Nonconscious goals can shape what people want to feel

Goals can determine what people want to feel (e.g., Tamir et al., 2008), but can they do so even when they are primed outside of conscious awareness? In two studies, participants wanted to feel significantly less angry after they were implicitly primed with a collaboration goal, compared to a neutral prime. These effects were found with different implicit priming manipulations, direct and indirect measures of emotional preferences, and when controlling for concurrent emotional experiences. The effects were obtained in social contexts in which the potential for collaboration was relatively higher (Study 1) and lower (Study 2). Also, similar effects were found when collaboration was activated nonconsciously (Studies 1–2) and consciously (Study 2). By showing that nonconscious goals can shape emotional preferences, we demonstrate that what people want to feel can be determined by factors they are unaware of.     

Predictors of Health Locus of Control in Older Adults

Health locus of control has been shown to influence how individuals approach their health and health-related decisions. The present study examined the variables predictive of older adults’ health locus of control. A total of 261 adults aged 54–84 years completed a questionnaire about their health, approach to health, and background information about themselves. The results revealed that demographic indicators, health-related variables, and psychological variables—particularly health risk tolerance, future time perspective, health self-efficacy, and emotional instability—were related to older adults’ health locus of control. Findings have implications for programs aimed at modifying older adults’ health locus of control.     

Impulsivity and Alcohol Use Coping Motives in a Trauma-Exposed Sample: The Mediating Role of Distress Tolerance

The present investigation examined the mediating role of distress tolerance in the association between impulsivity and alcohol use coping motives among trauma-exposed individuals. Participants were 86 adults (64.3% women; M(age) = 23.4, SD = 9.3) who met the DSM-IV-TR posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) criterion A for at least one traumatic life event and endorsed alcohol use in the past month. Distress tolerance at least partially mediated the association between impulsivity and alcohol use coping motives, after controlling for the variance explained by PTSD symptom severity and alcohol use problems. Clinical implications and future directions related to this line of inquiry are presented and discussed.     

English semantic word-pair norms and a searchable Web portal for experimental stimulus creation

As researchers explore the complexity of memory and language hierarchies, the need to expand normed stimulus databases is growing. Therefore, we present 1,808 words, paired with their features and concept–concept information, that were collected using previously established norming methods (McRae, Cree, Seidenberg, & McNorgan Behavior Research Methods 37:547–559, 2005). This database supplements existing stimuli and complements the Semantic Priming Project (Hutchison, Balota, Cortese, Neely, Niemeyer, Bengson, & Cohen-Shikora 2010). The data set includes many types of words (including nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc.), expanding on previous collections of nouns and verbs (Vinson & Vigliocco Journal of Neurolinguistics 15:317–351, 2008). We describe the relation between our and other semantic norms, as well as giving a short review of word-pair norms. The stimuli are provided in conjunction with a searchable Web portal that allows researchers to create a set of experimental stimuli without prior programming knowledge. When researchers use this new database in tandem with previous norming efforts, precise stimuli sets can be created for future research endeavors.     

Higher-order semantic structures in an African Grey parrot’s vocalizations: evidence from the hyperspace analog to language (HAL) model

Previous research has described the significant role that social interaction plays in both the acquisition and use of speech by parrots. The current study analyzed the speech of one home-raised African Grey parrot (Psittacus erithacus erithacus) across three different social contexts: owner interacting with parrot in the same room, owner and parrot interacting out of view in adjacent rooms, and parrot home alone. The purpose was to determine the extent to which the subject’s speech reflected an understanding of the contextual substitutability (e.g., the word street can be substituted in context for the word road) of the vocalizations that comprised the units in her repertoire (i.e., global co-occurrence of repertoire units; Burgess in Behav Res Methods Instrum Comput 30:188–198, 1998; Lund and Burgess in Behav Res Methods Instrum Comput 28:203–208, 1996). This was accomplished via the human language model hyperspace analog to language (HAL). HAL is contextually driven and bootstraps language “rules” from input without human intervention. Because HAL does not require human tutelage, it provided an objective measure to empirically examine the parrot’s vocalizations. Results indicated that the subject’s vocalization patterns did contain global co-occurrence. The presence of this quality in this nonhuman’s speech may be strongly indicative of higher-order cognitive skills.     

The Automaticity of Social Life

ABSTRACT— Much of social life is experienced through mental processes that are not intended and about which one is fairly oblivious. These processes are automatically triggered by features of the immediate social environment, such as the group memberships of other people, the qualities of their behavior, and features of social situations (e.g., norms, one's relative power). Recent research has shown these nonconscious influences to extend beyond the perception and interpretation of the social world to the actual guidance, over extended time periods, of one's important goal pursuits and social interactions.     

Infants generate goal-based action predictions

Predicting the actions of others is critical to smooth social interactions. Prior work suggests that both understanding and anticipation of goal-directed actions appears early in development. In this study, on-line goal prediction was tested explicitly using an adaptation of Woodward's (1998) paradigm for an eye-tracking task. Twenty 11-month-olds were familiarized to movie clips of a hand reaching to grasp one of two objects. Then object locations were swapped, and the hand made an incomplete reach between the objects. Here, infants reliably made their first look from the hand to the familiarized goal object, now in a new location. A separate control condition of 20 infants familiarized to the same movements of an unfamiliar claw revealed the opposite pattern: reliable prediction to the familiarized location, rather than the familiarized object. This study suggests that by 11 months infants actively use goal analysis to generate on-line predictions of an agent's next action.