Task switches under Go/NoGo conditions and the decomposition of switch costs

Alternating switches between two simple S-R tasks are combined with Go/NoGo tasks. Non-switches after Go trials are assumed to selectively profit from stimulus driven repetition benefits, whereas switches after NoGo trials are assumed to be selectively delayed by stimulus driven negative priming. Intentionally driven reconfiguration costs are assessed by RT differences between switches after Go trials (no negative priming) and non-switches after NoGo trials (no repetition benefits). Experiment 1 indicates that with short preparation time repetition benefits, negative priming costs, and intentional components contribute approximately additively to switch costs. Experiment 2 confirms that the delay of switches after NoGo trials is indeed due to negative priming. Experiments 3 and 4 show that repetition benefits and intentional components of switch costs are properly assessed only if the settings assure that participants reconfigure the required task set in NoGo as well as Go trials.     

Effect of a behavioral self-regulation intervention on patient adherence in hemodialysis.

The present study examined the efficacy of a behavioral intervention designed to increase adherence to fluid-intake restrictions among hemodialysis patients. Twenty intervention-group patients were compared with 20 matched control patients on an indicator of fluid-intake adherence at 3 time points. The Group x Time interaction was significant, indicating that patients in the 2 groups exhibited a differential pattern of change in fluid-intake adherence across the follow-up period. The intervention and control groups did not differ significantly in terms of adherence at the initial postintervention period but did differ at the 8-week follow-up. The observed group differences were, in part, due to a trend toward increasingly better adherence in the intervention group and poorer adherence in the control group across the follow-up period.     

Patient Adherence With Medical Treatment Regimens: An Interactive Approach

Inadequate patient adherence to treatment regimens is a ubiquitous problem in health care and carries a profound personal, societal, and economic cost. This article illustrates a general theoretical framework we believe to be useful for the interpretation, conception, and design of adherence research. The core tenet of this framework is that factors that influence adherence can be better understood by considering the interactive effects of patients' characteristics, type of adherence intervention, and characteristics of the illness and medical treatment context. This framework represents an extension and application of previous theory and research from personality, social, and clinical psychology concerning the value of an interactionalist perspective. We illustrate the framework using some of our past work involving treatment adherence among patients with chronic renal failure.     

Factors influencing juror verdict in a case involving repressed memories of abuse

Mental health professionals acting as expert witnesses are expected to testify about the prevalence of sexual abuse, and also about the veracity of memory. In cases involving adult survivors of sexual abuse, this testimony is typically about repressed and false memory syndromes. Many professionals have noted concerns about the lack of definitive data to support either syndrome. This study examined the following variables: juror knowledge and experience with repressed and false memory syndromes, juror attitudes about sexual abuse and memory recovery techniques, and gender of juror on verdict. Results include effects for repressed memory knowledge/experience and gender. Gender differences were found regarding attitudes about abuse and memory. Concluding comments include practical and research implications of the study results.     

Effects of Damage to Right-Hemisphere Brain Structures on Spontaneous Emotional and Social Judgments

Recent work in cognitive and social neuroscience has focused on the neural substrates of social judgment. The present study explores the effects of damage to the right-hemisphere somatosensory cortices (RSS), a region known for its role in emotion recognition. Seven subjects with RSS damage were shown a short movie depicting objects that move in socially suggestive ways, a stimulus that typically elicits spontaneous social and emotional attributions from normal subjects. The spontaneous verbal responses of RSS-damaged subjects to this movie were compared to those of normal subjects as well as brain-damaged control subjects; the data were derived using a word count and categorization computer program. This method measures spontaneous social and emotional judgments rather than the more typical rating and labeling measures used in neuropsychological studies of social judgment. As predicted, relative to brain-damaged and normal controls, subjects with RSS damage reacted to the stimulus movie with fewer words in categories describing emotional and social processes, despite using a similar total number of words (and slightly more words describing movement, a control category). These results provide further evidence for the role of the RSS in social/emotional processing and identify a role for the RSS in automatic representation in ourselves of body states of others to foster emotion recognition and social cognition.     

The Undecidability of Grisin's Set Theory

We investigate a contractionless naive set theory, due to Grisin [11]. We prove that the theory is undecidable.     

Creative Fixation is No Laughing Matter: The Effects of Funny and Unfunny Examples on Humor Production

How do people come up with humorous ideas? In creative cognition research, exposure to good examples sometimes causes fixation (people get “stuck” on the examples) but other times sparks inspiration (people's responses are more creative). The present research examined the effects of funny and unfunny examples on joke production. A sample of 175 adults read scenarios that they completed with funny responses. All participants were instructed to be funny, but before responding they read (a) funny responses as examples of good responses to emulate, (b) unfunny responses as examples of poor responses to avoid, or (c) no examples. The participants’ own responses were rated for funniness and for similarity to the example responses, and response times were recorded. Reading either funny or unfunny examples, compared to no examples, caused people to come up with funnier jokes. Similarity to the examples was low in all conditions, so fixation was relatively modest, but people who saw unfunny examples spent more time coming up with their responses. Taken together, the findings support the growing literature showing that examples are often inspiring rather than constraining, and they imply that good and bad examples spark creative thought via different paths.