Divided attention enhances the recognition of emotional stimuli: evidence from the attentional boost effect

The present study examined predictions of the early-phase-elevated-attention hypothesis of the attentional boost effect (ABE), which suggests that transient increases in attention at encoding, as instantiated in the ABE paradigm, should enhance the recognition of neutral and positive items (whose encoding is mostly based on controlled processes), while having small or null effects on the recognition of negative items (whose encoding is primarily based on automatic processes). Participants were presented a sequence of negative, neutral and positive stimuli (pictures in Experiment 1, words in Experiment 2) associated to target (red) squares, distractor (green) squares or no squares (baseline condition). They were told to attend to the pictures/words and simultaneously press the spacebar of the computer when a red square appeared. In a later recognition task, stimuli associated to target squares were recognised better than stimuli associated to distractor squares, replicating the standard ABE. More importantly, we also found that: (a) the memory enhancement following target detection occurred with all types of stimuli (neutral, negative and positive) and (b) the advantage of negative stimuli over neutral stimuli was intact in the DA condition. These findings suggest that the encoding of negative stimuli depends on both controlled (attention-dependent) and automatic (attention-independent) processes.     

The Epistemic Value of Emotions in Politics

In this paper, I consider emotional reactions in response to political facts, and I investigate how they may provide relevant knowledge about those facts. I assess the value of such knowledge, both from an epistemic and a political perspective. Concerning the epistemic part, I argue that, although emotions are not in themselves sufficient to ground evaluative knowledge about political facts, they can do so within a network of further coherent epistemic attitudes about those facts. With regards to the political part, I argue that the contribution of emotions to evaluative knowledge about political facts, is indeed politically valuable. To develop my argument, I show first that an evaluative kind of knowledge is relevant for reaching a sophisticated level of political cognition, and second that emotions contribute distinctively to this kind of knowledge. I conclude that, when emotional experiences towards political events are coupled with an adequate factual knowledge about those events, they can ground a distinctive evaluative knowledge about those events, and such knowledge is relevant both from an epistemic and a political perspective.     

Familicide: The killing of spouse and children

A familicide is a multiple-victim homicide incident in which the killer's spouse and one or more children are slain. National archives of Canadian and British homicides, containing 109 familicide incidents, permit some elucidation of the characteristic and epidemiology of this crime. Familicides were almost exclusively perpetrated by men, unlike other spouse-killings and other filicides. Half the familicidal men killed themselves as well, a much higher rate of suicide than among other uxoricidal or filicidal men. De facto unions were overrepresented, compared to their prevalence in the populations-at-large, but to a much lesser extent in familicides than in other uxoricides. Stepchildren were overrepresented as familicide victims, compared to their numbers in the populations-at-large, but to a much lesser extent than in other filicides; unlike killers of their genetic offspring, men who killed their stepchildren were rarely suicidal. An initial binary categorization of familicides as accusatory versus despondent is tentatively proposed. © 1995 Wiley-Liss, Inc.     

Effect of naloxone pretreatment on habituation in the crab Chasmagnathus granulatus

On sudden presentation of a passing shadow, the crab Chasmagnathus granulatus reacts with an escape response that habituates after repeating the same stimulus. In a first series of experiments, a range of naloxone (NX) doses (0.8, 2.4, 3.2, and 6.2 micrograms/g) was injected into crabs 15 min before one 15-trial habituation session. An enhancing effect of 3.2 micrograms NX/g on responsiveness appeared over trials, that cannot be explained either by a ceiling effect or by a delay in peak drug action. Two doses below 3.2 microgram/g and one dose above had no significant effect. Results from a second series of experiments showed that the 3.2 microgram NX/g effect vanishes after 15 trials (1 h after injection). The hypothesis that crab's habituation involves the action of an endogenous opioid mechanism is put forward to account for the naloxone pretreatment effect.     

Perceptions of counsellor effectiveness: A study of two country groups

The perceptions of United States' (US) and Singaporean college students on directive and nondirective counselling approaches were examined. A total of 103 Singaporean students, studying in Canada and the US, and 108 US students participated in the study. Simulated counselling interviews of the two approaches were presented to students through videotapes. After watching the counselling sessions, students rated the counsellor with the Counsellor Effectiveness Rating Scale; they also were asked to write comments about the counselling session. A multivariate analysis yielded a two-way interaction effect by country of origin. Counsellor expertise was rated significantly higher by Singaporean students observing the nondirective style, while US students rated the directive style higher. Qualitative responses from students were also examined. Implications are discussed.     

Ranking judgments in Arrow’s setting

In this paper, I investigate the relationship between preference and judgment aggregation, using the notion of ranking judgment introduced in List and Pettit (Synthese 140(1–2):207–235, 2004). Ranking judgments were introduced in order to state the logical connections between the impossibility theorem of aggregating sets of judgments proved in List and Pettit (Economics and Philosophy 18:89–110, 2002) and Arrow’s theorem (Arrow, Social choice and individual values, 1963). I present a proof of the theorem concerning ranking judgments as a corollary of Arrow’s theorem, extending the translation between preferences and judgments defined in List and Pettit (Synthese 140(1–2):207–235, 2004) to the conditions on the aggregation procedure.     

TRoPICALS: a computational embodied neuroscience model of compatibility effects

Perceiving objects activates the representation of their affordances. For example, experiments on compatibility effects showed that categorizing objects by producing certain handgrips (power or precision) is faster if the requested responses are compatible with the affordance elicited by the size of objects (e.g., small or large). The article presents a neural-network architecture that provides a general framework to account for compatibility effects. The model was designed with a methodological approach (computational embodied neuroscience) that aims to provide increasingly general accounts of brain and behavior (4 sources of constraints are used: neuroscientific data, behavioral data, embodied systems, reproduction of learning processes). The model is based on 4 principles of brain organization that we claim underlie most compatibility effects. First, visual perception and action are organized in the brain along a dorsal neural pathway encoding affordances and a ventral pathway encoding goals. Second, the prefrontal cortex within the ventral pathway gives a top-down bias to action selection by integrating information on stimuli, context, and goals. Third, reaction times depend on dynamic neural competitions for action selection that integrate bottom-up and top-down information. The congruence or incongruence between affordances and goals explains the different reaction times found in the experiments. Fourth, as words trigger internal simulations of their referents, they can cause compatibility effects as objects do. We validated the model by reproducing and explaining 3 types of compatibility effects and showed its heuristic power by producing 2 testable predictions. We also assessed the explicative power of the model by comparing it with related models and showed how it can be extended to account for other compatibility effects.