Reciprocity: Choice shift in a social trap

In the present study it was investigated if choice behaviour in a social trap situation was affected by feedback about the choice of others. On top of the social trap reward structure investigated by Schroeder, Jensen, Reed, Sullivan and Schwab (1983) a bonus was added. In the individual bonus condition subjects were promised an unspecified bonus if they would obtain more points than any other group member of one's group. In the group bonus condition subjects would obtain a bonus if the own group acquired more points than the other group. As expected, in the group bonus condition one took fewer points than in the individual bonus condition. As suggested by the reciprocity explanation of choice behaviour (Liebrand, Wilke, Vogel and Wolters 1986; Liebrand, Jansen and Rijken 1986) it appeared that first choice corresponded strongly with one's expectations about the choices of others. Before the second choice and also before the third choice one received purported feedback about the choices of other members of one's group. In the conserving condition one learned that all others made a conserving choice, whereas in the consuming condition one learned that all others made a consuming choice. According to the reciprocity explanation it was found that when choice behaviour was in agreement with own previous expectations and previous choice, no choice change did occur. Shifts took place in conditions in which own previous expectations about the choices of others and own choice were disconfirmed by information about choices of others.     

Individual risk taking for self and others

In this experimental study, individual risk taking for self and others was observed for three experimental situations (the choice dilemma situations of Kogan and Wallach, 1964, the Pruitt and Teger gambling situation, 1969, and a simple one-trial gamble game). The results of the present study suggest that one takes as much risk for oneself as for somebody else. An attempt was made to determine to what degree the results could be explained by properties of the experimental situations.     

Eye movements and spoken language comprehension: effects of visual context on syntactic ambiguity resolution

When participants follow spoken instructions to pick up and move objects in a visual workspace, their eye movements to the objects are closely time-locked to referential expressions in the instructions. Two experiments used this methodology to investigate the processing of the temporary ambiguities that arise because spoken language unfolds over time. Experiment 1 examined the processing of sentences with a temporarily ambiguous prepositional phrase (e.g., "Put the apple on the towel in the box") using visual contexts that supported either the normally preferred initial interpretation (the apple should be put on the towel) or the less-preferred interpretation (the apple is already on the towel and should be put in the box). Eye movement patterns clearly established that the initial interpretation of the ambiguous phrase was the one consistent with the context. Experiment 2 replicated these results using prerecorded digitized speech to eliminate any possibility of prosodic differences across conditions or experimenter demand. Overall, the findings are consistent with a broad theoretical framework in which real-time language comprehension immediately takes into account a rich array of relevant nonlinguistic context.     

Some attractions of verb agreement

In English, words like scissors are grammatically plural but conceptually singular, while words like suds are both grammatically and conceptually plural. Words like army can be construed plurally, despite being grammatically singular. To explore whether and how congruence between grammatical and conceptual number affected the production of subject-verb number agreement in English, we elicited sentence completions for complex subject noun phrases like The advertisement for the scissors. In these phrases, singular subject nouns were followed by distractor words whose grammatical and conceptual numbers varied. The incidence of plural attraction (the use of plural verbs after plural distractors) increased only when distractors were grammatically plural, and revealed no influence from the distractors' number meanings. Companion experiments in Dutch offered converging support for this account and suggested that similar agreement processes operate in that language. The findings argue for a component of agreement that is sensitive primarily to the grammatical reflections of number. Together with other results, the evidence indicates that the implementation of agreement in languages like English and Dutch involves separable processes of number marking and number morphing, in which number meaning plays different parts.     

NS-Euthanasie in Österreich von 1938–1945 (Teil 1)

psychopraxis. neuropraxis - Die NS-Euthanasie in Österreich ist in den letzten Jahren in den psychiatrischen Szenen des Landes auf unterschiedliche Weise und eher zunehmend thematisiert...     

Predicting Bidirectional Intimate Partner Violence: Demographic and Historical Factors That Influence Initiating Threats or Use of Violence by IPV Victims

Using data from the National Violence Against Women Survey, this study explored the role of gender and other demographic and historical factors that influence initiating threats or use of violence among a sample of intimate partner violence (IPV) victims—an element of bidirectional violence. For this study, involvement in a relationship marked by bidirectional violence was defined as an affirmative response to this question: Were you the first person to use/threaten physical force? after respondents self-identified as IPV victims. The hypothesized model to predict initiating threats or use of violence among male victims was not significant, but marital status, income, employment status, and childhood victimization experiences did significantly predict female behavior. Age, race, education, alcohol use, drug use, and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms were not useful in explaining model variance for men or women. The rates of perpetration were equivalent for males and females; however, these findings suggest that gender is still an important context to consider when theorizing about bidirectional IPV.     

Temporal Distribution of Attention During a Throwing Motion

A reaction-time measure of attention was employed during five segments of a simultaneous dart throw: premovement decision, immediately after recoil was begun, maximum recoil, immediately after forward movement was begun, and after release of the dart. Reaction time was significantly longer when the stimulus was presented during the first or second segment than during later segments. Reaction time during premovement was not consistently greater than that immediately after movement was begun, indicating that information is being sampled at a high rate after movement commences. It appears that monitoring of proprioceptive feedback after movement has begun, and initiation of corrective submovements, is necessary for skillful performance of dart throwing.