The World of Mad Men: Power,Surface and Passion

Mad Men is disturbing to post-millennium viewers, particularly those of a “certain” age, on three counts. First, it invokes a particular historical context of gender oppression; second it captures the prevailing post-War injunction that emotional distress is unseemly and distasteful; and third, it captures the zeitgeist's celebration of surface over substance in relationship. However, just as disturbing as these historically situated interpersonal premises is the niggling question that each relationship pairing and each episode leaves with the viewer. To wit: How much of the disconnection and the unrequited longings are reflective of a particular historical era, and to what degree do they reflect timeless aspects of character and relationship? Thus Mad Men provides an exquisitely rendered sociocultural tableau in which the viewer struggles, however articulated or not, with one of the essential knots of psychoanalytic as well as couples treatment: the complicated interpenetration of culture and character, of time and timelessness.     

Adjustment of control in the numerical Stroop task

In the numerical Stroop task, participants are asked to compare the physical sizes (physical task) or numerical values (numerical task) of two digits and ignore the irrelevant dimension. Participants are unable to ignore the irrelevant dimension as indicated by facilitation and interference effects. The literature suggests that there is asymmetry in the ability to adjust control in the physical and numerical tasks. The present study examined this suggestion in two experiments in which we manipulated the proportion of neutral/congruent trials in an experimental block. In addition, we examined the effects of control adjustment on the resolution of the task and informational conflicts. Our results suggest that adjustment of control can be bidirectional and is dependent on task requirements. Moreover, it might be easier to inhibit irrelevant information than to inhibit irrelevant task activation.     

Seeing bad does good: Relational benefits of accuracy regarding partners’ negative moods

When would greater empathic accuracy (EA) be an asset and when would it not? In two studies of romantic couples (both employing daily diaries, the second also involving a lab-based video-recall paradigm), we explored the associations between EA (at the day-level, person-level, and in the lab) and an important relationship outcome: negative relationship feelings. Our results show that accuracy is tied more strongly to this relational outcome when negative (vs. positive) moods are the target of empathic judgments. The association between accuracy and (better) feelings was true for both perceivers and targets. Importantly, these associations emerged only in diary-based accuracy scores, and not in the lab-based ones. These results further support the importance of everyday empathic accuracy. They also highlight the need to consider such accuracy as multi-faceted, and in particular, to recognize the differential role of attending to our partners’ negative versus positive moods in daily life.     

Early childhood predictors of boys’ antisocial and violent behavior in early adulthood

Research on early childhood predictors of violent behaviors in early adulthood is limited. The current study investigated whether individual, family, and community risk factors from 18 to 42 months of age were predictive of violent criminal arrests during late adolescence and early adulthood using a sample of 310 low-income male participants living in an urban community. In addition, differences in trajectories of overt conduct problems (CP), hyperactivity/attention problems (HAP), and co-occurring patterns of CP and HAP from age 1½ to 10 years were investigated in regard to their relationship to violent and nonviolent behaviors, depression, and anxiety at age 20. Results of multivariate analyses indicated that early childhood family income, home environment, emotion regulation, oppositional behavior, and minority status were all significant in distinguishing violent offending boys from those with no criminal records. In addition, trajectories of early childhood CP, but not attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, were significantly related to self-reports of violent behavior, depressive symptoms, and anxiety symptoms. Implications for the prevention of early childhood risk factors associated with adolescent and adult violent behavior for males are discussed.     

Translating visual information into action predictions: Statistical learning in action and nonaction contexts

Humans are sensitive to the statistical regularities in action sequences carried out by others. In the present eyetracking study, we investigated whether this sensitivity can support the prediction of upcoming actions when observing unfamiliar action sequences. In two between-subjects conditions, we examined whether observers would be more sensitive to statistical regularities in sequences performed by a human agent versus self-propelled ‘ghost’ events. Secondly, we investigated whether regularities are learned better when they are associated with contingent effects. Both implicit and explicit measures of learning were compared between agent and ghost conditions. Implicit learning was measured via predictive eye movements to upcoming actions or events, and explicit learning was measured via both uninstructed reproduction of the action sequences and verbal reports of the regularities. The findings revealed that participants, regardless of condition, readily learned the regularities and made correct predictive eye movements to upcoming events during online observation. However, different patterns of explicit-learning outcomes emerged following observation: Participants were most likely to re-create the sequence regularities and to verbally report them when they had observed an actor create a contingent effect. These results suggest that the shift from implicit predictions to explicit knowledge of what has been learned is facilitated when observers perceive another agent’s actions and when these actions cause effects. These findings are discussed with respect to the potential role of the motor system in modulating how statistical regularities are learned and used to modify behavior.     

The Loss of Loss Aversion: Will It Loom Larger Than Its Gain?

Loss aversion, the principle that losses loom larger than gains, is among the most widely accepted ideas in the social sciences. The first part of this article introduces and discusses the construct of loss aversion. The second part of this article reviews evidence in support of loss aversion. The upshot of this review is that current evidence does not support that losses, on balance, tend to be any more impactful than gains. The third part of this article aims to address the question of why acceptance of loss aversion as a general principle remains pervasive and persistent among social scientists, including consumer psychologists, despite evidence to the contrary. This analysis aims to connect the persistence of a belief in loss aversion to more general ideas about belief acceptance and persistence in science. The final part of the article discusses how a more contextualized perspective of the relative impact of losses versus gains can open new areas of inquiry that are squarely in the domain of consumer psychology.     

Functional connectivity dynamics during film viewing reveal common networks for different emotional experiences

Recent theoretical and empirical work has highlighted the role of domain-general, large-scale brain networks in generating emotional experiences. These networks are hypothesized to process aspects of emotional experiences that are not unique to a specific emotional category (e.g., “sadness,” “happiness”), but rather that generalize across categories. In this article, we examined the dynamic interactions (i.e., changing cohesiveness) between specific domain-general networks across time while participants experienced various instances of sadness, fear, and anger. We used a novel method for probing the network connectivity dynamics between two salience networks and three amygdala-based networks. We hypothesized, and found, that the functional connectivity between these networks covaried with the intensity of different emotional experiences. Stronger connectivity between the dorsal salience network and the medial amygdala network was associated with more intense ratings of emotional experience across six different instances of the three emotion categories examined. Also, stronger connectivity between the dorsal salience network and the ventrolateral amygdala network was associated with more intense ratings of emotional experience across five out of the six different instances. Our findings demonstrate that a variety of emotional experiences are associated with dynamic interactions of domain-general neural systems.