The Effect of Smiling and of Head Tilting on Person Perception

A survey on alcohol and drug use was completed by 1,291 college students. As predicted from research on self-schemas, greater self-efficacy was associated with lower substance use among respondents who indicated having been treated for substance abuse but not among those who had not received treatment. Also, those who reported receiving treatment were more likely than the others to report having attended campus programs on substance abuse. These findings suggest that substance use and its control are important aspects of the self-definition of those who receive treatment for substance abuse.     

The Glasgow Voice Memory Test: Assessing the ability to memorize and recognize unfamiliar voices

One thousand one hundred and twenty subjects as well as a developmental phonagnosic subject (KH) along with age-matched controls performed the Glasgow Voice Memory Test, which assesses the ability to encode and immediately recognize, through an old/new judgment, both unfamiliar voices (delivered as vowels, making language requirements minimal) and bell sounds. The inclusion of non-vocal stimuli allows the detection of significant dissociations between the two categories (vocal vs. non-vocal stimuli). The distributions of accuracy and sensitivity scores (d’) reflected a wide range of individual differences in voice recognition performance in the population. As expected, KH showed a dissociation between the recognition of voices and bell sounds, her performance being significantly poorer than matched controls for voices but not for bells. By providing normative data of a large sample and by testing a developmental phonagnosic subject, we demonstrated that the Glasgow Voice Memory Test, available online and accessible from all over the world, can be a valid screening tool (~5 min) for a preliminary detection of potential cases of phonagnosia and of “super recognizers” for voices.     

Individuality in coo calls of adult male golden snub-nosed monkeys (Rhinopithecus roxellana) living in a multilevel society

Animal Cognition - Vocal individuality is a prerequisite for individual recognition, especially when visual and chemical cues are not available or effective. Vocalizations encoding information of...     

Is the learning of goal-directed displacement effector-independent?

The present experiment was designed to investigate whether the learning of goal-directed locomotion is effector independent. To answer this question a bilateral transfer of learning paradigm was used. We wanted to find out whether learning can be transferred from a trained effector system to an untrained one. Sixteen participants were asked to proceed through virtual hallways, while walking on a treadmill or handling of a joystick, in order to cross a pair of oscillating doors. Participants received 1050 training trials on the specific effector system before being transferred to the untrained one. Results indicated a clear transfer from handling to walking and only a moderate transfer from walking to handling. This asymmetrical transfer provides partial support in favor of the effector independent hypothesis. Both the theoretical implications of this work and the possible mediating effect of calibration are discussed.     

High levels of contextual interference enhance handwriting skill acquisition

The authors conducted 3 experiments to examine whether introducing high levels of contextual interference is useful in handwriting skill acquisition. For all experiments, elementary school students (Ns = 44, 50, and 78, respectively) were randomly assigned to 1 of 2 practice schedules-blocked or random practice-in the acquisition phase. In the blocked condition, each of 3 letters (h, a, and y) or (in Experiment 1) symbols was handwritten 24 times consecutively. In the random condition, each letter (or symbol) was practiced 24 times, but in an intermixed, unsystematic sequence. Overall, the results showed that the random practice schedule leads to enhanced retention and transfer performance of handwriting skill acquisition.     

Two Forms of Catholic Apocalyptic Theology

While the emergence and development of apocalyptic forms of theology in Catholicism have been inhibited by particular theological styles as well as the powerful presence of the institutional church, it is the case that from the second half of the twentieth century on Catholicism has seen a number of forms of apocalyptic theology being well received. The two most influential forms have been provided by Johann Baptist Metz and Hans Urs von Balthasar. In this article I bring these two very different forms of apocalyptic into critical conversation with a view to coming to some provisional judgement regarding relative theological adequacy. The crucial issue is whether in the apocalyptic figurations of Metz and Balthasar the church is faithfully represented or undercut. I determine that Balthasar elaborates an apocalyptic form of theology in which the institutional church represents Christ and that Metz fundamentally undercuts the church. Still, the judgement of ‘Catholic’ adequacy or inadequacy is not solely based on the articulation of different views of the church largely because in neither case is the view of the church absolutely free standing. Not only is the conception of the church connected with other conceptions, for example, a view of God, Christ, community and person, but it is also influenced by how one interprets the Bible, understands tradition and engages philosophy. If apocalyptic and the church connect (Balthasar) or fail to connect (Metz), this will be in part due to very different decisions regarding these three features.