REFEREES' DECISION MAKING ABOUT TRANSGRESSIONS: THE INFLUENCE OF PLAYER GENDER AT THE HIGHEST NATIONAL LEVEL

Prior research has found that referees are harsher toward sporting offenses in regional-level matches between women than in regional-level matches between men. We tested whether this bias also occurs at a higher, national level of competition, despite the greater pressures for objectivity and fairness at this level. Referees' decisions were examined in 15 national-level handball matches between women and 15 national-level handball matches between men after transgressions that varied in severity. The results suggest that referees made harsher decisions in female than in male matches. Although more research is needed, this study supported the hypothesis that referees may use the gender of players as a powerful judgmental heuristic for deciding how to respond to aggression.     

Differentiating shame from guilt

How does shame differ from guilt? Empirical psychology has recently offered distinct and seemingly incompatible answers to this question. This article brings together four prominent answers into a cohesive whole. These are that (a) shame differs from guilt in being a social emotion; (b) shame, in contrast to guilt, affects the whole self; (c) shame is linked with ideals, whereas guilt concerns prohibitions and (d) shame is oriented towards the self, guilt towards others. After presenting the relevant empirical evidence, we defend specific interpretations of each of these answers and argue that they are related to four different dimensions of the emotions. This not only allows us to overcome the conclusion that the above criteria are either unrelated or conflicting with one another, it also allows us to tell apart what is constitutive from what is typical of them.     

Effect of arousal on internal clock speed in real action and mental imagery.

The possible implication of an internal clock as a mechanism accounting for the temporal homology between actual and mental walking is studied. To observe this phenomenon, stressful sound stimuli were used to increase arousal, which is known to activate the internal clock. Seventeen participants performed three tasks: (1) a time production task, used as a reference task reflecting the internal clock speed; (2) an actual walking task; and (3) a mental walking task, all three in two sound conditions (no noise and noise). The results showed a significant effect of arousal on time in each task. The effect of noise, increasing the arousal level, was greater in time production and mental imagery tasks than in real action. In addition, the percentages of change between the two sound conditions for actual and mental walking time were not statistically different. These findings are further evidence of the existence of a timing process common to actual and mental walking. The data are consistent with the implication of an internal clock in both actual and mental walking.     

Disentangling the effects of word frequency and contextual diversity on serial recall performance

Research shows that contextual diversity (CD; the number of different contexts in which a word appears within a corpus) constitutes a better predictor of reading performance than word frequency (WF), that it mediates the access to lexical representations, and that controlling for contextual CD abolishes the effect of WF in lexical decision tasks. Despite the theoretical relevance of these findings for the study of serial memory, it is not known how CD might affect serial recall performance. We report the first independent manipulation of CD and WF in a serial recall task. Experiment 1 revealed better performance for low CD and for high WF words independently. Both effects affected omissions and item errors, but contrary to past research, word frequency also affected order errors. These results were confirmed in two more experiments comparing pure and alternating lists of low and high CD (Experiment 2) or WF (Experiment 3). The effect of CD was immune to this manipulation, while that of WF was abolished in alternating lists. Altogether the findings suggest a more difficult episodic retrieval of item information for words of high CD, and a role for both item and order information in the WF effect.     

Developing a measure of interpretation bias for depressed mood: An ambiguous scenarios test

The tendency to interpret ambiguous everyday situations in a relatively negative manner (negative interpretation bias) is central to cognitive models of depression. Limited tools are available to measure this bias, either experimentally or in the clinic. This study aimed to develop a pragmatic interpretation bias measure using an ambiguous scenarios test relevant to depressed mood (the AST-D).¹ In Study 1, after a pilot phase (N = 53), the AST-D was presented via a web-based survey (N = 208). Participants imagined and rated each AST-D ambiguous scenario. As predicted, higher dysphoric mood was associated with lower pleasantness ratings (more negative bias), independent of mental imagery measures. In Study 2, self-report ratings were compared with objective ratings of participants’ imagined outcomes of the ambiguous scenarios (N = 41). Data were collected in the experimental context of a functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging scanner. Consistent with subjective bias scores, independent judges rated more sentences as negatively valenced for the high versus low dysphoric group. Overall, results suggest the potential utility of the AST-D in assessing interpretation bias associated with depressed mood.     

The hazards of underspecified models: the case of symmetry in everyday predictions

Should one be more confident when predicting the whole (or an event based on a larger sample) from the part (or an event based on a smaller sample) than when predicting the reverse? The relevant literature on judgment under uncertainty argues that such predictions are symmetrical but that, as an empirical matter, people often fail to appreciate this symmetry. The authors show that symmetry in prediction does not necessarily hold. In addition to an empirical study involving predictions about soccer games, they develop a theoretical model showing that, at least for the ranges of numerical values usually found in everyday judgment problems, symmetry in predictions is uncommon when 2 different sample sizes are involved. The complexity of the theoretical model used in this analysis raises questions about model specification in judgmental research.     

Emotions,Me, Myself and I

We are prone to think that the emotions someone undergoes are somehow revelatory of the sort of person she is, and philosophers working in the field have frequently insisted upon the existence of an intimate relation between a subject and her emotions. But how intimate is the relation between emotions and the self? I first explain why interesting claims about this relation must locate it at the level of emotional intentionality. Given that emotions have a complex intentional structure – they are about an object and evaluate it – this means that the relation between emotions and the self may take different shapes. My discussion focuses on three different claims about this relation. According to the first claim, all emotions are about the subject who undergoes them. The second claim appeals to a more moderate form of reflexivity and affirms that emotions always feature a representation of other psychological states of the subject. The third understands the relation between emotions and the self in evaluative terms: emotions are said to evaluate relationally, one of the terms of this relation being the subject who undergoes it. I argue that all three claims apply, at best, only to a limited subset of emotions and that they must sometimes give way to claims that do not presuppose any intentional connection between emotions and the self.     

Can auditory deviant stimuli temporarily suspend cognitive processing? Evidence from patients with anxiety

While anxiety is typically thought to increase distractibility, this notion mostly derives from studies using emotionally loaded distractors presented in the same modality as the target stimuli and tasks involving crosstalk interference. We examined whether pathological anxiety might also increase distractibility for emotionally neutral irrelevant sounds presented prior to target stimuli in a task where these stimuli do not compete for selection. Patients with anxiety and control participants categorized visual digits preceded by task-irrelevant sounds that changed on rare trials (auditory deviance). Both groups exhibited an equivalent increase in response times following a deviant sound but patients showed a reduction of response accuracy, which was entirely due to an increase in response omissions. We conclude that the involuntary capture of attention by unexpected stimuli may, in patients with anxiety, result in a temporary suspension of cognitive activity.