Spicy Adjectives and Nominal Donkeys: Capturing Semantic Deviance Using Compositionality in Distributional Spaces

Sophisticated senator and legislative onion. Whether or not you have ever heard of these things, we all have some intuition that one of them makes much less sense than the other. In this paper, we introduce a large dataset of human judgments about novel adjective‐noun phrases. We use these data to test an approach to semantic deviance based on phrase representations derived with compositional distributional semantic methods, that is, methods that derive word meanings from contextual information, and approximate phrase meanings by combining word meanings. We present several simple measures extracted from distributional representations of words and phrases, and we show that they have a significant impact on predicting the acceptability of novel adjective‐noun phrases even when a number of alternative measures classically employed in studies of compound processing and bigram plausibility are taken into account. Our results show that the extent to which an attributive adjective alters the distributional representation of the noun is the most significant factor in modeling the distinction between acceptable and deviant phrases. Our study extends current applications of compositional distributional semantic methods to linguistically and cognitively interesting problems, and it offers a new, quantitatively precise approach to the challenge of predicting when humans will find novel linguistic expressions acceptable and when they will not.     

CS as an effect: action-based evaluative conditioning depends on temporal contiguity

ABSTRACT

In this study, we analysed Evaluative Conditioning (EC) with a recently introduced S-R paradigm [Blask et al., 2016 Blask, K. , Frings, C. , & Walther, E. (2016). Doing is for feeling. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General , 145 (10), 1263–1268. https://doi.org/ 10.1037/xge0000211 [Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]. Doing is for feeling. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 145(10), 1263–1268], in which valence first transfers from an affective US to a response and then from this valence-laden response to a novel CS. Based on action control research, the CS in this procedure could be interpreted as an effect of the response. Hence, temporal contiguity of the valence-laden response and the CS should determine whether EC occurs. We tested this hypothesis in an experiment, in which we varied the time interval between the response and the subsequent CS. Results show that EC effects occurred only under conditions of high temporal contiguity thus supporting our assumptions. This finding sheds light on the processes underlying action-based EC in particular and evaluative learning in general.     

Professionals' negative expectations of boys from father-headed single-parent families: Implications for the training of child-care professionals

The study explored the possibility that individuals' assessment of children's personality and behavioural functioning may reflect stereotypic perceptions involving more negative expectations of boys from father-headed as opposed to mother-headed single-parent families. These hypotheses were based upon the assumptions of the pre-emincnce of the maternal role in the parent-child relation. The objective was to determine whether stereotypic perceptions, if any, prevail equally or differentially among laypersons and trained professionals such as teachers and social workers. Consistent with the hypotheses, the findings showed that both laypersons and professionals had more negative expectations of boys from father- as opposed to mother-custody homes. Comparison of laypersons with the professional group of teachers and social workers combined showed no significant differences between the perceptions of these two groups of respondents. The teachers, however, had significantly fewer stereotypic negative perceptions of boys from father-headed families than laypersons and social workers. The implications of the findings are discussed for the welfare of the children and their single parents, and the training of professionals.     

Depression impairs the ability to ignore the emotional aspects of facial expressions: Evidence from the Garner task

We assessed dysphoric and clinically distressed individuals' ability to ignore the emotional aspects of facial expressions using the Garner speeded‐classification task. Garner's paradigm tests the ability to selectively focus on a single relevant dimension while ignoring variations on other, irrelevant, ones. In the present task, the stimuli were faces of men and women expressing happy, angry, and neutral emotions. In Experiments 1 and 2, dysphoric and nondysphoric participants performed the Garner task, focusing on gender and ignoring emotion (Experiment 1) and focusing on emotion and ignoring gender (Experiment 2). Results suggest that dysphoric individuals exhibited more difficulty ignoring the emotional dimension of social stimuli even under specific instructions to do so than nondysphoric individuals. In Experiments 3 and 4, we replicated these results in clinically distressed and nondistressed individuals. The results of Experiment 3 further suggested that depression was more closely associated with the inability to selectively ignore emotion than was social anxiety. Experiment 4 confirmed that this failure of selective attention was specific to processing emotional, and not gender features. The implications of these findings for cognitive and interpersonal theories of depression are discussed.