When vying reveals lying: the timed antagonistic response alethiometer

Two experiments tested a new computer‐based lie‐detection technique. The Timed Antagonistic Response Alethiometer (TARA) manufacturers a situation in which, if respondents lie, they must perform two incompatible tasks, whereas if they tell the truth, they can perform two compatible ones. Both tasks involve repeatedly classifying target and control statements as true or false. The incompatible task combination, being more difficult, takes longer to complete correctly; hence, slower responses diagnose dishonesty. Experiment 1 found that, while concurrently classifying control statements honestly, participants invariably took longer to classify target statements dishonestly than honestly. Exploiting this effect, Experiment 2 found that separate groups of liars and truth‐tellers could be distinguished with about 85% accuracy. The properties and potential of the technique are discussed. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Suicide schema in schizophrenia: the effect of emotional reactivity, negative symptoms and schema elaboration

Suicide risk is thought to increase with a greater potential for activation of suicide-related schemas. Suicide schemas are less likely to be activated with reductions of emotional range associated with certain negative symptoms of schizophrenia. The study tested whether suicide risk would increase in patients with recent onset schizophrenia with increased potential for suicide schema activation as indicated by lower levels of specific negative symptoms that reflected emotional reactivity, namely emotional withdrawal and blunted affect. A logistic regression analysis of baseline data of 278 recent onset schizophrenic patients with a measure of suicide behaviour as the dependent variable and negative symptoms, delusions, hallucinations, depression, gender, episode, ethnicity, education, age, duration of untreated psychosis and substance use as independent variables was carried out. Emotional withdrawal, but not blunted affect was significant and negatively associated, and depression positively associated with suicide behaviour. There was evidence to indicate that restricted emotions are associated with reduced suicide risk as predicted.     

The I That Buys: Narcissists as Consumers

Which people are most swayed by self‐image motives and hence most likely to make consumer choices in line with those motives? This article contends that the answer is narcissists—individuals who see themselves, and who want others to see them, as special, superior, and entitled and who are prone to exhibitionism and vanity. This work hypothesizes that narcissists will, to validate their excessively positive self‐views, strive to purchase the high‐prestige products (i.e., expensive, exclusive, new, and flashy). In so doing, they will regulate their own esteem by increasing their apparent status and consequently earning others’ admiration and envy. This article also hypothesizes that narcissists will show greater interest in the symbolic than utilitarian value of products and will exhibit, even controlling for self‐esteem, more pronounced self‐enhancement phenomena such as endowment and self‐signaling effects.     

Contextual validity and the effects of low-constraint sentence contexts on lexical decisions

Subjects made lexical decisions after reading either (a) low-constraint sentence contexts that did not predict the identity or meaning of congruous targets (e.g. “Mary went to her room to look at her XXXX”), or (b) control contexts that were randomly ordered lists of words. The crucial variable was the validity of the contextual information. When the sentence contexts were incongrous with the word targets as often as they were congruous (the “less-valid environment”), the congruous contexts had a slight inhibitory effect on decision latency relative to the baseline condition. In contrast, when the contexts were always congruous with the word targets (“valid environment”), they had a large facilitatory effect on decision latency. These results suggest that (a) the effects of congruous contexts can depend on the validity of the contexts across the entire experimental session, and (b) contextual facilitation may be due in part to sentence level processes.     

Influence of context on the activation and selection of ambiguous word senses

The activation of ambiguous word senses was investigated by measuring the amount of interference in naming the ink color of a word that was either related or unrelated to one of the meanings of a preceding ambiguous word. In agreement with previous results obtained using this procedure (Conrad, 1974), evidence was obtained that both meanings of the ambiguous words are activated even in the presence of biasing context. However, contrary to previous findings, the degree of activation of each word sense depended on its degree of compatibility with the context. These results are consistent with a language processing system in which all interpretations of an ambiguity are accessed and then processed until an accurate determination has been made of which interpretation best satisfies the syntactic and semantic constraints that govern it.     

Responses to the Stigmatized: Disjunctions in Affect, Cognitions, and Behavior

This study examined affective, cognitive, and behavioral responses to members of a stigmatized group – homosexual men. Male participants were placed in a situation in which they anticipated interacting with a gray or a non-stigmatized conversation partner. The topic of the impending conversation was either potentially threatening or non-threatening. Participants in the gay conversation partner condition sat either farther away from the conversation partner (in the threat condition) or closer to the conversation partner (in the no-threat condition) than they did from non-stigmatized conversation partners. There were no differences in attitudes toward the conversation partner as a function of experimental condition. The results were interpreted in terms of predictions based on ambivalence-amplification theory, aversive racism theory, and the integrated threat theory.     

BUDDHISM,FREE WILL,AND PUNISHMENT: TAKING BUDDHIST ETHICS SERIOUSLY

In recent decades, there has been growing interest among philosophers in what the various Buddhist traditions have said, can say, and should say, in response to the traditional problem of free will. This article investigates the relationship between Buddhist philosophy and the historical problem of free will. It begins by critically examining Rick Repetti's Buddhism, Meditation, and Free Will (2019), in which he argues for a conception of “agentless agency” and defends a view he calls “Buddhist soft compatibilism.” It then turns to a more wide-ranging discussion of Buddhism and free will—one that foregrounds Buddhist ethics and takes seriously what the various Buddhist traditions have said about desert, punishment, and the reactive attitudes of resentment, indignation, and moral anger. The article aims to show that, not only is Buddhism best conceived as endorsing a kind of free will skepticism, Buddhist ethics can provide a helpful guide to living without basic desert moral responsibility and free will.     

Quantifying self‐motives: Functional links between dispositional desires

Previous research has sought to establish the existence, or gauge the relative strength, of key self‐evaluation motives (i.e., self‐enhancement, self‐verification, self‐assessment, self‐improvement). Here, we attempted, across five samples, to quantify individual differences in self‐motive strength and explore their empirical ramifications. We devised brief self‐report indices for each self‐motive and checked their factor structure, reliability, and validity. We found that self‐enhancement covaried mainly with self‐verification, and that self‐assessment covaried mainly with self‐improvement, thus validating key hypotheses regarding their functional links. Moreover, self‐enhancement and self‐verification covaried with positive personality traits, as well as with preferences for receiving positive feedback and perceptions of its accuracy. In sum, self‐reported variations in dispositional self‐motive strength form theoretically meaningful patterns. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.