Emotional inertia emerges after prolonged states of exhaustion: Evidences from a measurement burst study

Motivation and Emotion - Exhaustion refers to the feeling of ongoing loss of emotional, physical and cognitive resources. The present study draws on the Conservation of Resources Theory to examine...     

Timed written picture naming in 14 European languages

We describe the Multilanguage Written Picture Naming Dataset. This gives trial-level data and time and agreement norms for written naming of the 260 pictures of everyday objects that compose the colorized Snodgrass and Vanderwart picture set (Rossion & Pourtois in Perception, 33, 217–236, 2004). Adult participants gave keyboarded responses in their first language under controlled experimental conditions (N = 1,274, with subsamples responding in Bulgarian, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Icelandic, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish). We measured the time to initiate a response (RT) and interkeypress intervals, and calculated measures of name and spelling agreement. There was a tendency across all languages for quicker RTs to pictures with higher familiarity, image agreement, and name frequency, and with higher name agreement. Effects of spelling agreement and effects on output rates after writing onset were present in some, but not all, languages. Written naming therefore shows name retrieval effects that are similar to those found in speech, but our findings suggest the need for cross-language comparisons as we seek to understand the orthographic retrieval and/or assembly processes that are specific to written output.     

Easy Knowledge,Closure Failure,or Skepticism: A Trilemma

This article aims to provide a structural analysis of the problems related to the easy knowledge problem. The easy knowledge problem is well known. If we accept that we can have basic knowledge via a source without having any prior knowledge about the reliability or accuracy of this source, then we can acquire knowledge about the reliability or accuracy of this source too easily via information delivered by the source. Rejecting any kind of basic knowledge, however, leads into an infinite regress and, plausibly, to skepticism. The article argues that the third alternative, accepting basic knowledge but rejecting easy knowledge, entails closure failure. This is obviously the case for deductive bootstrapping, but, notably, the problem also arises for inductive bootstrapping. Hence, the set of problems related to the easy knowledge problem has the structure of a trilemma. We are forced to accept easy knowledge, closure failure, or skepticism.     

Fair and dependent versus egoistic and free: effects of semantic and evaluative priming on the ‘Ring Measure of Social Values’

Two experiments investigated the influence of priming trait concepts associated with cooperation versus competition on cooperative choices in the ‘Ring Measure of Social Values’. While models of associative memory explain priming effects on immediate associative responses, they fail to provide a sufficient account for the impact of priming on deliberate, voluntary behaviours, because the same activated concepts (e.g. ‘strong’, ‘profit’, ‘success’) may foster opposite behavioural tendencies (i.e. raise competitive impulses or remind the individual of a cooperation norm). The hypothesis is proposed and tested that the evaluative component of the prime stimuli moderates the behavioural tendency (approach versus avoidance) elicited by the semantic priming component. Accordingly, Experiment 1 shows that both positively toned concepts linked to cooperation as well as negatively toned concepts linked to competition lead to increased cooperative choices. Experiment 2 demonstrates that simple, invariant properties of the prime stimuli are more readily extracted than more complex, interactive prime relations. In general, the priming effects are confined to subjects who lack a consistent, pre-experimental value orientation. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Forecasting from ignorance: the use and usefulness of recognition in lay predictions of sports events

Whereas previous studies on how people make forecasts of sports events focused primarily on experts, we examined how laypeople do this task. In particular, we (a) tested the recognition heuristic [Goldstein, D. G., & Gigerenzer, G. (2002). Models of ecological rationality: the recognition heuristic. Psychological Review, 109, 75-90], which requires partial ignorance, against four alternative mechanisms in describing laypeople's forecasts for the European Soccer Championships 2004; (b) evaluated how well recognition predicted the outcomes of the matches compared to direct indicators of team strength (e.g., past performance, rankings); and (c) studied the less-is-more effect--the phenomenon that knowing less leads to more correct forecasts than knowing more--which can occur when the recognition heuristic is used. Two groups of participants (laypeople, experts) made forecasts for the first-round matches of the tournament. Of the five candidate mechanisms, the recognition heuristic predicted laypeople's forecasts best: when applicable, it accounted for 90% of the forecasts. The recognition heuristic correctly predicted the actual winner of the matches substantially better than chance but did not achieve the accuracy of direct indicators of team strength. The experts made more correct forecasts than the laypeople. Moreover, we found no benefit of ignorance among the group of laypeople, although the conditions for a less-is-more effect specified by Goldstein and Gigerenzer were fulfilled.     

