Executive working memory load induces inattentional blindness

When attention is engaged in a task, unexpected events in the visual scene may go undetected, a phenomenon known as inattentional blindness (IB). At what stage of information processing must attention be engaged for IB to occur? Although manipulations that tax visuospatial attention can induce IB, the evidence is more equivocal for tasks that engage attention at late, central stages of information processing. Here, we tested whether IB can be specifically induced by central executive processes. An unexpected visual stimulus was presented during the retention interval of a working memory task that involved either simply maintaining verbal material or rearranging the material into alphabetical order. The unexpected stimulus was more likely to be missed during manipulation than during simple maintenance of the verbal information. Thus, the engagement of executive processes impairs the ability to detect unexpected, task-irrelevant stimuli, suggesting that IB can result from central, amodal stages of processing.     

WAR, WOMEN, AND POLITICAL WISDOM

One of the most perceptive and ambidextrous social commentators of our day, Augustinian scholar Jean Bethke Elshtain furnishes in ever fresh ways through her writings a bridge between the ancient and the modern, between politics and ethics, between timeless moral wisdom and cultural sensitivity. To read Elshtain seriously is to take the study of culture as well as the “permanent things” seriously. But Elshtain is no mere moralist. Neither is she content solely to dwell in the domain of the theoretical. For it is Elshtain the citizen—the creatively engaged and contributing citizen—whom the reader encounters on virtually every page of her writings. But reader beware: Elshtain does not shy away from controversy. At the same time, she is anything but a controversialist. In the essay that follows, several prominent themes that emerge from Elstain's writings—civic responsibility, justice, gender, and war—are considered afresh. Whether one agrees with her positions or not, one is forced to confess in the end that she cares deeply about the common good. And this alone makes her required reading for any engaged citizen of the republic.     

Forgiveness results from integrating information about relationship value and exploitation risk

Exploitation is a fact of life for social organisms, and natural selection gives rise to revenge mechanisms that are designed to deter such exploitations. However, humans may also possess cognitive forgiveness mechanisms designed to promote the restoration of valuable social relationships following exploitation. In the current article, the authors test the hypothesis that decisions about forgiveness result from a computational system that combines information about relationship value and exploitation risk to produce decisions about whom to forgive following interpersonal offenses. The authors examined the independent and interactive effects of relationship value and exploitation risk across two studies. In Study 1, controlling for other constructs related to forgiveness, the authors assessed relationship value and exploitation risk. In Study 2, participants experienced experimental manipulations of relationship value and exploitation risk. Across studies, using hypothetical and actual offenses and varied forgiveness measures, the combination of low exploitation risk and high relationship value predicted the greatest forgiveness.     

The cost of callousness: regulating compassion influences the moral self-concept

It has often been argued that compassion is fundamental to morality. Yet people often suppress compassion for self-interested reasons. We provide evidence that suppressing compassion is not cost free, as it creates dissonance between a person's moral identity and his or her moral principles. We instructed separate groups of participants to regulate their compassion, regulate their feelings of distress, or freely experience emotions toward compassion--inducing images. Participants then reported how central morality was to their identities and how much they believed that moral rules should always be followed. Participants who regulated compassion-but not those who regulated distress or experienced emotions--showed a dissonance-based trade-off. If they reported higher levels of moral identity, they had a greater belief that moral rules could be broken. If they maintained their belief that moral rules should always be followed, they sacrificed their moral identity. Regulating compassion thus has a cost of its own: It forces trade-offs within a person's moral self-concept.     

Alleviating Choking: The Sounds of Distraction

“Choking” is defined as a critical deterioration in the execution of habitual processes as a result of an elevation in anxiety levels under perceived pressure, leading to substandard performance. In the current study, music was used in a “dual-task” paradigm to facilitate performance under pressure. Three “choking-susceptible” experienced female basketball players were purposively sampled from 41 screened players. Participants completed 240 basketball free throws in a single-case A₁-B₁-A₂-B₂ design (A phases = “low-pressure” and B phases = “high-pressure”), with the music intervention occurring during the B₂ phase. Following completion of the phases, an interview was conducted to examine perceptions of choking and cognitions associated with the effects of the music lyrics. Participants improved performance in the B₂ phase, and explained that choking resulted from an increase in public self-awareness (S-A). The music intervention decreased S-A, and enabled participants to minimize explicit monitoring of execution and reduce general distractibility.     

Can Religion Promote Virtue?: A More Stringent Test of the Model of Relational Spirituality and Forgiveness

Rather than simply studying whether religious individuals are more forgiving than nonreligious individuals, recent research has focused on how religion may promote a more fluid and efficient forgiveness process. The present studies sought to strengthen evidence for a model of relational spirituality and forgiveness (Davis, Hook, & Worthington, 2008 Davis, D. E., Hook, J. N. and Worthington, E. 2008. Relational spirituality and forgiveness: The roles of attachment to God, religious coping, and viewing the transgression as a desecration. Journal of Psychology and Christianity, 27: 293–301.  [Google Scholar]), given the reliance of prior studies on cross-sectional designs that did not control for hurtfulness of the offense. In Study 1, spiritual appraisals predicted unforgiveness, controlling for hurtfulness and other covariates. Furthermore, using structural equation modeling, empathy was found to partially mediate the relationship between spiritual appraisals and unforgiveness. In Study 2, participants (N = 123) completed a survey weekly for 6 weeks that included measures of relational spirituality and forgiveness. Appraisals of relational spirituality predicted subsequent unforgiveness, as well as the rate of decline in unforgiveness. Thus, using a more stringent test, we found additional evidence for the model.     

Training attention: Interactions between central cues and reflexive attention

Three experiments are reported in which we investigate whether the recently reported interactions between central cues (e.g., arrows) and reflexive attention are attributable to the overlearned spatial properties of certain central cues. In all three experiments, a nonpredictive cue with arbitrary spatial properties (a colour patch) is presented prior to a detection target in the left or right visual field. Reaction times to detect targets are compared before and after a training session in which participants are trained to associate each colour patch with left and right space, either via a target detection task in which colour predicts target location 100% of the time (Experiments 1 and 3), or via a left/right motor movement as a function of colour (Experiments 2 and 3). In the first two experiments, a small but highly significant training effect is observed. Participants are approximately 10 ms faster to detect targets at congruent locations relative to incongruent locations after training relative to before training, despite the fact that cue colour was nonpredictive during the test sessions. In Experiment 3, the length of the training session is increased and the magnitude of the training effect also increases as a result. Implications for the interaction between central cues and reflexive attention, as well as premotor theory of attention, are discussed.     

Men's grooming in the Latter-day Saints Church: A qualitative study of norm violation

The role of personal grooming as an indicator of commitment to church hierarchy is examined in a study of one congregation of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Latter-day Saints Church policy urges men to be clean-shaven. In the present study, we interview all men in one ward who have worn beards or mustaches, in order to investigate questions of authority, identity, and conflict that occurred as a result of violating the grooming norm. Interviewees describe an identity conflict, with self-expression conflicting with the desire to demonstrate faithfulness to their church. In some cases, they reconcile the conflict by conforming to the norm; in others, they violate the norm out of a sense of asserting their own identity, but this comes at a cost of distance from their church identity.