Extra‐powerful on the visuo‐perceptual space,but variable on the number space: Different effects of optokinetic stimulation in neglect patients

We studied the effects of optokinetic stimulation (OKS; leftward, rightward, control) on the visuo‐perceptual and number space, in the same sample, during line bisection and mental number interval bisection tasks. To this end, we tested six patients with right‐hemisphere damage and neglect, six patients with right‐hemisphere damage but without neglect, and six neurologically healthy participants. In patients with neglect, we found a strong effect of leftward OKS on line bisection, but not on mental number interval bisection. We suggest that OKS influences the number space only under specific conditions.     

Poor vigilance affects attentional orienting triggered by central uninformative gaze and arrow cues

Behaviour and neuroimaging studies have shown that poor vigilance (PV) due to sleep deprivation (SD) negatively affects exogenously cued selective attention. In the current study, we assessed the impact of PV due to both partial SD and night-time hours on reflexive attentional orienting triggered by central un-informative eye-gaze and arrow cues. Subjective mood and interference performance in emotional Stroop task were also investigated. Twenty healthy participants performed spatial cueing tasks using central directional arrow and eye-gaze as a cue to orient attention. The target was a word written in different coloured inks. The participant’s task was to identify the colour of the ink while ignoring the semantic content of the word (with negative or neutral emotional valence). The experiment took place on 2 days. On the first day, each participant performed a 10-min training session of the spatial cueing task. On the second day, half of participants performed the task once at 4:30 p.m. (BSL) and once at 6:30 a.m. (PV), whereas the other half performed the task in the reversed order. Results showed that mean reaction times on the spatial cueing tasks were worsened by PV, although gaze paradigm was more resistant to this effect as compared to the arrow paradigm. Moreover, PV negatively affects attentional orienting triggered by both central un-informative gaze and arrow cues. Finally, prolonged wakefulness affects self-reported mood but does not influence interference control in emotional Stroop task.     

On predicting others’ words: Electrophysiological evidence of prediction in speech production

The present study investigated whether lexical processes that occur when we name objects can also be observed when an interaction partner is naming objects. We compared the behavioral and electrophysiological responses of participants performing a conditional go/no-go picture naming task in two different conditions: individually and jointly with a confederate participant. To obtain an index of lexical processing, we manipulated lexical frequency, so that half of the pictures had corresponding names of high-frequency and the remaining half had names of low-frequency. Color cues determined whether participants should respond, whether their task-partner should respond, or whether nobody should respond. Behavioral and ERP results showed that participants engaged in lexical processing when it was their turn to respond. Crucially, ERP results on no-go trials revealed that participants also engaged in lexical processing when it was their partner’s turn to act. In addition, ERP results showed increased response inhibition selectively when it was the partner’s turn to act. These findings provide evidence for the claim that listeners generate predictions about speakers’ utterances by relying on their own action production system.     

Impaired configural body processing in anorexia nervosa: Evidence from the body inversion effect

Patients with anorexia nervosa (AN) suffer from severe disturbances of body perception. It is unclear, however, whether such disturbances are linked to specific alterations in the processing of body configurations with respect to the local processing of body part details. Here, we compared a consecutive sample of 12 AN patients with a group of 12 age‐, gender‐ and education‐matched controls using an inversion effect paradigm requiring the visual discrimination of upright and inverted pictures of whole bodies, faces and objects. The AN patients presented selective deficits in the discrimination of upright body stimuli, which requires configural processing. Conversely, patients and controls showed comparable abilities in the discrimination of inverted bodies, which involves only detail‐based processing, and in the discrimination of both upright and inverted faces and objects. Importantly, the body inversion effect negatively correlated with the persistence scores at the Temperament and Character Inventory, which evaluates increased tendency to convert a signal of punishment into a signal of reinforcement. These results suggest that the deficits of configural processing in AN patients may be associated with their obsessive worries about body appearance and to the excessive attention to details that characterizes their general perceptual style.     

When First Comes Love (or Lust): How Romantic and Sexual Cues Bias First Impressions in Online Social Networking

Three experimental studies (N = 286) tested how priming the concepts of sex or romance influence the way people perceive other social media users. Participants first completed a word-search task containing sexual (intercourse, lust), romantic (love, heart), or control words. Participants then evaluated a target’s sexual qualities and romantic qualities based on social media profiles, as well as rated their acceptance of the priming stimuli. Results suggested that sex primes led participants to judge targets as being more alluring, racy, and provocative, whereas romance primes led participants to judge targets as being more tender, sentimental, and kind. Both men and women found all primes to be equally acceptable content; women were not averse to these mainstream, non-explicit sexual stimuli. Findings are discussed in terms of viewing sex and romance as distinct, yet related networks of concepts and the need to disentangle sex, romance, and sexualized views of romance.     

Importance models of the physical self: Improved methodology supports a normative‐cultural importance model but not the individual importance model

We examine theoretical and methodological issues associated with the roles of individual and group‐normative importance in self‐esteem determination. Critical issues include multicollinearity among the physical self‐subdomains, which may have affected previous results, and the need for a multidimensional perspective on importance models. We apply state‐of‐the‐art methodologies, including exploratory structural equation modelling and the product‐of‐indicators approach to latent interactions. Positive interactions would be required to support the individually importance‐weighted average model, but none were observed in the multidimensional model estimated on the full sample. Nonetheless, some interaction effects were found in the country‐specific version of the model. Rather, we found support for the alternative group importance‐weighted average model. We conclude that domain‐specific self‐concepts are weighted differently and thus differentially affect self‐esteem, but these weights do not seem to depend on individual differences in importance. Although awaiting confirmation from further studies, our results suggest the idea that individuals use mainly normative importance processes based on cultural factors in weighting each domain‐specific component of self‐concept. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Preserving the Respondent’s Standpoint in a Research Interview: Different Strategies of ‘Doing’ the Interviewer

Much has been written on the respondent’s perspective but fewer studies have recognized that “perspectives other than those drawn from the discipline come into play for the interviewer” (Warren in Handbook of interview research, Sage, Thousand Oaks, CA, 2002: 84). In the article we show that the interviewer uses different strategies of identity management and different standpoints as resources to accomplish and account for one of the main interviewer’s duties, namely to achieve an “understanding of the world from the subjects’ points of view” (Kvale in Interviews: An introduction to qualitative research interviewing, Sage, Thousand Oaks, CA, 1996: 1). We examine instances in which the interviewer displays a “neutral” posture, showing adherence to her institutional identity, and instances in which she positions herself as an “embodied subject,” disclosing her personal involvement, stepping out of the role and displaying an identity and a standpoint in common with that of the interviewee. We show how such strategies of identity management (1) prompt either identification or divergence of viewpoints between the interviewer and the interviewees; (2) affect the degree of intimacy among participants and spontaneity in conversation. By means of these two strategies, we discuss, the interviewer accomplishes and accounts for her professional ability to understand the interviewees’ standpoints. In particular such strategies are two ways of accounting for an ethical relationship with the interviewees, which, respectively, emphasize either the impartiality or the reciprocity in understanding. Our purpose is not to suggest that one strategy is to be preferred on the other, but, rather, to illustrate how both the “neutral” and the “embodied” posture are situated practices through which the interviewer attempts to preserve the respondents’ viewpoint on the narrated events.