Transfer of value from fit

People experience regulatory fit when they pursue a goal in a manner that sustains their regulatory orientation (E. T. Higgins, 2000). Five studies tested whether the value experienced from regulatory fit can transfer to a subsequent evaluation of an object. In Studies 1 and 2, participants gave the same coffee mug a higher price if they had chosen it with a strategy that fit their orientation (eager strategy/promotion; vigilant strategy/prevention) than a strategy that did not fit. Studies 3-5 investigated possible mechanisms underlying this effect. Value transfer was independent of positive mood, perceived effectiveness (instrumentality), and perceived efficiency (ease), and occurred for an object that w as independent of the fit process itself. The findings supported a value confusion account of transfer.     

What predicts adjustment among law students? A longitudinal panel study

Although at the time of this article's publication, many anecdotes and cross-sectional studies had reported that law students experience significant distress during their 1st year, few researchers had controlled for prelaw school status (e.g., M. Garrison, B. Tomko, & I. Yip, 1996; L. Guinier, M. Fine, J. Balin, A. Bartow, & D. L. Stachel, 1994), and only a single group of researchers had explored a psychosocial factor that predicted these changes. The present authors tested 3 sets of potential predictors of adjustment: sources of stress, coping strategies, and relationship factors. The present data replicated declines in students' psychological health, physical health, and attitudes toward law over the 1st year of school. That result supports the generalizability and currency of previous studies. In contrast to other researchers, the present authors found few gender differences. Less relationship happiness, less emotional support, and use of less active coping tactics at the beginning of the year predicted poorer outcomes at the end of the year. Strain from academic pressures, lack of personal time, and social isolation were correlated with poorer outcomes.     

Driven by information: a tectonic theory of Stroop effects

The goal of avoiding distraction (e.g., ignoring words when naming their print colors in a Stroop task) is opposed intrinsically by the penchant to process conspicuous and correlated characteristics of the environment (e.g., noticing trial-to-trial associations between the colors and the words). To reconcile these opposing forces, the authors propose a tectonic theory of selective attention in which 2 memory-based structures--dimensional imbalance and dimensional uncertainty--drive selection by processing salient, surprising, and/or correlated information contained within and across stimulus dimensions. Each structure modulates the buildup of excitation to targets and the buildup of inhibition to distractors and to memories of previous stimuli. Tectonic theory is implemented to simulate the impact of 4 types of context on the presence, magnitude, and direction of congruity effects and task effects in the Stroop paradigm. The tectonic model is shown to surpass other formal models in explaining the range and diversity of Sroop effects.     

Conceptualizing and assessing heterosexism in high schools: a setting-level approach

Heterosexism is defined as a setting-level process that systematically privileges heterosexuality relative to homosexuality, based on the assumption that heterosexuality, as well as heterosexual power and privilege are the norm and the ideal. The many ways heterosexism is manifest in the physical–architectural, program–policy, suprapersonal, and social features of high schools are described followed by a proposal for a comprehensive assessment strategy. Strategies used in previous research are reviewed in terms of what is assessed, how it is assessed, and how it is analyzed. The author advocates for more comprehensive assessments and for school-level analyses to enable comparisons between schools, facilitate research on the effects of heterosexism, and provide a basis for evaluating interventions. Additional issues include reliability and validity, links between heterosexism and other forms of oppression, heterosexism in other contexts or at other levels, and implications for theory and practice in community psychology.     

Advancing our understanding of intergenerational continuity in antisocial behavior

This commentary reviews the major findings of this set of 4 papers on intergenerational continuity in antisocial behavior; it identifies strengths and remaining challenges, and discusses potential policy implications of the research. As a group, these researchers have raised the methodological bar for future work in this area, using prospective designs with multiple informants and methods to test the influences of G2 parenting and adolescent antisocial behavior in mediating continuity between G1 parenting and G3 early disruptive behavior. The pattern of findings is discussed with respect to gender of G2 and social context. The inherent challenges of conducting intergenerational research are also highlighted, within the context of offering recommendations for improving future intergenerational investigations and their feasibility.     

