Sometimes happy people focus on the trees and sad people focus on the forest: context-dependent effects of mood in impression formation

Research indicates that affect influences whether people focus on categorical or behavioral information during impression formation. One explanation is that affect confers its value on whatever cognitive inclinations are most accessible in a given situation. Three studies tested this malleable mood effects hypothesis, predicting that happy moods should maintain and unhappy moods should inhibit situationally dominant thinking styles. Participants completed an impression formation task that included categorical and behavioral information. Consistent with the proposed hypothesis, no fixed relation between mood and processing emerged. Whether happy moods led to judgments reflecting category-level or behavior-level information depended on whether participants were led to focus on the their immediate psychological state (i.e., current affective experience; Studies 1 and 2) or physical environment (i.e., an unexpected odor; Study 3). Consistent with research on socially situated cognition, these results demonstrate that the same affective state can trigger entirely different thinking styles depending on the context.     

Loving the Questions, an Exploration of the Nicene Creed – Marianne H. Micks

Book reviewed:
Loving the Questions, an Exploration of the Nicene Creed , Marianne H. Micks, Church Publishing Incorporated 2005 (1-59628-008-5), xii + 115 pp., pb $14.00     

Civil Religion and the Invention of Tradition: The Festival of Saint Ansano in Siena

Every December, in the Italian city of Siena, the civil and religious authorities celebrate the festival of Saint Ansano, an early Christian martyr who became one of the city's first patron saints. Although based upon long-established rituals for the liturgical feast of Saint Ansano, the contemporary celebration of this festival was ‘invented’ as recently as 1968 and represents a striking example of the ‘invention of tradition’ in a contemporary ‘civil religion’. The article examines the origins of the modern and contemporary festival of Saint Ansano, tracing its history and significance for Sienese civil religion from the late 1960s until 2003—the year in which the 1700th anniversary of Ansano's martyrdom was celebrated in Siena. The article concludes by reflecting on the significance of this festival both for the concept of ‘the invention of tradition’ and for the nature of ‘civil religion’ in contemporary Siena.     

Computer-aided analysis of in-flight physiological measurement

Computer Science Corporation, U.S. Air Force Flight Test Center, Edwards Air Force Base, California Heart waveforms were collected from pilots under laboratory baseline conditions and in flight. Described is the computer-aided method for smoothing the heart waveforms recorded in flight.     

Computers in spatial vision research

The original impulse for using computers in a laboratory dedicated to spatial vision research and the current role of computers in experiments are detailed. Although computers are used widely for modeling spatial vision, there is some doubt about whether conventional serial computers are the most appropriate tools for this task.     

The syntactic priming effect: Evoked response evidence for a prelexical locus

Twenty subjects made lexical decisions in a syntactic priming paradigm. Target stimuli (nouns, verbs, abiguous noun--verb words, and nonsense words) were immediately preceded on each trial by a function word syntactic prime, creating appropriate or inappropriate syntactic contexts for the real word targets. Evoked responses to the targets were recorded from left and right frontal, temporal, and temporoparietal sites. Principal components analysis revealed a component peaking at 140 msec which discriminated words in appropriate contexts from words in inappropriate contexts, independent of lexical syntactic class, with maximal discrimination at temporoparietal sites. Evidence for the identification of the syntactic class of target items was not observed in the evoked response until 80 msec after this syntactic priming effect occurred. These results suggest a prelexical locus for the syntactic priming effect. The implications of these results for current conceptions of the modularity of the mental lexicon are discussed.     

Categorial grammars determined from linguistic data by unification

We provide an algorithm for determining a categorial grammar from linguistic data that essentially uses unification of type-schemes assigned to atoms. The algorithm presented here extends an earlier one restricted to rigid categorial grammars, introduced in [4] and [5], by admitting non-rigid outputs. The key innovation is the notion of an optimal unifier, a natural generalization of that of a most general unifier.     

Stability of the Millon Clinical Multiaxial Inventory among psychiatric inpatients

This study investigated the stability of the Millon Clinical Multiaxial Inventory (MCMI) in a sample of psychiatric inpatients over a longer time period and from different perspectives than previous reliability studies. Test-retest reliability was assessed from three perspectives: correlation/regression, equivalence of dimensional structures across testings upon different admissions, and stability of personality style across testings. Some stability from a correlational perspective was found, with higher stability estimates indicated for the basic personality scales in comparison with the clinical symptom scales which is consistent with Millon's theory. The internal structure of the MCMI was essentially identical across testings. Although source of reinforcement and instrumental or coping style were stable across testings beyond chance, the MCMI profiles of a considerable number of subjects were inconsistent across testings. Correspondingly, clinicians should be cautious in using the MCMI to make categorical decisions regarding personality style with inpatients who are tested at admission and who have had repeated hospitalizations.