Contact and Community: The Role of Social Interactions for a Political Identity

Can social interaction contribute to a sense of community that transcends national borders? This question was initially raised by Deutsch (1953) and revived by Fligstein (2008). My analysis makes two contributions to this literature. First, insights from social psychology are applied to specify the microfoundations for why contact across group boundaries can be related to a collective identity. Second, a new three‐wave panel data set is used to examine the relationship empirically. The sample includes almost 1,500 students at 38 German universities. The results show that social interaction contributes to a European identity, but that it is in particular contact with other international students rather than contact with hosts that fosters it most effectively. The data also reveal that contact has a more profound impact on individuals with a weak European identity to begin with. Finally, the change I find is stable after students return to their home institutions.     

Uncertainty and Expectation in Sentence Processing: Evidence From Subcategorization Distributions

There is now considerable evidence that human sentence processing is expectation based: As people read a sentence, they use their statistical experience with their language to generate predictions about upcoming syntactic structure. This study examines how sentence processing is affected by readers' uncertainty about those expectations. In a self‐paced reading study, we use lexical subcategorization distributions to factorially manipulate both the strength of expectations and the uncertainty about them. We compare two types of uncertainty: uncertainty about the verb's complement, reflecting the next prediction step; and uncertainty about the full sentence, reflecting an unbounded number of prediction steps. We find that uncertainty about the full structure, but not about the next step, was a significant predictor of processing difficulty: Greater reduction in uncertainty was correlated with increased reading times (RTs). We additionally replicated previously observed effects of expectation violation (surprisal), orthogonal to the effect of uncertainty. This suggests that both surprisal and uncertainty affect human RTs. We discuss the consequences for theories of sentence comprehension.     

Weighing the Evidence: A Systematic Review on Long-Term Neurocognitive Effects of Cannabis Use in Abstinent Adolescents and Adults

Findings on neurocognitive effects of sustained cannabis use are heterogeneous. Previous work has rarely taken time of abstinence into account. In this review, we focus on understanding sustained effects of cannabis, which begin when clinical symptoms of the drug have worn off after at least 14 days. We conducted a search between 2004 and 2015 and found 38 studies with such a prolonged abstinence phase. Study-design quality in terms of evidence-based medicine is similar among studies. Studies found some attention or concentration deficits in cannabis users (CU). There is evidence that chronic CU might experience sustained deficits in memory function. Findings are mixed regarding impairments in inhibition, impulsivity and decision making for CU, but there is a trend towards worse performance. Three out of four studies found evidence that motor function remains impaired even after a time of abstinence, while no impairments in visual spatial functioning can be concluded. Functional imaging demonstrates clear differences in activation patterns between CU and controls especially in hippocampal, prefrontal and cerebellar areas. Structural differences are found in cortical areas, especially the orbitofrontal region and the hippocampus. Twenty studies (57 %) reported data on outcome effects, leading to an overall effect size of r _mean?=?.378 (CI 95 %?=?[.342; .453]). Heavy use is found to be more consistently associated with effects in diverse domains than early age of onset. Questions of causality―in view of scarce longitudinal studies, especially those targeting co-occurring psychiatric disorders―are discussed.     

Assessing People's General Ecological Behavior: A Cross‐Cultural Measure1

The present study aims to further develop the General Ecological Behavior (GEB) scale in order to apply it cross‐culturally. The scale is proposed to be relatively open, neither bound to a particular set of ecological behaviors nor to a particular questionnaire response format. Questionnaire data from 686 California students were compared with the original Swiss calibration data. Reliability, internal consistency, and discriminant validity revcal that the GEB could be applied to the California students as well as to the Swiss sample, which consisted of older adults. Because the GEB measure makes use of behavior difficulties–caused by situational influences‐the proposed approach also guides the search for political actions that could promote changes in more ecologically behaving societies.     

The Center for Lifespan Psychology at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development: Overview of conceptual agenda and illustration of research activities

Founded in 1981 by the late Paul B. Baltes, the Center for Lifespan Psychology at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development has helped to establish lifespan psychology as a distinct conceptual approach within developmental psychology. Recently, the Center has extended its research programme into developmental behavioural neuroscience. Here, we provide an overview of the Center's conceptual agenda, and present two of its seven research projects in greater detail. Work at the Center is guided by three propositions: (1) to study lifespan changes in behaviour as interactions among maturation, learning, and senescence; (2) to develop theories and methods that integrate empirical evidence across domains of functioning, timescales, as well as behavioural and neuronal levels of analysis; (3) to identify mechanisms of development by exploring age-graded differences in plasticity. The Intra-Person Dynamics Project studies the organization of cognitive abilities within individuals of different ages, and investigates lifespan age differences in the plasticity and components of episodic memory performance. The Sensorimotor–Cognitive Couplings Project examines lifespan differences in dynamic dependencies between sensorimotor and cognitive performance. Both projects combine behavioural assessments with methods from developmental neuroscience to delineate age-graded changes in brain–behaviour mappings. Current research in other projects includes: (1) behavioural development in very old age, as assessed in the Berlin Aging Study; (2) the interplay of motivation, affect, and cognition in developmental regulation; (3) behavioural and electrophysiological mechanisms of social interaction from infancy to adulthood; and (4) formal and statistical issues in structural equation modelling, with an emphasis on latent growth curve modelling. Graduate education and research at the Center profit greatly from cooperation with other institutions in Berlin and Potsdam as well as from national and international collaboration.     

