Bemerkungen zur Wissenschaftslogik

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Kritisches und Experimentelles zur „Empfindungszeit“ Fröhlichs

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Anxiety sensitivity and retaliatory aggressive behavior in research volunteers

An important focus of recent aggression research has been to identify personality variables that influence the expression of aggression. One such variable may be anxiety sensitivity (AS). Individuals high in AS fear unpleasant anxiety-related physiological sensations and perhaps physiological arousal in general. Accordingly, people high in AS are motivated to avoid situations that produce these sensations. With respect to aggressive encounters, an intense attack by an opponent involves significant physiological arousal. High anxiety-sensitive individuals may therefore attempt to decrease the intensity of the interaction by responding in a non-aggressive or conciliatory manner. To test this possibility, 112 community volunteers completed a measure of AS and a well-validated laboratory task designed to assess aggressive behavior. As predicted, an inverse relation between AS and extreme aggressive responding was found. Specifically, as AS increases, retaliatory aggression is less likely after intense attack by an opponent.     

Short- and long-term implicit memory in aging and Alzheimer's disease

Implicit memory processes were investigated via picture naming in healthy young and older adults and in persons with mild Alzheimer's disease (AD). Repetition priming in picture-naming was intact in all groups over the course of a short retention interval (seconds), and only the AD group revealed a deficit over a longer interval (72 hours). In addition, the AD group showed impaired procedural memory, with no benefit of practice on picture-naming. Impaired long-term priming was related to severity of AD. Both theoretical and methodological implications are discussed.     

Does incongruence of lexicosemantic and prosodic information cause discernible cognitive conflict?

We are often required to interpret discordant emotional signals. Whereas equivalent cognitive paradigms cause noticeable conflict via their behavioral and psychophysiological effects, the same may not necessarily be true for discordant emotions. Skin conductance responses (SCRs) and heart rates (HRs) were measured during a classic Stroop task and one in which the emotions conveyed by lexicosemantic content and prosody were congruent or incongruent. The participants’ task was to identify the emotion conveyed by lexicosemantic content or prosody. No relationship was observed between HR and congruence. SCR was higher during incongruent than during congruent conditions of the experimental task (as well as in the classic Stroop task), but no difference in SCR was observed in a comparison between congruence effects during lexicosemantic emotion identification and those during prosodic emotion identification. It is concluded that incongruence between lexicosemantic and prosodic emotion does cause notable cognitive conflict. Functional neuroanatomic implications are discussed.     

Word frequency and word likeness mirror effects in episodic recognition memory

Estes and Maddox (2002) suggested that the word frequency mirror effect in episodic recognition memory might be due to word likeness rather than to the frequency of experience with a word per se. We examined their suggestion using a factorial manipulation of frequency and neighborhood density, a measure used in lexical memory research to measure orthographic word likeness. For study with no specified task, main effects of density and frequency were in the mirror order, confirming the hypothesized mirror effect of word likeness but not its role in producing the frequency mirror effect. Lexical decision study increased the size of both mirror effects, even though the density manipulation had a negligible effect on lexical decision performance for words. Post hoc analyses showed that neither mirror effect could be explained by differences in lower order measures of word likeness (letter and bigram frequency). The joint orders of frequency and density results were mirrored across new and old conditions in accordance with attention likelihood theory (ALT), but density effects on z-ROC slope suggest that ALT may require extension to accommodate the effect of word likeness on response confidence.