The effort heuristic

The research presented here suggests that effort is used as a heuristic for quality. Participants rating a poem (Experiment 1), a painting (Experiment 2), or a suit of armor (Experiment 3) provided higher ratings of quality, value, and liking for the work the more time and effort they thought it took to produce. Experiment 3 showed that the use of the effort heuristic, as with all heuristics, is moderated by ambiguity: Participants were more influenced by effort when the quality of the object being evaluated was difficult to ascertain. Discussion centers on the implications of the effort heuristic for everyday judgment and decision-making.     

Reconnecting to Spirituality: Christian-Identified Adolescents and Emerging Adult Young Men’s Journey from Diagnosis of HIV to Coping

Spirituality is important to holistic health, yet little is known about its impact on young people with HIV. To address this knowledge deficit, a grounded theory study used semi-structured interviews of 20 Christian-identified adolescent and emerging adult gay males and one perinatally infected male. This study revealed that, to cope with HIV health issues, participants used a process of reconnecting with their spirituality. In order to successfully reconnect with their spirituality, study participants reported a need to re-embrace and re-engage in spiritual practices, hold onto hope, believe they are normal, and commit to beliefs and practices despite rejection from the church.     

Partners or pawns?: The impact of elite decision-making and epistemic communities in global information policy on developing countries and transnational civil society

This paper explores the complex institutional processes that comprise the global governance of cyberinfrastructure and examines the impact of these elite regime formation processes on developing countries and transnational civil society organizations. Based on a concurrent, mixed-methods study of the United Nations-sponsored World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), we find that policy-actors from developing countries and civil society organizations have been less effective than other actors in influencing these processes. Finally, we recommend future research on the use of ICTs to strengthen the effective participation of developing countries and transnational civil society organizations in these processes. He directs the Collaboratory on Technology Enhanced Learning Communities 〈www.cotelco.net〉 and holds a Ph.D. in political science from Howard University. This study is part of a larger research program called From Pawns to Partners, supported by grants from the University of Michigan, W.K. Kellogg Foundation, Microsoft Research, and Hewlett-Packard. The author would like to thank the graduate students working in Cotelco, as well as helpful colleagues Deborah Robinson, James Jackson, Michael Traugott, Alford Young, and Michael Kennedy. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2004 ISA conference.     

Effects of distraction on visual enumeration in children and adults

Speeded enumeration of visual stimuli typically produces a bilinear function, with a shallow subitizing rate (<100 ms/item) up to 3-4 items (subitizing span) and a steeper counting rate (~300 ms/item) thereafter. FINST theory (L. M. Trick & Z. W. Pylyshyn, 1993, 1994) suggests that subitizing of targets is possible in the presence of distractors if attention is not required for target detection, but this has not been tested in children. The present study explored enumeration without distractors (Os alone) and with distractors (Os among Xs) in 35 children aged 6-11 years and 17 adults. Subitizing span increased significantly from childhood to adulthood, and counting rate increased significantly with age. Bilinear functions were significantly better than linear fits to the data for most children and adults both without distractors (97% and 100%, respectively) and with distractors (89% and 94%), consistent with their efficient visual search for a single O among multiple Xs. These findings are discussed in comparison with those from new modeling of earlier enumeration data from young and older adults, revealing striking asymmetries in subitizing with distractors between development and aging.     

Fractionating the preview benefit in search: dual-task decomposition of visual marking by timing and modality

Providing participants with a preview of half the distractors in a visual search task facilitates performance. The present study examined the effects of secondary tasks on the preview benefit in search. Participants had to attend to a visual or an auditory stream of digits that began either (a) at the onset of the preview or (b) after the preview. Secondary tasks that onset with the preview disrupted the preview benefit irrespective of their modality. Only visual secondary tasks disrupted the benefit in the delayed condition. These selective interference effects suggest that the preview benefit can be fractionated into 2 components: an initialization component that involves modality-independent resources and a maintenance component that depends on visual resources. Results are discussed in relation to theoretical accounts of the preview benefit in search.     

Does state self-control depletion predict relationship functioning and partner aggression? An ecological momentary assessment study of community couples

Intimate relationship functioning depends upon the ability to accommodate one's partner and to inhibit retaliatory and aggressive impulses when disagreements arise. However, accommodation and inhibition may be difficult when self-control strength is weak or depleted by prior exertion of self-control. The present study considered whether state self-control depletion prospectively predicts male and female self-reports of anger with partner and arguing with partner. Consistent with the I³ Model (Finkel, 2014, Adv Exp Soc Psychol, 49, 1–104), we also considered whether the association between elevated anger and arguing (i.e., instigation) and partner aggression was stronger when state self-control (i.e., inhibition) was depleted or among people high in negative urgency. In this ecological momentary assessment (EMA) study, heavy drinking married and cohabiting heterosexual couples (N = 191) responded to three randomly signaled reports each day for 30 days. Depletion predicted anger and arguing with partners both cross-sectionally and prospectively for men and women. However, after controlling for prior levels of anger and arguing, these effects were diminished, and supplemental analyses revealed that anger and arguing with partner predicted subsequent depletion. Anger and arguing were strongly associated with concurrent reports of partner aggression perpetration and victimization (verbal and/or physical). However, neither state self-control depletion nor negative urgency moderated these effects. Overall, results suggest a modest impact of depletion on daily couple functioning as well as a potential cyclical effect of arguing on depletion.