Objectivity in the eye of the beholder: divergent perceptions of bias in self versus others

Important asymmetries between self-perception and social perception arise from the simple fact that other people's actions, judgments, and priorities sometimes differ from one's own. This leads people not only to make more dispositional inferences about others than about themselves (E. E. Jones & R. E. Nisbett, 1972) but also to see others as more susceptible to a host of cognitive and motivational biases. Although this blind spot regarding one's own biases may serve familiar self-enhancement motives, it is also a product of the phenomenological stance of naive realism. It is exacerbated, furthermore, by people's tendency to attach greater credence to their own introspections about potential influences on judgment and behavior than they attach to similar introspections by others. The authors review evidence, new and old, of this asymmetry and its underlying causes and discuss its relation to other psychological phenomena and to interpersonal and intergroup conflict.     

Trauma films, information processing, and intrusive memory development

Three experiments indexed the effect of various concurrent tasks, while watching a traumatic film, on intrusive memory development. Hypotheses were based on the dual-representation theory of posttraumatic stress disorder (C. R. Brewin, T. Dalgleish, & S. Joseph, 1996). Nonclinical participants viewed a trauma film under various encoding conditions and recorded any spontaneous intrusive memories of the film over the following week in a diary. Changes in state dissociation, heart rate, and mood were also measured. As predicted, performing a visuospatial pattern tapping task at encoding significantly reduced the frequency of later intrusions, whereas a verbal distraction task increased them. Intrusive memories were largely unrelated to recall and recognition measures. Increases in dissociation and decreases in heart rate during the film were also associated with later intrusions.     

Emotions, personality, and health: introduction to the special issue

Our intent in this introduction to the special issue on Emotions, Personality, and Health is to alert readers to the logic underlying the editors' choices of topics for the issue and to provide a brief summary of its contents. We discuss how the 10 articles fit together to provide a mosaic of diverse approaches to the study of emotion. Collectively, these articles show ways that emotion research may be integrated with personality theory to inform us about the psychological dimensions of health and illness.     

The emerging dialogue between psychoanalysis and neuroscience: neuroimaging perspectives

Current progress in the cognitive neurosciences is highly relevant to the development of psychoanalytic theory and practice. Neuroscience is today becoming mature enough to provide empirical biological approaches for the investigation of psychoanalytic models and observations. The current state of functional neuroimaging techniques is reviewed, selected paradigms and findings relevant to psychotherapy research are presented, and ways to pursue the dialogue between psychoanalysts and neuroscientists are discussed, as are some related obstacles and pitfalls. The emerging dialogue between psychoanalysts and neuroscientists may help not only to reestablish a solid position of psychodynamic theory and treatment in contemporary medicine, but also to bridge the division between "psychological" and "somatic" treatments, and gain important insights into the mind-brain relationship.     

Predictors of posttraumatic stress disorder and symptoms in adults: a meta-analysis

A review of 2,647 studies of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) yielded 476 potential candidates for a meta-analysis of predictors of PTSD or of its symptoms. From these, 68 studies met criteria for inclusion in a meta-analysis of 7 predictors: (a) prior trauma, (b) prior psychological adjustment, (c) family history of psychopathology, (d) perceived life threat during the trauma, (e) posttrauma social support, (f) peritraumatic emotional responses, and (g) peritraumatic dissociation. All yielded significant effect sizes, with family history, prior trauma, and prior adjustment the smallest (weighted r = .17) and peritraumatic dissociation the largest (weighted r = .35). The results suggest that peritraumatic psychological processes, not prior characteristics, are the strongest predictors of PTSD.     

Event-related brain potential markers of high-language proficiency in adults

The central issue addressed is whether there are electrophysiological markers for high-language proficiency in adults. Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded in 19 young adults who demonstrated either "normal" or "high" language proficiency. ERPs were obtained during a sentence-processing task and analyzed for specific response components elicited by different word types. The ERPs in the normal and high-language proficiency groups were similar for early sensory related processing but differed in the later components thought to be more closely related to lexical access and post-lexical processing. The findings for the ERP waveforms suggest that adults with high-language proficiency show slightly faster lexical access over left anterior brain regions for closed class items, and a reduced reliance on contextual information contained in sentences.     

Face recognition and emotional valence: processing without awareness by neurologically intact participants does not simulate covert recognition in prosopagnosia

Covert face recognition in neurologically intact participants was investigated with the use of very brief stimulus presentation to prevent awareness of the stimulus. In Experiment 1, skin conductance response (SCR) to photographs of celebrity and unfamiliar faces was recorded; the faces were displayed for 220 msec and for 17 msec in a within-participants design. SCR to faces presented for 220 msec was larger and more likely to occur with familiar faces than with unfamiliar faces. Face familiarity did not affect the SCR to faces presented for 17 msec. SCR was larger for faces of good than for faces of evil celebrities presented for 17 msec, but valence did not affect SCR to faces displayed for 220 msec. In Experiment 2, associative priming was found in a face familiarity decision task when the prime face was displayed for 220 msec, but no facilitation occurred when primes were presented for 17 msec. In Experiment 3, participants were able to differentiate evil and good faces presented without awareness in a two-alternative forced-choice decision. The results provide no evidence of familiarity detection outside awareness in normal participants and suggest that, contrary to previous research, very brief presentation to neurologically intact participants is not a useful model for the types of covert recognition found in prosopagnosia. However, a response based on affective valence appears to be available from brief presentation.     

Visual perspective taking for avatars in a Simon task

In modern digital applications, users often interact with virtual representations of themselves or others, called avatars. We examined how these avatars and their perspectives influence stimulus–response compatibility in a Simon task. Participants responded to light/dark blue stimuli with left/right key presses in the presence of a task-irrelevant avatar. Changes in stimulus–response compatibility were used to quantify changes in the mental representation of the task and perspective taking toward this avatar. Experiments 1 and 2 showed that perspective taking for an avatar occurred in orthogonal stimulus–response mappings, causing a compatibility effect from the avatar’s point of view. In the following two experiments we introduced a larger variety of angular disparities between the participant and avatar. In Experiment 3, the Simon effect with lateralized stimulus positions remained largely unaffected by the avatar, pointing toward an absence of perspective taking. In Experiment 4, after avatar hand movements were added in order to strengthen the participants’ sense of agency over the avatar, a spatial compatibility effect from the avatar’s perspective was observed again, and hints of the selective use of perspective taking on a trial-by-trial basis were found. Overall, the results indicate that users can incorporate the perspective of an avatar into their mental representation of a situation, even when this perspective is unnecessary to complete a task, but that certain contextual requirements have to be met.