-year period, offer evidence in favor of the hypotheses that groups of poor problem solvers may have poor performance in a working memory test requiring inhibition of irrelevant information (Hypothesis 1), but not in other short-term memory tests (Hypothesis 2), that this difficulty is related to poor recall of critical information and greater recall of to-be-inhibited information (Hypothesis 3), that poor problem solvers also have difficulty in remembering only relevant information included in arithmetic word problems (Hypothesis 4) despite the fact that they are able to identify relevant information (Hypothesis 5). The results show that problem-solving ability is related to the ability of reducing the memory accessibility of nontarget and irrelevant information.     

Social influence: The role of originality

Two experiments investigated the role of message originality vs. conventionality in social influence. It was hypothesized that subjects would generate more original proposals when confronted with a minority advocating an original viewpoint than when confronted with a conventional minority proposal or with an original majority proposal. In the first experiment, subjects exposed to an original minority paired with a conventional majority produced a wider range and more original proposals than those exposed either to a conventional minority paired with a conventional majority or to a majority source only. The second experiment further demonstrated that the original message induced creative processing only when attributed to a minority source but not when attributed to a majority source. It also showed that the original minority elicited creative processing mainly when paired with a conventional majority, but not when paired with a majority advocating an equally original position. Findings are interpreted in the frame of Nemeth's (1986) minority influence theory.