In the privacy of their own homes: using the internet to assess racial bias

Recent studies suggest that research participants show reduced distortion of their taboo attitudes and behaviors when they take part in Internet-based procedures from outside the laboratory. We explored whether such procedures would reduce distortion in the assessment of racial bias. In Study 1, White participants who completed the study in the laboratory evaluated Black targets more favorably than White targets. This unexpected "outgroup-favoring" pattern occurred in both pencil-and-paper and Internet versions of the study, showing that modality did not produce it; but when participants worked outside the laboratory via the Internet, this pattern disappeared. Study 2 replicated the above findings and further indicated that the reduced distortion in Internet-based studies was due to the removal of the experimenter rather than removing the participants from the laboratory environment. The implications of these findings for the study of controlled processes of prejudice and the nature of Internet-based social communication are discussed.     

"... As you would have them do unto you": Does imagining yourself in the other's place stimulate moral action?

Philosophers, psychologists, and religious teachers have suggested that imagining yourself in another's place will stimulate moral action. The authors tested this idea in two different situations. In Experiment 1, participants had the opportunity to assign themselves and another research participant to tasks, with one task clearly more desirable than the other. Imagining oneself in the other's place did little to increase the morality (fairness) of the decision. A different form of perspective taking, imagining the other's feelings, increased direct assignment of the other to the desirable task, apparently due to increased empathy. In Experiment 2, participants confronted a different decision: either accept an initial task assignment that would give them highly positive consequences and the other participant nothing or change the assignment so they and the other would each receive moderately positive consequences. In this situation, imagining oneself in the other's place did significantly increase moral action.     

Location, location, location: the misprediction of satisfaction in housing lotteries

People tend to overestimate the emotional consequences of future life events, exhibiting an impact bias. The authors replicated the impact bias in a real-life context in which undergraduates were randomly assigned to dormitories (or "houses"). Participants appeared to focus on the wrong factors when imagining their future happiness in the houses. They placed far greater weight on highly variable physical features than on less variable social features in predicting their future happiness in each house, despite accurately recognizing that social features were more important than physical features when asked explicitly about the determinants of happiness. In Experiment 2, we found that this discrepancy emerged in part because participants exhibited an isolation effect, focusing too much on factors that distinguished between houses and not enough on factors that varied only slightly, such as social features.     

Dissociable neural systems for recognizing emotions

This study tested the hypothesis that the recognition of emotions would draw upon anatomically separable brain regions, depending on whether the stimuli were static or explicitly conveyed information regarding actions. We investigated the hypothesis in a rare subject with extensive bilateral brain lesions, patient B., by administering tasks that assessed recognition and naming of emotions from visual and verbal stimuli, some of which depicted actions and some of which did not. B. could not recognize any primary emotion other than happiness, when emotions were shown as static images or given as single verbal labels. By contrast, with the notable exception of disgust, he correctly recognized primary emotions from dynamic displays of facial expressions as well as from stories that described actions. Our findings are consistent with the idea that information about actions is processed in occipitoparietal and dorsal frontal cortices, all of which are intact in B.'s brain. Such information subsequently would be linked to knowledge about emotions that depends on structures mapping somatic states, many of which are also intact in B.'s brain. However, one of these somatosensory structures, the insula, is bilaterally damaged, perhaps accounting for B.'s uniformly impaired recognition of disgust (from both static and action stimuli). Other structures that are damaged in B.'s brain, including bilateral inferior and anterior temporal lobe and medial frontal cortices, appear to be critical for linking perception of static stimuli to recognition of emotions. Thus the retrieval of knowledge regarding emotions draws upon widely distributed and partly distinct sets of neural structures, depending on the attributes of the stimulus.     

Developmental prosopagnosia: a study of three patients

We studied perception in three patients with prosopagnosia of childhood onset. All had trouble with other 'within-category' judgments. All were deficient on face matching tests and severely impaired on tests of perception of the spatial relations of facial features and abstract designs, indicating a deficit in the encoding of coordinate relationships, similar to adult-onset prosopagnosia with lesions of the fusiform face area. Two had difficulty perceiving feature colour, which correlated with reduced luminance sensitivity. In contrast to adult-onset patients, saturation discrimination was spared in two and spatial resolution impaired in two. Curvature discrimination was relatively spared. Contrast sensitivity showed variable reductions at different spatial frequencies. We conclude that developmental prosopagnosia is similar to the adult-onset form in encoding deficits for the spatial arrangement of facial elements. Deficits in luminance perception and spatial resolution are more associated with defective encoding for basic object-level recognition, as shown on tests of object and spatial perception.