Conscientiousness but not agreeableness mediates females’ tendency toward being a morning person

Individuals differ in their chronotype, and some are identified as morning ones and others as evening ones. Earlier studies showed that women were higher on morningness, conscientiousness, and agreeableness. In this study, we aimed at exploring the mediational effects of conscientiousness and agreeableness in the relationship of gender and morningness‐eveningness. Participants were 669 university students. Results supported positive relationships between morningness and conscientiousness and agreeableness and between conscientiousness and agreeableness. Females were higher on all these three variables. Mediation analyses suggested that the effect of gender (here females) on chronotype (here morningness) was mediated by conscientiousness but not agreeableness so that after the mediation partially occurred, the gender's effect did not remain significant anymore. This study backed our hypothesis that conscientiousness might play a more pronounced role than the intrinsic diurnal rhythm concerning the sex differences in chronotype.     

Automatic actions: Agency,intentionality, and responsibility

This article discusses a challenge to the traditional intentional-causalist conceptions of action and intentionality as well as to our everyday and legal conceptions of responsibility, namely the psychological discovery that the greatest part of our alleged actions are performed automatically, that is unconsciously and without a proximal intention causing and sustaining them. The main part of the article scrutinizes several mechanisms of automatic behavior, how they work, and whether the resulting behavior is an action. These mechanisms include actions caused by distal implementation intentions, four types of habit and habitualization, mimicry, and semantically induced automatic behavior (which is later disregarded because of its lack of clarity). According to the intentional-causalist criterion, the automatic behaviors resulting from all but one of these mechanisms turn out to be actions and to be intentional; and even the behavior resulting from the remaining mechanism (naturally acquired habits) is something we can be responsible for. Hence, the challenge, seen from close up, does not really call the traditional conception of action and intentionality into question.     

Arguments for adjuncts

It is commonly assumed across the language sciences that some semantic participant information is lexically encoded in the representation of verbs and some is not. In this paper, we propose that semantic obligatoriness and verb class specificity are criteria which influence whether semantic information is lexically encoded. We present a comprehensive survey of the English verbal lexicon, a sentence continuation study, and an on-line sentence processing study which confirm that both factors play a role in the lexical encoding of participant information.     

Individuals differ in the attentional blink: Mental speed and intra-subject stability matter

The failure to correctly report two targets (“T₁”, “T₂”) that follow each other in close temporal proximity has been called the “attentional blink” (AB). The AB has, so far, mainly been studied using experimental approaches. The present studies investigated individual differences in AB performance, revealing (among further findings) a high positive correlation between the accuracies of detecting the two targets correctly (r = 0.69); and between T₂∣T₁ accuracy and psychometric intelligence (0.41 ≤ r ≤ 0.43) and RT variability in short-term and working memory (− 0.38 ≤ r ≤ − 0.45). Together, these results support important aspects of major theoretical accounts of the AB from an individual differences perspective and introduce intelligence and intra-subject stability as contributing factors in AB performance.     

Predicting premature termination within a randomized controlled trial for binge-eating patients

Understanding the dropout rates of efficacious forms of psychotherapy for patients with binge eating disorder (BED) is an unsolved problem within this increasing population. Up until now the role of psychotherapy process characteristics as predictors of premature termination has not been investigated in the BED literature. Within a randomized controlled trial (N=78) we investigated the degree to which early psychological process characteristics, such as components of the therapeutic relationship and the experiences of mastery and motivational clarification, predicted premature termination of treatment. We statistically controlled for the influences of covariates such as rapid response of treatment, treatment group, body mass index, Axis II disorder, and patients' preexisting generalized self-efficacy at baseline. Patients' postsession reports from Sessions 1 to 5 indicated that low self-esteem in-session experiences was a stable predictor of premature termination. Its predictive value persisted after controlling for the above-mentioned covariates. Exploratory analyses further revealed low self-esteem experiences, low global alliance, and low mastery and clarification experiences as predictors in those patients who explicitly specified discontentment with therapy as reason for premature termination. These results indicate that patients' self-esteem experiences may not be an epiphenomenon of their specific psychopathology but may represent general mechanisms on which remaining or withdrawing from psychotherapeutic treatment depends. Early psychotherapy process characteristics should therefore be considered in training and evaluation of psychotherapists carrying through BED treatments.     

Age and gender differences in morningness-eveningness during adolescence

Morningness-eveningness was assessed in a large sample of adolescents and young adults. Morningness decreased from 12 to 15 years, and then remained on a stable level until about 20 years, when a turn back to morningness occurred. Boys and men were on average more evening-oriented than were girls and women. In detail, significant differences existed at the ages of 16, 18, and 19 years. A quadratic function explained more variance than a linear regression. Composite Scale of Morningness scores are related to puberty scores in boys and girls, and when combining data (i.e., higher pubertal development was related to eveningness).     

Influence of delayed muscle reflexes on spinal stability: Model-based predictions allow alternative interpretations of experimental data

Model-based calculations indicate that reflex delay and reflex gain are both important for spinal stability. Experimental results demonstrate that chronic low back pain is associated with delayed muscle reflex responses of trunk muscles. The aim of the present study was to analyze the influence of such time-delayed reflexes on the stability using a simple biomechanical model. Additionally, we compared the model-based predictions with experimental data from chronic low back pain patients and healthy controls using surface-electromyography. Linear stability methods were applied to the musculoskeletal model, which was extended with a time-delayed reflex model. Lateral external perturbations were simulated around equilibrium to investigate the effects of reflex delay and gain on the stability of the human lumbar spine. The model simulations predicted that increased reflex delays require a reduction of the reflex gain to avoid spinal instability. The experimental data support this dependence for the investigated abdominal muscles in chronic low back pain patients and healthy control subjects. Reflex time-delay and gain dependence showed that a delayed reflex latency could have relevant influence on spinal stability, if subjects do not adapt their reflex amplitudes. Based on the model and the experimental results, the relationship between muscle reflex response latency and the maximum of the reflex amplitude should be considered for evaluation of (patho) physiological data. We recommend that training procedures should focus on speeding up the delayed reflex response as well as on increasing the amplitude of these reflexes.     

Visual orienting in dynamic broadband (1/f) noise sequences

Visual orienting has typically been characterized using simple displays—for example, displays with a static target placed on a homogeneous background. In the present study, visual orienting was investigated using a dynamic broadband (1/f) noise display that should mimic a more naturalistic setting and that should allow saccadic orienting experiments to be performed with fewer constraints. In Experiment 1, it was shown that the noise movie contains gaze-attracting features that are almost as distinct as the ones measured for (static) real-word scenes. The movie can therefore serve as a strong distractor. In Experiment 2, observers carried out a luminance target search that showed that saccadic amplitude errors were substantially higher (18%) than the ones measured in simple displays. That error is certainly one of the primary factors making gaze-fixation prediction in complex scenes difficult. Supplemental figures for this study may be downloaded from http://app.psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental.