Demand characteristics of music affect performance on the Wonderlic Personnel Test Of Intelligence

This study examined whether demand characteristics concerning music can change subjects' performance on the Wonderlic Personnel Test of intelligence. Participants (N= 60) were randomly assigned and informed either that Mozart's music typically enhances cognitive performance or diminishes it. They then completed the Wonderlic Personnel Test while listening to a Mozart piano sonata. The subjects with a positive set answered significantly more items correctly on the test (14%) than those with a negative set (p = .03). This result may hold implications for the study of the 'Mozart effect'.     

Moral judgment and conduct disorder intensity in adolescents involved in delinquency: matching controls by school grade

Most studies that have found associations between delinquency and moral judgment generally compare incarcerated juveniles with adolescents in normal schooling. However, this comparison is subject to two criticisms. First, a large number of adolescents in school who are not charged with any crime in the legal system are still involved in unlawful behaviour. Second, adolescents involved with delinquency often have difficulties at school. The aim of the present study was to measure this association by matching a sample of adolescents involved with delinquency (n=18, M age=15.8, SD=1.1) to adolescents not involved in delinquency (n=42, M age=15.8, SD=0.8) according to their school grade and Conduct Disorder Intensity as measured by a self-report index using DSM-IV diagnostic criteria. Participants who met four or more criteria were assigned to the High Conduct Disorder group (n=28), and the rest were assigned to the Low Conduct Disorder group (n=32). Their level of moral judgment was evaluated with the French version of the Sociomoral Reflection Measure-Short Form by Gibbs, Basinger, and Fuller, inspired by Kohlberg's model of moral development. Findings demonstrate that in both samples, adolescents in the High Conduct Disorder group presented moral judgment that was significantly less mature than that of adolescents in the Low Conduct Disorder group. However, the majority of participants in the Low Conduct Disorder group also scored low on the Sociomoral Reflection Measure-Short Form, suggesting more immature moral judgment. The bias introduced by the mode of recruitment in most comparisons of adolescents involved with delinquency to adolescents with no delinquency problems is discussed, and an argument is made for the importance of analysing moral judgment development within a framework of general cognitive development.     

Duration of mentally simulated movement: a review

The authors review studies of mentally simulated movements. In automatic or cyclical movements, actual and motor imagery (MI) durations are similar. When athletes simulate only dynamic phases of movement or perform MI just before competing, however, environmental and time constraints lead to an underestimation of actual duration. Conversely, complex attention-demanding movements take longer to image. Finally, participants can modify the speed of MI voluntarily when they receive specific instructions. To complete the available data, the authors compared imagined and actual durations in tennis and gymnastics. Results showed systematic and disproportionate overestimation of actual duration. The authors found a relationship between complex motor skills and MI duration. They discuss the factors leading to over- and underestimation and the hypotheses that could be tested.     

Transfer of learning across durations and ears in auditory frequency discrimination

Frequency-discrimination thresholds (FDTs) for 1-kHz tone pips with durations of 40, 100, and 200 msec were measured in the left and right ears of 10 normal-hearing listeners, before and after six 2-h frequency-discrimination training sessions involving, exclusively, the 200-msec duration and the right ear. In the trained ear, highly significant improvements in FDTs were observed at all durations. Further inspection of the data suggested complete generalization between 200 and 100 msec, but not at 40 msec. Posttraining FDTs were not found to differ between the two ears for the two untrained durations, but proved significantly smaller in the right (trained) than in the left (untrained) ear at the trained (200-msec) duration only. A control experiment involving 10 additional subjects allowed us to establish the absence of intrinsic differences in pretraining FDTs between the right and left ears. Overall, these findings indicate that frequency-discrimination learning generalizes widely across stimulus durations and across ears, but that part of the improvement is specific to the range of durations and to the ear used in training.     

Relative Effectiveness of Values Clarification and Symbolic Modeling in Enhancing the Moral Values of Adolescents in Selected Nigerian Schools

Using quasi-experiment, this study explored the effects of values clarification and symbolic modeling on moral intent to act in a sample of 120 high school students from Ogun State, Nigeria. Despite widespread disapproval and outright condemnation by the public, moral offences by the adolescent population have become increasingly frequent and grave in both the urban and rural areas of Nigeria. Believing that programs set by the government could impact the level of moral behavior among the youths of Nigeria, various leaders in Nigeria have attempted to make a difference in the moral life of the nation, such as “Ethical Revolution” by President Shehu Shagari in 1982; “War Against Indiscipline” by General Mohammed Buhari in 1985. In this study, both values clarification and symbolic modeling options demonstrated significant impacts on moral behavior as measured by the Moral Behavioral Inventory (MBI) and the Adolescent Personal Development Inventory (APDI).     

Double foot‐in‐the‐door,social representations,and environment: application for energy savings

This study aims to determine the most effective procedure to bring individuals to adopt pro‐environmental behaviors, specifically to make energy savings for several weeks. A link was established between two fields of research traditionally separated in social psychology literature: free will compliance and social representations theories. An experiment was carried out to test the effectiveness of several simple and double foot‐in‐the‐door procedures, activating central or peripheral cognitions of the social representation of energy savings. Basically, the results indicate that the most effective procedure is the double foot‐in‐the‐door, which activates central cognitions. Twice as many participants accepted the target request and three times as many actually performed the expected behavior with this procedure.     

Therapeutic Assessment of a Violent Criminal Offender: Managing the Cultural Narrative of Evil

Therapeutic Assessment (TA) emphasizes the importance of the clinical relationship and the core values of collaboration, respect, humility, compassion, and curiosity, which guide all aspects of the endeavor (Finn, 2007 Finn, S. E. (2007). In our clients' shoes: Theory and techniques of Therapeutic Assessment. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. [Google Scholar]). Those values are not easy to apply with violent offenders. However, this article explains how TA can significantly contribute to the treatment of those clients by helping the therapist avoid common cultural narratives about evil. We see that these culturally based myths permit us to explain violent behaviors, but also prevent us from treating them because they lead us to a circular countertransference–transference process. Through a clinical case, I show how the TA process can help us to work empathically with violent people while addressing the dangerousness effectively.     

How does motor imagery speed affect motor performance times? Evaluating the effects of task specificity

The present experiment investigated whether motor imagery (MI) performed at a faster speed might influence the actual motor performance duration by comparing real‐time vs. fast MI of different finger movement sequences. Forty‐eight participants were either asked to do real‐time or fast MI practice of simple 8‐digit (unimanual), complex 8‐digit (bimanual), and long (16‐digit) finger movement sequences. The main findings revealed that both fast and real‐time MI resulted in actual speed gains in all experimental conditions, hence suggesting that performing fast MI did not systematically provide additional benefits as compared to real‐time MI. Interestingly, the results suggested that the speed at which movements were performed following an increase in MI speed was selectively influenced by the complexity of the task. MI training at higher speed seemed to be more effective in changing complex motor sequences compared with real‐time MI. Practical implications in motor learning and rehabilitation are also discussed. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Emotional enhancement of immediate memory: Positive pictorial stimuli are better recognized than neutral or negative pictorial stimuli

We examined emotional memory enhancement (EEM) for negative and positive pictures while manipulating encoding and retrieval conditions. Two groups of 40 participants took part in this study. Both groups performed immediate implicit (categorization task) and explicit (recognition task) retrieval, but for one group the tasks were preceded by incidental encoding and for the other group by intentional encoding. As indicated by the sensitivity index (d'), after incidental encoding positive stimuli were easier to recognize than negative and neutral stimuli. Participants' response criterion was more liberal for negative stimuli than for both positive and neutral ones, independent of encoding condition. In the implicit retrieval task, participants were slower in categorizing positive than negative and neutral stimuli. However, the priming effect was larger for emotional than for neutral stimuli. These results are discussed in the context of the idea that the effect of emotion on immediate memory enhancement may depend on the intentionality to encode and retrieve information.