A nation challenged: the impact of foreign threat on America's tolerance for diversity

Three experiments investigated how perceived foreign threats to the United States can influence Americans' endorsement of assimilation and multiculturalism as models for foreign and domestic intergroup relations. The initial study, conducted during the 6-month anniversary of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks (9/11), discovered that a diverse group of Americans preferred assimilation as a foreign policy and multiculturalism as a domestic policy. After reading that foreigners were supporting the dominant global status of the United States, however, Americans in Experiment 2 no longer expressed this preference for assimilation as a model for foreign intergroup relations. Experiment 3 discovered that Americans primed with 9/11 (i.e., a foreign threat) revealed higher levels of national identity than did those primed with the Columbine massacre (i.e., a domestic threat); moreover, level of national identity predicted support for multiculturalism as a domestic policy and assimilation as a foreign policy.     

What wealth-happiness paradox? A short note on the American case

Happiness scholars have tried to resolve the seeming paradox that as Americans’ wealth increased substantially over the last few decades, their happiness did not. This article questions whether the paradox is real. Demonstrations of the paradox almost always rely on GDP per capita as the measure of wealth, but that is a poor measure of a people’s well-being. It is heavily and increasingly skewed; it does not account for effort. Using instead measures of household income, male income, and average wages eliminates the paradox; these indicators of affluence have grown only slowly or declined in the same period, paralleling the changes in happiness scores. Moreover, using these indicators reveals a modest but real correlation between material well-being and national happiness.     

It all sounds the same to me: Sequential ERP and behavioral effects during pitch and harmonicity judgments

The representation of complex sounds was examined by comparing both behavioral and event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to the change or repetition of fundamental frequency (f0) and harmonicity. In the pitch task, participants were asked to categorize the incoming stimulus as either low or high, regardless of harmonicity, and in the harmonicity task, participants indicated whether the stimulus was tuned or mistuned, regardless of pitch. Over three experiments, participants were faster in responding to pitch than to harmonicity. As a result of this asymmetry, behavioral and ERP data showed that irrelevant changes in harmonicity had little impact on performance during the pitch task, whereas harmonicity judgments were impeded by irrelevant changes in f0. These data are consistent with both general horse-race accounts of processing and specific accounts of mistuning detection that posit prior f0 registration. In addition, ERP components N2 and P3 were modulated by both intertrial contingency and task instructions, revealing the further influence of top-down mechanisms on concurrent sound segregation.     

Assessment of sensory substitution prosthesis potentialities in minimalist conditions of learning

Pattern recognition with a prosthesis substituting vision by audition was investigated. During 15 1‐hour sessions, nine blindfolded sighted subjects were trained to recognise 2D patterns by trial and error. In addition to a global assessment, recognition of pattern element nature (vertical bars, horizontal bars…), element size and element spatial arrangement were independently assessed for each pattern. Influence of experimental parameters (complexity level of patterns, exploration number of a pattern) on recognition was studied. Performances improved over sessions. As a rule, patterns element nature was less well recognised than element size and spatial arrangement. Experimental parameters influenced pattern recognition performance. Results are discussed in relation with auditory and visual perception as well as in the perspective to implement a learning protocol for future users of prosthesis. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Testing for the presence of 1/f noise in continuation tapping data.

A number of recent papers have suggested that the series of time intervals produced in continuation tapping may have fractal properties. This proposition, nevertheless, was only based on the visual appraisal of graphical results, and was not statistically supported. In the present study, we applied the ARMA/ARFIMA modeling procedures proposed by Wagenmakers, Farrell, and Ratcliff (2005) to test for the presence of long-range dependencies in continuation tapping data. Our results demonstrate the presence of long-range dependencies in most series and offer strong support for the hypothesis that fluctuations in tapping series are fractal in nature.