Prevention of Postpartum Depression in Low-Income Women: Development of the Mamás y Bebés/Mothers and Babies Course

A prenatal intervention designed to prevent the onset of major depressive episodes (MDEs) during pregnancy and postpartum was pilot tested at a public sector women’s clinic. The Mamás y Bebés/Mothers and Babies Course is an intervention developed in Spanish and English that uses a cognitive-behavioral mood management framework, and incorporates social learning concepts, attachment theory, and socio-cultural issues. The four goals of this project were to develop the intervention, assess its acceptability, test the feasibility of conducting a randomized trial with public sector patients, and obtain estimates of its effect size. Forty-one pregnant women at high risk for developing MDEs were randomized to the Mothers and Babies Course (n = 21) or a comparison condition (n = 20). Assessments occurred during pregnancy and at 1, 3, 6, and 12 months postpartum. Differences in terms of depression symptom levels or incidence of MDEs between the two groups did not reach statistical significance in this pilot trial. However, the MDE incidence rates of 14% for the intervention condition versus 25% for the comparison condition represent a small effect size (h = 0.28) that will be further examined in a larger scale study. The intervention was well received by the participants and implementation of a randomized trial appeared quite feasible as indicated by our follow-up rate of 91% at 12 months. Implications for the continuing development of preventive interventions for perinatal depression are discussed.     

Consciousness and emotion: ERP modulation and attentive vs. pre-attentive elaboration of emotional facial expressions by backward masking

Facial stimulus processing is an important topic to explain how people comprehend affective disposition in others. The effect of attentive and pre-attentive elaboration of emotional facial expression was explored in the present research by using backward masking procedure. Specifically, unconscious mental process of emotion comprehension was analyzed: pictures presenting a happy, sad, angry, fearful, disgusted, surprised expressions were submitted to 21 subjects in both attentive and pre-attentive conditions and event-related potentials (ERPs) were registered in the two conditions. The two processes, attentive and pre-attentive, seem to be similar in their nature, since they are marked by analogous ERP deflections. In fact, two ERP effects were found, a positive (P300) deflection, maximally distributed on the parietal regions, and a negative (N200) deflection, more localized on the frontal sites. Nevertheless, some differences between the two conditions were found in terms of quantitative modulations of the two peaks. The N200 effect, ampler in attentive condition, may be considered such as an index of conscious processing of emotional faces, whereas the P3 (P3a) effect, higher in pre-attentive condition, was considered a specific marker of the automatic, unconscious process during the emotional face comprehension.     

Mood impact on cardiovascular reactivity when task difficulty is unclear

Research in the context of the mood-behavior-model (Gendolla in Rev Gen Psychol 4:348–408, 2000) has shown that moods can have an impact on effort mobilization due to congruency effects on demand appraisals. However, the mood research literature suggests that mood may also influence effort mobilization by its impact on appraisals of the instrumentality of success. In a single factor (mood valence: negative vs. neutral vs. positive) between-persons design, participants performed a memory task under conditions of unclear task difficulty. By successfully performing the task, participants could earn the chance to win a monetary reward. As predicted for tasks with unclear difficulty, effort mobilization—assessed as cardiovascular reactivity—increased from negative to positive mood. This effect was mediated by the subjective probability of winning the monetary reward for successful performance. These results demonstrate for the first time that mood can influence effort mobilization via the estimated instrumentality of success.     

“I Hope I Will Be Able to Go Back to My Home City”: Narratives of Suffering and Survival of Children in Palestine

Psychological Studies - In light of critical psychology and socio-constructionist theories, the present work aims at analyzing attitudes of political agency, psychological adjustment to trauma, and...