Individuals lower in working memory capacity are particularly vulnerable to anxiety's disruptive effect on performance

Anxiety has a disruptive effect on performance in a number of domains. The purpose of this study was to determine whether individual differences in working memory (WM) capacity are related to an individual's susceptibility to anxiety's detrimental effect on performance. Fifty undergraduate students (28 females) were administered the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI) (Spielberger, Gorsuch, Lushene, Vagg, & Jacobs, 1983) to measure trait anxiety and the automated operation span task to measure WM capacity (Unsworth, Heitz, Schrock, & Engle, 2005). Then, they performed a highly demanding dual-task that consisted of a primary short-term memory task and a secondary tone-discrimination task that served as a measure of spare capacity. Anxiety and WM capacity interacted to affect performance on the auditory task so that those low in WM capacity were particularly vulnerable to anxiety's disruptive effect, whereas those high in WM capacity were buffered against anxiety's effect. These findings suggest that WM capacity may be an important factor in determining which individuals underperform on anxiety-provoking tests such as scholastic achievement tests.     

Friends’ Knowledge of Youth Internalizing and Externalizing Adjustment: Accuracy,Bias, and the Influences of Gender,Grade, Positive Friendship Quality,and Self-Disclosure

Some evidence suggests that close friends may be knowledgeable of youth’s psychological adjustment. However, friends are understudied as reporters of adjustment. The current study examines associations between self- and friend-reports of internalizing and externalizing adjustment in a community sample of fifth-, eighth-, and eleventh-grade youth. The study extends prior work by considering the degree to which friends’ reports of youth adjustment are accurate (i.e., predicted by youths’ actual adjustment) versus biased (i.e., predicted by the friend reporters’ own adjustment). Findings indicated stronger bias effects than accuracy effects, but the accuracy effects were significant for both internalizing and externalizing adjustment. Additionally, friends who perceived their relationships as high in positive quality, friends in relationships high in disclosure, and girls perceived youths’ internalizing symptoms most accurately. Knowledge of externalizing adjustment was not influenced by gender, grade, relationship quality, or self-disclosure. Findings suggest that friends could play an important role in prevention efforts.

Still Epiphenomenal Qualia: Response to Muller

Hans Muller has recently attempted to show that Frank Jackson cannot assert the existence of qualia without thereby falsifying himself on the matter of such mental states being epiphenomenal with respect to the physical world. I argue that Muller misunderstands the commitments of qualia epiphenomenalism and that, as a result, his arguments against Jackson do not go through.

The medium can influence the message: Print-based versus digital reading influences how people process different types of written information

While electronic reading devices are extremely popular, research is equivocal regarding their benefits for outcomes such as reader comprehension. Integrating literatures on reading medium comparisons and matching effects in persuasion, this research tested whether comprehension is maximized when the content of the material (e.g., whether it is traditional vs. modern) matches the medium (e.g., reading from a traditional book vs. digital e-reader). In Study 1, participants read a traditional- or modern-themed short story from either a book or an e-reader. Story comprehension was greater when participants read from the printed medium compared to the e-reader, an effect that was marginally moderated by story content, consistent with a matching effect. In Study 2, participants read a persuasive message that emphasized either a traditional versus modern solution to improving health in either a magazine format or on an iPad. Message comprehension was marginally greater among participants who read their message in a printed format. Participants’ interest in weight loss showed evidence of a matching effect – participants were more interested in losing weight when a modern solution to obesity article was presented on an iPad compared to a printed format. The results are applied to the study of reading and attitude change.     

Learning a foreign language: Effects of tact and listener instruction on the emergence of bidirectional intraverbals

We evaluated the effects of tact and listener instruction on the emergence of bidirectional intraverbal relations with 6 typically developing Brazilian children, using an adapted alternating treatment design with pretest and posttest probes. In listener instruction, participants selected pictures that corresponded to spoken foreign-language words. For tact instruction, children had to vocalize foreign words in the presence of the corresponding pictures. After meeting mastery criteria, bidirectional intraverbal tests assessed vocalizations in Portuguese (native language) following the presentation of the equivalent words in English (foreign language) and vice versa. Tact instruction consistently produced higher levels of emergent intraverbal responding compared to listener instruction, confirming results from previous studies.     

A strike against a striking principle

Several authors believe that there are certain facts that are striking and cry out for explanation—for instance, a coin that is tossed many times and lands in the alternating sequence HTHTHTHTHTHT… (H?=?heads, T?=?tails). According to this view, we have prima facie reason to believe that such facts are not the result of chance. I call this view the striking principle. Based on this principle, some have argued for far-reaching conclusions, such as that our universe was created by intelligent design, that there are many universes other than the one we inhabit, and that there are no mathematical or normative facts. Appealing as the view may initially seem, I argue that we lack sufficient reason to accept it.

     

Imprecise evidence without imprecise credences

Philosophical Studies - Does rationality require imprecise credences? Many hold that it does: imprecise evidence requires correspondingly imprecise credences. I argue that this is false. The...     

Minimal Disagreement

Philosophia - In the recent debate about the semantics of perspectival expressions (predicates of taste, aesthetic adjectives, moral terms, epistemic modals, epistemic terms etc.), disagreement has...     

A Forward Bias in Human Profile-Oriented Portraits

The spatial composition of human portraits obeys historically changing cultural norms. We show that it is also affected by cognitive factors that cause greater spontaneous attention to what is in front rather in the back of an agent. Scenes with more space in front of a directed object are both more often produced and judged as more aesthetically pleasant. This leads to the prediction that, in profile-oriented human portraits, compositions with more space in front of depicted agents (a “forward bias”) should be over-represented. By analyzing a large dataset (total N of 1,831 paintings by 582 unique identified European painters from the 15th to the 20th century), we found evidence of this forward bias: Painters tended to put more free space in front of, rather than behind, the sitters. Additionally, we found evidence that this forward bias became stronger when cultural norms of spatial composition favoring centering became less stringent.