Giving advice or making decisions in someone else's place: the influence of impression, defense, and accuracy motivation on the search for new information

When making decisions, people have been found predominantly to seek information supporting their preferred choice and to neglect conflicting information. In this article, the authors investigate to what extent different types of advisors, who recommend a choice to someone or make a decision on behalf of someone, show the same confirmatory information search. In Experiment 1, the authors presented participants, in the role of advisors, with a client's decision problem and found that when making a recommendation, advisors conducted a more balanced information search than participants who were making a decision for themselves. However, advisors who had to make a decision on behalf of their clients revealed an increased preference for information supporting their position. Experiment 2 suggested that this confirmatory information search was caused by impression motivation: The advisors bolstered their decision to justify it to the client. The results are discussed within the multiple motive framework of the heuristic systematic model.     

On the function of weak phantasmata in perception: Phenomenological,psychological and neurological clues for the transcendental function of imagination in perception

Weak phantasmata have a decisive and specifically transcendental function in our everyday perception. This paper provides several different arguments for this claim based on evidence from both empirical psychology and phenomenology.I would like to express my gratitude to Bill McKenna for his help with the English text and his critical remarks. This paper was presented in the Cork Roundtable for Philosophy in March 2003, at University College, Cork, and I would like to thank Julia Jansen, Tony O’Connor and the other participants for their constructive critique.     

On the selective relation of frontal cortical asymmetry and anger-out versus anger-control

The model of anterior asymmetry and emotion proposes an asymmetric representation of approach and withdrawal systems in the left and right anterior brain regions. Within this framework, 3 different concepts have been related to anterior asymmetry: affective valence, motivational direction, and behavioral activation. The aim of the present study was an empirical investigation into the relation between anterior cortical activity and questionnaire measures related to the 3 dimensions positive versus negative affect, approach versus withdrawal motivation, and behavioral activation versus inhibition. Subjects with relative greater left than right frontal cortical activity showed higher anger-out scores and lower anger-control scores. These results support the hypothesis that motivational direction is related to frontal asymmetry (approach-left and withdrawal-right). Furthermore, subjects with greater bilateral (left and right) frontal cortical activity showed higher behavioral activation scores. This finding might suggest that behavioral activation is related to approach and withdrawal motivation.     

Dodge-ing the issue: Dodge,Javal, Hering,and the measurement of saccades in eye-movement research

Dodge, in 1916, suggested that the French term 'saccade' should be used for describing the rapid movements of the eyes that occur while reading. Previously he had referred to these as type I movements. Javal had used the term 'saccade' in 1879, when describing experiments conducted in his laboratory by Lamare. Accordingly, Javal has been rightly credited with assigning the term to rapid eye movements. In English these rapid rotations had been called jerks, and they had been observed and measured before Lamare's studies of reading. Rapid sweeps of the eyes occur as one phase of nystagmus; they were observed by Wells in 1792 who used an afterimage technique, and they were illustrated by Crum Brown in 1878. Afterimages were used in nineteenth-century research on eye movements and eye position; they were also employed by Hering in 1879, to ascertain how the eyes moved during reading. In the previous year, Javal had employed afterimages in his investigations of reading, but this was to demonstrate that the eyes moved horizontally rather than vertically. Hering's and Lamare's auditory method established the discontinuous nature of eye movements during reading, and the photographic methods introduced by Dodge and others in the early twentieth century enabled their characteristics to be determined with greater accuracy.     

“Man's best friend:” How the presence of a dog reduces mental distress after social exclusion

A substantial amount of research shows that social exclusion is a threat to mental health. In the research reported here, we tested the hypothesis that the presence of a companion animal can serve as a buffer against these adverse effects. In a controlled laboratory experiment, we found that only socially excluded participants who did not work in the presence of a dog reported lower mental well-being compared with socially excluded participants who performed in the presence of a dog and participants who were not socially excluded. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.     

Effects of individual aerobic performance on finish time in mountain running

It was hypothesized that for each mountain running competition, there is a certain individual performance level below which running times increase dramatically. The running times of 869 finishers of 3 international mountain running competitions have been analysed. A hyperbolic association was demonstrated between finish times in mountain running competitions and individual performance at the anaerobic threshold (VO2AT(Race)). Due to the non-linear association, there is an increasing effect on both the finish time and the change of finish time with decreasing aerobic performance. In all three competitions, the change of finish time is about 7 times more pronounced in mountain runners with the lowest VO2ATL,, compared to those with the highest values of VO2AT(Race). Both athletes and organizers should keep in mind these effects of decreasing aerobic performance on running times and potentially associated risks.     

A "view from nowhen" on time perception experiments

Systematic errors in time reproduction tasks have been interpreted as a misperception of time and therefore seem to contradict basic assumptions of pacemaker-accumulator models. Here we propose an alternative explanation of this phenomenon based on methodological constraints regarding the direction of time, which cannot be manipulated in experimental settings. In two experiments, we demonstrate the influence of the direction of a dimensional change for pitch and brightness estimates. The results support the assumption that errors in time reproduction tasks do not reflect a systematic temporal misperception, but rather a methodological artifact. Implications for contemporary models of time perception are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved).     

Threat and selective exposure: the moderating role of threat and decision context on confirmatory information search after decisions

Previous studies on the impact of perceived threat on confirmatory information search (selective exposure) in the context of decision making have yielded mixed results. Some studies have suggested that confirmatory information search is reduced, yet others have found contradictory effects. The present series of 5 studies consistently found that the crucial moderator for these inconsistent findings was whether the induced threat was contextually related to the subsequent decision and information search tasks. Contextual incongruence (e.g., an induction of terrorist threat followed by an economic decision case) results in reduced levels of confirmatory information search, whereas a congruent threat (e.g., an induction of terrorist threat followed by a decision case on terrorism) results in increased levels of confirmatory information search. Analyses of the underlying psychological processes revealed that decision-unrelated threat inductions increase decision makers' experienced decision uncertainty, thus reducing confirmatory information search.     

The bystander-effect: a meta-analytic review on bystander intervention in dangerous and non-dangerous emergencies

Research on bystander intervention has produced a great number of studies showing that the presence of other people in a critical situation reduces the likelihood that an individual will help. As the last systematic review of bystander research was published in 1981 and was not a quantitative meta-analysis in the modern sense, the present meta-analysis updates the knowledge about the bystander effect and its potential moderators. The present work (a) integrates the bystander literature from the 1960s to 2010, (b) provides statistical tests of potential moderators, and (c) presents new theoretical and empirical perspectives on the novel finding of non-negative bystander effects in certain dangerous emergencies as well as situations where bystanders are a source of physical support for the potentially intervening individual. In a fixed effects model, data from over 7,700 participants and 105 independent effect sizes revealed an overall effect size of g = -0.35. The bystander effect was attenuated when situations were perceived as dangerous (compared with non-dangerous), perpetrators were present (compared with non-present), and the costs of intervention were physical (compared with non-physical). This pattern of findings is consistent with the arousal-cost-reward model, which proposes that dangerous emergencies are recognized faster and more clearly as real emergencies, thereby inducing higher levels of arousal and hence more helping. We also identified situations where bystanders provide welcome physical support for the potentially intervening individual and thus reduce the bystander effect, such as when the bystanders were exclusively male, when they were naive rather than passive confederates or only virtually present persons, and when the bystanders were not strangers.