Self‐esteem as a source of evaluative conditioning

This study was designed to examine whether self‐esteem can be used as a source of evaluative conditioning, and whether implicit or explicit self‐esteem was more predictive of the evaluative conditioning effect. Moreover, the role of contingency awareness in the acquisition of the evaluative conditioning effect was also examined. Words related to the self and a general other were served as unconditioned stimuli (USs) in the evaluative conditioning process in order to see whether the evaluation could be transferred to neutral, abstract paintings after 10 times of pairing. An evaluative conditioning effect was demonstrated in that the evaluation of the paintings became more positive after repeatedly paired with words about the self but not words about general others. Implicit self‐esteem predicted the magnitude of the evaluative conditioning effect, while the association between explicit self‐esteem and the evaluative conditioning effect was nonsignificant, both with and without the effect of contingency awareness being controlled for. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Neural correlates of metaphor processing: The roles of figurativeness,familiarity and difficulty

There is currently much interest in investigating the neural substrates of metaphor processing. In particular, it has been suggested that the right hemisphere plays a special role in the comprehension of figurative (non-literal) language, and in particular metaphors. However, some studies find no evidence of right hemisphere involvement in metaphor comprehension (e.g. [Lee, S. S., & Dapretto, M. (2006). Metaphorical vs. literal word meanings: fMRI evidence against a selective role of the right hemisphere. NeuroImage, 29, 536–544; Rapp, A. M., Leube, D. T., Erb, M., Grodd, W., & Kircher, T. T. J. (2004). Neural correlates of metaphor processing. Cognitive Brain Research, 20, 395–402]). We suggest that lateralization differences between literal and metaphorical language may be due to factors such as differences in familiarity ([Schmidt, G. L., DeBuse, C. J., & Seger, C. A. (2007). Right hemisphere metaphor processing? Characterizing the lateralization of semantic processes. Brain and Language, 100, 127–141]), or difficulty ([Bookheimer, S. (2002). Functional MRI of language: New approaches to understanding the cortical organization of semantic processing. Annual Review of Neuroscience, 25, 151–188; Rapp, A. M., Leube, D. T., Erb, M., Grodd, W., & Kircher, T. T. J. (2004). Neural correlates of metaphor processing. Cognitive Brain Research, 20, 395–402]) in addition to figurativeness. The purpose of this study was to separate the effects of figurativeness, familiarity, and difficulty on the recruitment of neural systems involved in language, in particular right hemisphere mechanisms. This was achieved by comparing neural activation using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) between four conditions: literal sentences, familiar and easy to understand metaphors, unfamiliar and easy to understand metaphors, and unfamiliar and difficult to understand metaphors. Metaphors recruited the right insula, left temporal pole and right inferior frontal gyrus in comparison with literal sentences. Familiar metaphors recruited the right middle frontal gyrus when contrasted with unfamiliar metaphors. Easy metaphors showed higher activation in the left middle frontal gyrus as compared to difficult metaphors, while difficult metaphors showed selective activation in the left inferior frontal gyrus as compared to easy metaphors. We conclude that the right hemisphere is involved in metaphor processing and that the factors of figurativeness, familiarity and difficulty are important in determining neural recruitment of semantic processing.     

Women's human rights violations: Cameroonian students' perceptions

Cameroonian university students (N = 666) assessed whether certain different societal positions that the law grants to women and men (the husband chooses the marital home, the husband wields parental power, a married woman cannot freely engage in trade, the husband administers his wife's personal property) and certain cultural practices (female genital mutilation, parents arranging their children's marriage) were seen as violations of women's human rights. Justifications for the choices were also analysed. Female genital mutilation was most often seen as a violation of women's human rights, and the husband selecting the marital home was least often seen as a violation. These differences were explained by cultural specificities. Women more often than men saw the cases as violations of rights. Respondents coming from the North saw the cases less often as violations of rights than respondents from other geocultural areas, which was in accordance with their previously observed higher collectivism. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Rethinking NIMBYism: The role of place attachment and place identity in explaining place‐protective action

The ‘NIMBY’ (Not In My Back Yard) concept is commonly used to explain public opposition to new developments near homes and communities, particularly arising from energy technologies such as wind farms or electricity pylons. Despite its common use, the concept has been extensively critiqued by social scientists as a useful concept for research and practice. Given European policy goals to increase sustainable energy supply by 2020, deepening understanding of local opposition is of both conceptual and practical importance. This paper reviews NIMBY literature and proposes an alternative framework to explain local opposition, drawing upon social and environmental psychological theory on place. Local opposition is conceived as a form of place‐protective action, which arises when new developments disrupt pre‐existing emotional attachments and threaten place‐related identity processes. Adopting a social constructivist perspective and drawing on social representation theory, a framework of place change is proposed encompassing stages of becoming aware, interpreting, evaluating, coping and acting, with each stage conceived at multiple levels of analysis, from intrapersonal to socio‐cultural. Directions for future research and potential implications of the place‐based approach for public engagement by energy policy‐makers and practitioners are discussed. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Perceptions by and of lonely people in social networks

