Conflicts as aversive signals: Conflict priming increases negative judgments for neutral stimuli

Botvinick, Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience 7:356–366 (2007) recently suggested that competing theories of the monitoring function of the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) for cognitive control might converge on the detection of aversive signals in general, implying that response conflicts, a known trigger of ACC activation, are aversive, too. Recent evidence showing conflict priming (i.e., faster responses to negative targets after conflict primes) directly supports this notion but remains inconclusive with regard to possible confounds with processing fluency. To this end, two experiments were conducted to offer more compelling evidence for the negative valence of conflicts. Participants were primed by (conflict and nonconflict) Stroop stimuli and subsequently had to judge the valence of neutral German words (Experiment 1a) or Chinese pictographs (Experiment 1b). Results showed that conflict, as compared with nonconflict, primes led to more negative judgments of subsequently presented neutral target stimuli. The findings will be discussed in the light of existing theories of action control highlighting the role of aversive signals for sequential processing adjustments.     

Extended Schema Mode conceptualizations for specific personality disorders: an empirical study

The aim of this study was to investigate newly formulated schema mode models for cluster-C, paranoid, histrionic and narcissistic personality disorders. In order to assess 18 hypothesized modes, the Schema Mode Inventory (SMI) was modified into the SMI-2. The SMI-2 was administered to a sample of 323 patients (with a main diagnosis on one of the PDs mentioned) and 121 nonpatients. The SMI-2 was successful in distinguishing patients and controls. Newly formulated modes proved to be appropriate for histrionic, avoidant, and dependent PD. The modification of the Overcontroller mode into the Perfectionistic and Suspicious Overcontroller mode was valuable for characterizing paranoid and obsessive-compulsive PD. The results support recent theoretical developments in Schema Therapy, and are useful for application in clinical practice.     

Priming and communication: Social determinants of information use in judgments of life satisfaction

Two experiments examined the effects of answering a question about a specific component of life satisfaction on respondents' assessment of their overall satisfaction with life. The results suggest that the use of primed information in forming subsequent judgments is determined by Grice's conversational norms. In general, answering the specific question increases the accessibility of information relevant to that question. However, the effect that this has on the general judgment depends on the way in which the two questions are presented. When the two questions are merely placed in sequence without a conversational context, the answer to the subsequent general question is based in part on the primed specific information. As a result, the answer to the general question becomes similar to that for the specific question (i.e. assimilation). However, this does not occur when the two questions are placed in a communication context. Conversational rules dictate that communicators should be informative and should avoid redundancy in their answers. Therefore, when a specific and a general question are perceived as belonging to the same conversational context, the information on which the answer to the specific question was based is disregarded when answering the general one. This attenuates the assimilation effect. The conditions under which these different processes occur are identified and experimentally manipulated, and the implications of these findings for models of information use in judgment are discussed.     

Awareness of the influence as a determinant of assimilation versus contrast

In the present study, subjects had to generate an evaluative judgment about a target person on the basis of his behaviour that had both positive and negative implications. In a previous phase of the study that was ostensibly unrelated to the judgment task, the relevant trait categories were primed. Subsequently, half of the subjects were reminded of the priming episode. Consistent with earlier research (e.g. Lombardi, Higgins and Bargh, 1987; Newman and Uleman, 1990) that used memory of the priming events as a correlational measure, a contrast effect was found under the ‘reminding’ condition and assimilation resulted when subjects were not reminded of the priming episode. This pattern of results is interpreted as the consequence of corrective influences.     

The Laicism and Its Religious Limits

Public school as a constitutional condition of modern democracy can not deal with absolutistic and fundamentalistic claims of public morality in a neutral way. The problems resulting from this for a laicistic school are discussed in the context of liberal tradition in France and the école laïque as it originated in the 19th century.     

Ambient Sexual Harassment: An Integrated Model of Antecedents and Consequences

Research on sexual harassment as a prevalent job stressor has focused primarily on outcomes for the direct targets of harassment; the antecedents and consequences ofindirectexposure to sexual harassment have not been explored. Ambient Sexual Harassment is proposed as an assessment of indirect exposure to sexual harassment. Ambient Sexual Harassment is defined as the general or ambient level of sexual harassment in a work group as measured by the frequency of sexually harassing behaviors experienced by others in a woman's work group. The integration of Ambient Sexual Harassment into the model of sexual harassment developed by Fitzgerald, Drasgow, Hulin, Gelfand, and Magley (1997) proposes that indirect exposure to sexual harassment will have similar antecedents and job-related, psychological, and health outcomes as direct exposure. An empirical test of the model, using samples of female employees from a public utility company (N= 455) and a food processing plant (N= 194), generally supports predictions.