Not all gifts are good: The potential practical costs of motivated gifts

People rely on support from others to accomplish mundane and momentous tasks. When asking for assistance, is it beneficial to incentivize a helper by offering a motivated gift (i.e., a gift with the hope of getting support in return)? Six studies (N > 2,500) examine the frequency and potential costs of motivated gifts. In Study 1, a third of Americans indicated that they had given a motivated gift at least once, while nearly two‐thirds believed they had received one. In Studies 2a–d, most participants who imagined receiving a motivated gift before a favor request reported lower willingness to help and anticipated satisfaction from helping than participants who imagined simply being asked for a favor. Finally, Study 3 replicates these findings with actual help provided among friends in a laboratory setting. Findings suggest that motivated gifts are relatively common but may sometimes undermine the assistance that people hope to receive.     

Associations between prenatal substance exposure,prenatal violence victimization,unintended pregnancy,and trauma exposure in childhood in a clinical setting

Given the importance of early prevention and intervention strategies for children exposed to trauma, detection of early risk factors for exposure to traumatic events in childhood is critical. The present study examined associations between three known prenatal risk factors that characterize environmental instability in utero—prenatal substance exposure, prenatal violence victimization, and unintended pregnancy—and child exposure to interparental violence and other adverse experiences in a sample of 198 mother–child dyads (M child age = 44.48 months) referred to a hospital clinic for treatment following exposure to trauma. Prenatal substance and violence exposure were associated with child trauma exposure, and prenatal violence victimization was also associated with maternal severity ratings of traumatic exposures. Unintended pregnancy was not associated with child trauma exposure or severity. These findings expand our understanding of prenatal risk factors for trauma exposure in childhood and, specifically, highlight prenatal substance exposure and violence victimization as risk factors for subsequent exposure to trauma in early childhood. Results suggest that prenatal prevention and intervention programs should target reducing maternal substance use and in-utero exposure to violence.     

Reification of phonological storage

We question the arguments and data presented by Larsen and Baddeley (this issue 2003) in support of the phonological loop account of verbal short-term memory on a number of grounds. These include the correlation between effect size and the presence of a phonological similarity effect in the data, and the existence elsewhere in the literature of effects of articulatory suppression and interference between verbal and nonverbal information that undermines the phonological loop account. We question the idea that short-term memory phenomena are best conceived of in terms of phonological storage, and we sketch an alternative perspective that does not rely on the notion of a bespoke phonological store, an entity that we argue represents a reification.     

Priming the Identification of Environmental Sounds

Three experiments were conducted using a repetition priming paradigm: Auditory word or environmental sound stimuli were identified by subjects in a pre-test phase, which was followed by a perceptual identification task using either sounds or words in the test phase. Identification of an environmental sound was facilitated by prior presentation of the same sound, but not by prior presentation of a spoken label (Experiments 1 and 2). Similarly, spoken word identification was facilitated by previous presentation of the same word, but not when the word had been used to label an environmental sound (Experiment 1). A degree of abstraction was demonstrated in Experiment 3, which revealed a facilitation effect between similar sounds produced by the same type of source. These results are discussed in terms of the Transfer Appropriate Processing, activation, and systems approaches.     

Modulation of the Irrelevant Sound Effect by Organizational Factors: Further Evidence from Streaming by Location

An irrelevant sequence of discrete auditory tokens disrupts serial recall markedly if successive tokens differ, but the disruption is less marked if the sound is repeated. However, the relation of stimulus mismatch and degree of disruption with serial recall seems to be modulated by organizational principles such as streaming by pitch and streaming by location. The current empirical work replicates the finding that the impact of changing sequences can be reduced if tokens are assigned to different locations in such a way as to form separate streams, each containing sequences of repeated tokens. This study shows that this phenomenon is not a consequence of reducing the number of tokens per stream.