Although past research has associated loneliness with negative perceptions of others, P. Christensen and D. A. Kashy (1998), using the social relations model (SRM), found that among new acquaintances, loneliness was associated with more positive other‐perceptions. SRM was used to examine loneliness and interpersonal perception within existing social networks. Seventy‐three university students in the United States rated themselves and others on 19 attributes and also judged how they thought others saw them (meta‐perceptions). Results indicated that lonely people tended to be more negative toward closer targets and somewhat positive toward less close acquaintances. Lonely people had lower self‐regard and perceived self‐regard, invariant across acquaintanceship, and were rated more negatively by others. Relationship contexts thus moderate effects of loneliness on other‐perceptions.     

A temporal discriminability account of children's eyewitness suggestibility

Children's suggestibility is typically measured using a three‐stage ‘event–misinformation–test’ procedure. We examined whether suggestibility is influenced by the time delays imposed between these stages, and in particular whether the temporal discriminability of sources (event and misinformation) predicts performance. In a novel approach, the degree of source discriminability was calculated as the relative magnitude of two intervals (the ratio of event–misinformation and misinformation–test intervals), based on an adaptation of existing ‘ratio‐rule’ accounts of memory. Five‐year‐olds (n =150) watched an event, and were exposed to misinformation, before memory for source was tested. The absolute event–test delay (12 versus 24 days) and the ‘ratio’ of event–misinformation/misinformation–test intervals (11:1, 3:1, 1:1, 1:3 and 1:11) were manipulated across participants. The temporal discriminability of sources, measured by the ratio, was indeed a strong predictor of suggestibility. Most importantly, if the ratio was constant (e.g. 18/6 versus 9/3 days), performance was remarkably similar despite variations in absolute delay (e.g. 24 versus 12 days). This intriguing finding not only extends the ratio‐rule of distinctiveness to misinformation paradigms, but also serves to illustrate a new empirical means of differentiating between explanations of suggestibility based on interference between sources and disintegration of source information over time.     

Speech‐perception‐in‐noise deficits in dyslexia

Speech perception deficits in developmental dyslexia were investigated in quiet and various noise conditions. Dyslexics exhibited clear speech perception deficits in noise but not in silence. Place‐of‐articulation was more affected than voicing or manner‐of‐articulation. Speech‐perception‐in‐noise deficits persisted when performance of dyslexics was compared to that of much younger children matched on reading age, underscoring the fundamental nature of speech‐perception‐in‐noise deficits. The deficits were not due to poor spectral or temporal resolution because dyslexics exhibited normal ‘masking release’ effects (i.e. better performance in fluctuating than in stationary noise). Moreover, speech‐perception‐in‐noise predicted significant unique variance in reading even after controlling for low‐level auditory, attentional, speech output, short‐term memory and phonological awareness processes. Finally, the presence of external noise did not seem to be a necessary condition for speech perception deficits to occur because similar deficits were obtained when speech was degraded by eliminating temporal fine‐structure cues without using external noise. In conclusion, the core deficit of dyslexics seems to be a lack of speech robustness in the presence of external or internal noise.     

Language‐specific stress perception by 9‐month‐old French and Spanish infants

During the first year of life, infants begin to have difficulties perceiving non‐native vowel and consonant contrasts, thus adapting their perception to the phonetic categories of the target language. In this paper, we examine the perception of a non‐segmental feature, i.e. stress. Previous research with adults has shown that speakers of French (a language with fixed stress) have great difficulties in perceiving stress contrasts ( Dupoux, Pallier, Sebastián & Mehler, 1997 ), whereas speakers of Spanish (a language with lexically contrastive stress) perceive these contrasts as accurately as segmental contrasts. We show that language‐specific differences in the perception of stress likewise arise during the first year of life. Specifically, 9‐month‐old Spanish infants successfully distinguish between stress‐initial and stress‐final pseudo‐words, while French infants of this age show no sign of discrimination. In a second experiment using multiple tokens of a single pseudo‐word, French infants of the same age successfully discriminate between the two stress patterns, showing that they are able to perceive the acoustic correlates of stress. Their failure to discriminate stress patterns in the first experiment thus reflects an inability to process stress at an abstract, phonological level.