Romantic red: red enhances men's attraction to women

In many nonhuman primates, the color red enhances males' attraction to females. In 5 experiments, the authors demonstrate a parallel effect in humans: Red, relative to other achromatic and chromatic colors, leads men to view women as more attractive and more sexually desirable. Men seem unaware of this red effect, and red does not influence women's perceptions of the attractiveness of other women, nor men's perceptions of women's overall likeability, kindness, or intelligence. The findings have clear practical implications for men and women in the mating game and, perhaps, for fashion consultants, product designers, and marketers. Furthermore, the findings document the value of extending research on signal coloration to humans and of considering color as something of a common language, both within and across species.     

The maze task: Measuring forced incremental sentence processing time

The maze task is an online measure of sentence processing time that provides an alternative to the standard moving window version of self-paced reading. Rather than each word of the sentence being presented in succession, two words are presented at the same time, and the participant must choose which word is a grammatical continuation of the sentence. This procedure forces the reader into an incremental mode of processing in which each word must be fully integrated with the preceding context before the next word can be considered. Previous research with this technique has not considered whether it is sufficiently sensitive to syntactic complexity effects or to garden path effects. Four experiments are reported demonstrating that reliable differences in processing time for subject relatives and object relatives can be obtained, and that this technique generates garden path effects that correspond closely with the data from eyetracking experiments, but without the spillover effects that are sometimes obtained with eyetracking. It is also shown that the task is sensitive to word frequency effects, producing estimates well in excess of those found with eyetracking.     

Within- and between-nervous-system inhibition of return: Observation is as good as performance

Inhibition of return (IOR) has been shown to occur when an individual returns to a target location (within-person IOR) and when an individual moves to a location just engaged by another individual (between-person IOR). Although within- and between-person IOR likely result from the same inhibitory mechanisms, different processes must activate these mechanisms following the performance and observation of action. Consistent with the suggestion that the mirror neuron system may be responsible for activating the inhibitory mechanisms behind IOR on observation trials, between-person IOR was only detected under restricted viewing conditions known to activate mirror neurons. These results indicate that mirror neuron system may be involved in both higher-order and automatic cognitive behavior.     

Is there a special association between self judgements and conscious recollection?

Dual‐process models of recognition memory posit a rapid retrieval process that produces a general sense of familiarity and a slower retrieval process that produces conscious recollections of prior experience. The Remember–Know paradigm has been used to study the subjective correlates of these two processes with Remember judgements assumed to index conscious recollection and Know judgements assumed to index familiarity. In this paper we examine Conway and Dewhurst's recent finding that judgements of self during encoding produce more Remember responses than alternative semantic judgements. While one might interpret this result to suggest a special association between self judgement and conscious recollection, we consider the possibility that it occurs because of greater discriminability in this condition. The results of four experiments demonstrate that a self judgement condition produces more, fewer, or an equal number of Remember responses relative to a control condition depending on whether overall discriminability in the self judgement condition is greater than, less than, or equal to that in the control condition. The implications of these results for conceptions of self judgement and the use of the Remember–Know paradigm are detailed. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Emotions and preventive health behavior: worry, regret, and influenza vaccination.

The role of worry, regret, and perceived risk in preventive health decisions was explored in a longitudinal questionnaire study on influenza vaccination among 428 university employees. The study yielded 3 main findings. First, ratings of anticipated worry and regret were stronger predictors of vaccination than perceived risk and mediated the effect of risk on vaccination. Second, the anticipated level of emotions differed systematically from experienced emotions, such that vaccinated individuals anticipated more regret and less worry than they actually experienced. Third, anticipated and experienced emotions had implications for subsequent vaccination decisions. Those who did not vaccinate in the 1st year but had high levels of worry and regret were likely to be vaccinated the following year.     

Disorders of Eating in the Elderly

The most common eating disorder in the elderly in both community and hospital settings is food refusal. This may lead to weight loss and malnutrition with all the adverse consequences on independence and function. The management of disorders of eating in the elderly is a diagnostic and therapeutic challenge, requiring the combined skills of the medical and nursing staff. The causes are often multifactorial and require careful and repeated assessment of the patient's social, psychological, and medical history. Approach to treatment involves these factors, as well as ethical and cultural considerations. Eating is the most basic biological drive for survival in nature. In human societies there are additional cultural and social aspects that may override this instinct, as in the case of hunger strikes for political motives. In the elderly, food is one of the major sources of possible pleasure and it is the challenge for health providers to try and give this enjoyment to their patients for as long as possible.     

Improved motor sequence retention by motionless listening

This study examined the effect of listening to a newly learned musical piece on subsequent motor retention of the piece. Thirty-six non-musicians were trained to play an unfamiliar melody on a piano keyboard. Next, they were randomly assigned to participate in three follow-up listening sessions over 1 week. Subjects who, during their listening sessions, listened to the same initial piece showed significant improvements in motor memory and retention of the piece despite the absence of physical practice. These improvements included increased pitch accuracy, time accuracy, and dynamic intensity of key pressing. Similar improvements, though to a lesser degree, were observed in subjects who, during their listening sessions, were distracted by another task. Control subjects, who after learning the piece had listened to nonmusical sounds, showed impaired motoric retention of the piece at 1 week from the initial acquisition day. These results imply that motor sequences can be established in motor memory without direct access to motor-related information. In addition, the study revealed that the listening-induced improvements did not generalize to the learning of a new musical piece composed of the same notes as the initial piece learned, limiting the effects to musical motor sequences that are already part of the individual’s motor repertoire.     

Seeing what you hear: Visual feedback improves pitch recognition

The present study examined the effect of visual feedback on the ability to recognise and consolidate pitch information. We trained two groups of nonmusicians to play a piano piece by ear, having one group receiving uninterrupted audiovisual feedback, while allowing the other only to hear, but not see their hand on the keyboard. Results indicate that subjects for whom visual information was deprived showed significantly poorer ability to recognise pitches from the musical piece they had learned. These results are interesting since pitch recognition ability would not intuitively seem to rely on visual feedback. In addition, we show that subjects with previous experience in computer touch-typing made fewer errors during training when trained with no visual feedback, but did not show improved pitch recognition ability posttraining. Our results demonstrate how sensory redundancy increases robustness of learning, and further encourage the use of audiovisual training procedures for facilitating the learning of new skills.