Take a risk or proceed with caution: Prevention motivation moderates responses to near-loss events

A persistently pressing issue identified in the decision-making literature is that people not only fail to recognize the risks entailed in a near-loss event but also subsequently engage in further risk-taking. We contend in this paper that prevention motivation critically regulates decision-makers' responses to a near-loss. Across three studies, we found that high prevention-focused individuals perceive greater risks in a near-loss event and are subsequently less likely to take risks, compared with low prevention-focused individuals. This finding highlights the significance of applying a motivational perspective to studying decision-making and risk.     

Process components of the Implicit Association Test: a diffusion-model analysis

The authors present a diffusion-model analysis of the Implicit Association Test (IAT). In Study 1, the IAT effect was decomposed into 3 dissociable components: Relative to the compatible phase, (a) ease and speed of information accumulation are lowered in the incompatible phase, (b) more cautious speed-accuracy settings are adopted, and (c) nondecision components of processing require more time. Studies 2 and 3 assessed the nature of interindividual differences in these components. Construct-specific variance in the IAT relating to the construct to be measured (such as implicit attitudes) was concentrated in the compatibility effect on information accumulation (Studies 2 and 3), whereas systematic method variance in the IAT was mapped on differential speed-accuracy settings (Study 3). Implications of these dissociations for process theories of the IAT and for applications are discussed.     

A Matlab function to estimate choice model parameters from paired-comparison data.

Tversky (1972) has proposed a family of models for paired-comparison data that generalize the Bradley-Terry-Luce (BTL) model and can, therefore, apply to a diversity of situations in which the BTL model is doomed to fail. In this article, we present a Matlab function that makes it easy to specify any of these general models (EBA, Pretree, or BTL) and to estimate their parameters. The program eliminates the time-consuming task of constructing the likelihood function by hand for every single model. The usage of the program is illustrated by several examples. Features of the algorithm are outlined. The purpose of this article is to facilitate the use of probabilistic choice models in the analysis of data resulting from paired comparisons.     

Long‐Term Effects of an Extensive Cognitive Training on Personality Development

Previous research found that cognitive training increases the Big Five personality trait Openness to Experience during and some weeks after the intervention. The present study investigated whether long‐term changes happen in Openness to Experience and other personality traits after an extensive cognitive training of memory and perceptual speed. The intervention group consisted of 204 adults (20–31 years and 65–80 years; 50% female) who received daily 1‐hour cognitive training sessions for about 100 days. The control group consisted of 86 adults (21–29 years and 65–82 years; 51% female) who received no cognitive training. All participants answered the NEO Five‐Factor Inventory before and 2 years after the cognitive training. Latent change models were applied that controlled for age group (young vs. old) and gender. In the long run, the cognitive training did not affect changes in any facet of Openness to Experience. This was true for young and old participants as well as for men and women. Instead, the cognitive training lowered the general increase of Conscientiousness. Even an extensive cognitive training on memory and perceptual speed does not serve as a sufficient intervention for enduring changes in Openness to Experiences or one of its facets.     

Stereotypes as Pseudocontingencies

We introduce a heuristic called pseudocontingencies (PCs) as an alternative account of various stereotyping phenomena. PCs give rise to the expectation that attributes are correlated based solely on asymmetries in attribute base rates. Attributes that are encountered frequently and attributes that are encountered rarely are perceived to be correlated with each other. Such differences in information densities are typical of many stereotyped targets, including the self vs. others, the in-group vs. out-groups and majority vs. minority groups. Evidence is reviewed for PCs underlying illusory correlations, confirmation biases, gender stereotypes, Simpson’s paradox, and in procedures used for implicit stereotype measurement. PCs are shown to predict specific patterns of self-enhancement and self-depreciation, the effects of intergroup contact on in-group biases and the readiness to infer stereotypes from aggregated “big-data”. Although PCs can lead to seriously flawed stereotypic expectations, they afford an efficient and possibly adaptive inference strategy.