The time course of location-avoidance learning in fear of spiders

Two experiments were designed to study the time course of avoidance learning in spider fearfuls (SFs) under controlled experimental conditions. To achieve this, we employed an immersive virtual environment (IVE): While walking freely through a virtual art museum to search for specific paintings, the participants were exposed to virtual spiders. Unbeknown to the participants, only two of four museum rooms contained spiders, allowing for avoidance learning. Indeed, the more SF the participants were, the faster they learned to avoid the rooms that contained spiders (Experiment. 1), and within the first six trials, high fearfuls already developed a preference for starting their search task in rooms without spiders (Experiment 2). These results illustrate the time course of avoidance learning in SFs, and they speak to the usefulness of IVEs in fundamental anxiety research.     

Loneliness and Attitudes Toward Being Alone in Belgian and Chinese Adolescents: Examining Measurement Invariance

Loneliness is an adverse phenomenon that tends to peak during adolescence. As loneliness is a subjective state, it is different from the objective state of being alone. People’s attitudes toward being alone can be more or less negative or positive. Cultures differ in the form and meaning of social behavior, interpersonal relationships, and time spent alone. However, for cross-cultural comparisons to be meaningful, measurement invariance of the measure should be established. The present study examined measurement invariance of the Loneliness and Aloneness Scale for Children and Adolescents (LACA) in a sample of 218 Belgian and 190 Chinese early adolescents, aged 11–15 years. Using nested multigroup confirmatory factor analyses, measurement invariance of the LACA across Belgium and China was established. More specifically, evidence was found for configural, metric, and partial scalar invariance. Because partial scalar invariance was established, the two cultural groups could be compared. No significant differences were found for peer-related loneliness. Regarding the attitudes toward aloneness, Belgian adolescents were more negative and less positive toward being alone than Chinese adolescents. The present study is encouraging for researchers who want to use the LACA for cross-cultural comparisons, in that we found evidence for measurement invariance across two disparate cultural groups speaking completely different languages.     

Ease‐of‐retrieval effects on procedural justice judgements under conditions of informational and personal uncertainty

This study tests whether individuals' reliance on ease‐of‐retrieval processes when forming procedural justice judgements are moderated by informational and personal uncertainty. In Studies 1 and 2 we examined the predicted effects of informational uncertainty. Results indicated that participants in information‐uncertain conditions relied on ease‐of‐retrieval, whereas those in information‐certain conditions relied on content information to make procedural justice judgements. In Study 3 we examined the combined effects of informational uncertainty and personal uncertainty on reliance on ease‐of‐retrieval when forming procedural justice judgements. The findings of Study 3 indicated that personal uncertain participants who were in informational certain conditions based their procedural justice judgements on content information, whereas all other participants based their procedural justice judgements on ease‐of‐retrieval. This is the first paper to demonstrate that the joint effect of informational uncertainty and personal uncertainty on reliance on ease‐of‐retrieval is different from the two uncertainties acting alone.     

Similarity bias in credit decisions for entrepreneurs on the brink of bankruptcy

For entrepreneurs in financial distress, it is of vital importance that investors and bankers accurately assess the viability of their business, free of unwanted biases that bear no relevance to the assessment of the chance of survival. Despite the prevalence of entrepreneurs facing financial distress, little research has yet investigated the role of cognitive biases in funding decisions in this important context. The current research attends to this issue and investigated whether entrepreneurs who are perceived by a banker as more similar are more likely to receive capital to save their business from bankruptcy than entrepreneurs who are perceived as less similar to the banker. Additionally, we investigated whether similarity bias affected bankers' attributions of what caused the financial distress as well as their perceptions of entrepreneurs' trustworthiness. Using an experimental research design, we found a similarity bias in bankers' causal attributions and trustworthiness judgments, but not in their credit decisions. We contrast our findings with similarity bias research among equity investors and discuss the implications for theory and practice.     

The neural underpinnings of facial emotion recognition in ischemic stroke patients

Deficits in facial emotion recognition occur frequently after stroke, with adverse social and behavioural consequences. The aim of this study was to investigate the neural underpinnings of the recognition of emotional expressions, in particular of the distinct basic emotions (anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness and surprise). A group of 110 ischaemic stroke patients with lesions in (sub)cortical areas of the cerebrum was included. Emotion recognition was assessed with the Ekman 60 Faces Test of the FEEST. Patient data were compared to data of 162 matched healthy controls (HC’s). For the patients, whole brain voxel-based lesion–symptom mapping (VLSM) on 3-Tesla MRI images was performed. Results showed that patients performed significantly worse than HC’s on both overall recognition of emotions, and specifically of disgust, fear, sadness and surprise. VLSM showed significant lesion–symptom associations for FEEST total in the right fronto-temporal region. Additionally, VLSM for the distinct emotions showed, apart from overlapping brain regions (insula, putamen and Rolandic operculum), also regions related to specific emotions. These were: middle and superior temporal gyrus (anger); caudate nucleus (disgust); superior corona radiate white matter tract, superior longitudinal fasciculus and middle frontal gyrus (happiness) and inferior frontal gyrus (sadness). Our findings help in understanding how lesions in specific brain regions can selectively affect the recognition of the basic emotions.     

Features of the Value Function for Voice and Their Consistency across Participants from Four Countries: Great Britain, Mexico, The Netherlands, and the United States

This study investigated features of the value function for voice using subjects from four countries: Great Britain, Mexico, The Netherlands, and the United States. Across these four groups of subjects the shape of the value function was found to be similar, though differences in the estimated reference points were detected. Consistent with predictions derived from prospect theory (Kahneman & Tversky, 1979) the relationship between the value of voice and the magnitude of voice was found to be direct, monotonic, and nonlinear. The largest increment in value occurred when the magnitude of voice shifted from mute to some voice. Thereafter, increments in value tended to decline in magnitude suggesting diminishing marginal returns on the response measure of procedural fairness. An unexpected finding was that the final segment of the value function was convex indicating increasing marginal returns as the magnitude of voice shifted from its penultimate level to its maximum possible level. The study also investigated whether subjects' reported expectations of voice correspond to the value function reference point as theorized in the literature. Findings suggest that self-reported expectations of voice are higher than the estimated value function reference point.     

Old and new ways to study characteristics of reading disability: The case of the nonword-reading deficit

Theoretical and computational models of reading have traditionally been informed by specific characteristics of disabled readers. One of the most frequently studied marker effects of developmental dyslexia is the nonword-reading deficit. Disabled readers are generally believed to show a specific problem in reading nonwords. This study presents a survey of frequently cited methods used to examine this effect by controlling general reading ability in various ways. An extensive analysis, however, shows that the majority of these methods (grade equivalents scores, the reading-level match design, and interactions in a chronological-age match design) actually fail to account for confounding variables such as age and general slowing, potentially affecting the conclusions reached. To alleviate this problem, an alternative method is presented: i.e. state trace analysis. Applying this method in a sample of Dutch disabled and typical readers, the results revealed an absence of a nonword-reading deficit in the disabled readers. Furthermore, after controlling for their decoding ability, disabled readers showed inferior word reading performance, which strongly suggests that the fundamental problem of disabled readers does not relate to the reading of nonwords but concerns their (dis)ability to acquire orthographic (word-specific) knowledge. Further, predictions for disabled readers in an inconsistent orthography like English are formulated. Finally, based on a review of neurobiological studies, implications for theories of reading disability are discussed.