Reduced cognitive control in passionate lovers

Passionate love is associated with intense changes in emotion and attention which are thought to play an important role in the early stages of romantic relationship formation. Although passionate love usually involves enhanced, near-obsessive attention to the beloved, anecdotal evidence suggest that the lover’s concentration for daily tasks like study and work may actually be impaired, suggesting reduced cognitive control. Affect might also contribute to changes in cognitive control. We examined the link between passionate love and cognitive control in a sample of students who had recently become involved in a romantic relationship. Intensity of passionate love as measured by the Passionate Love Scale was shown to correlate with decreased individual efficiency in cognitive control as measured in Stroop and flanker task performance. There was no evidence that affective changes mediate this effect. This study provides the first empirical evidence that passionate love in the early stages of romantic relationship is characterized by impaired cognitive control.     

Disentangling trait from state components in the assessment of egoistic and moralistic self-enhancement

A latent state-trait model has been used to assess the extent to which egoistic and moralistic self-enhancement represent: (a) stable individual differences and (b) systematic effects of the situation and/or the person-situation interaction. Analyses were conducted on a sample of 187 adults (64% females). Findings revealed that both self-enhancement tendencies mostly capture stable interindividual differences, although significant occasion-specific effects were observed. Egoistic self-enhancement presents a higher proportion of trait variance than moralistic self-enhancement. The egoistic dimension was mostly related with the stable (trait) components of conscientiousness and emotional stability. The moralistic dimension, on the contrary, was mostly related with the transient component of emotional stability. Potential explanations for the observed differences between egoistic and moralistic self-enhancement were discussed and interpreted in terms of their implications for personality assessment.     

“So You Wanna Be a Pop Star?”: Schadenfreude Following Another's Misfortune on TV

In this experiment we demonstrate that low self-evaluation individuals experience more schadenfreude following an unfavorable performance of a contestant on a TV show after receiving negative feedback on a self-relevant task, as compared with those who received positive feedback. Moreover, we show that high self-evaluation individuals do not differ in their experience of schadenfreude as a function of feedback. These findings corroborate our argument that in a “double whammy” condition (i.e., low self-evaluation and induced self-threat), individuals will be more motivated to restore their self-worth and, consequently, experience more pleasure at the misfortunes of others.     

The Semantics of Freedom in Agoraphobic Patients: An Empirical Study

This study aimed to empirically test the clinical theory, common to constructivist and constructionist psychotherapeutic approaches, that the semantics of freedom (i.e., bipolar constructs regarding the dimension of meaning “free/constrained”) are psychologically linked to agoraphobia. Repertory grid technique was used to elicit constructs from 30 agoraphobic patients and from a matched control group of patients suffering from other psychological disorders, and the two sets of constructs were compared in terms of their semantic content. Results confirm the hypothesis, suggesting that freedom semantics seem to be prevalent in agoraphobia in terms of both frequency and importance. These results and their limitations are discussed in relation to their clinical applications and in light of the methodological issues arising from the study.     

Bradley’s Regress: Relations, Exemplification, Unity

Different interpretations of Bradley’s regress argument are considered. On the basis of textual evidences, it is argued that the most persuasive is the one that sees the argument as primarily addressing the general issue of unity or connectedness.     

Flux-driven nucleation at interfaces during reactive diffusion

Nucleation of intermetallic compounds and of voids at interfaces during reactive diffusion is treated with account of influence of the flux divergence in the nucleation regions of the real space as an additional term for drift in the size space (in Fokker–Planck equation for nucleation). Such approach enables the construction of effective Gibbs nucleation barrier which may (in the broad region of parameters) increase to infinity meaning the full suppression of nucleation, or, by the contrast, decrease assisting the nucleation. The introduced effective nucleation barriers depend on kinetic factors – on the ratio of diffusivities in nucleating and in neighboring phases. Thus, the competition of stable and metastable phases is reconsidered, as well as nucleation of Kirkendall/Frenkel voids at the interfaces.     

Measurement and Application of Egoistic and Moralistic Self‐enhancement

Five studies were conducted to develop and validate the Egoistic and Moralistic Self‐enhancement (EMS) scale, a new self‐report measure of egoistic and moralistic self‐enhancement. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis provided evidence for a two‐factor structure comprising the tendencies to promote agentic (egoistic) and communal (moralistic) qualities (Study 1). Construct validity was supported by significant correlations with established measures of socially desirable responding, such as the Balanced Inventory of Desirable Responding (Study 2) and the Impression Management scale of the 16 Personality Factors (Study 3). When the EMS scale has been applied in organizational settings, we found that job applicants were more inclined than nonapplicants to promote their own agentic and communal qualities, although differences were more pronounced for egoistic self‐enhancement (Study 4). Findings also suggested that exaggeration of agentic qualities decrease the criterion‐related validity of conscientiousness in predicting job performance (Study 5). Taken together, findings suggest that the EMS scale provides a valid and reliable measure that can be fruitfully used for both theoretical and applied research.     

Quality of management by objectives,task-related stressors,and non-task-related stressors as predictors of stress and job satisfaction among teleworkers

This study examined the effects of management behaviour together with jobrelated and non-job-related stressors on stress experience and job satisfaction among teleworkers. Fifty-four participants were full- or part-time teleworkers, and eighteen participants were members of a nonteleworking control group with comparable working tasks recruited from the same companies. Self-report measures of quality of MBO, task-related stressors, and non-job-related stressors (predictors) were collected, together with measures of participants' stress experience and job satisfaction (criteria). The three predictor variables represented rather independent stress factors. Consistent with expectations, non-job-related stressors were higher for teleworkers working predominantly at home compared to office-centred teleworkers and nonteleworking controls. Moreover, regression analyses indicated significant effects of quality of MBO and non-job-related stressors on teleworkers' stress experience and job satisfaction. Occupational health and management implications of these results for preventive and prospective aspects of telework design are discussed.     

The beat goes on: rhythmic modulation of cortical potentials by imagined tapping

A frequency analysis was used to tag cortical activity from imagined rhythmic movements. Participants synchronized overt and imagined taps with brief visual stimuli presented at a constant rate, alternating between left and right index fingers. Brain potentials were recorded from across the scalp and topographic maps made of their power at the alternation frequency between left and right taps. Two prominent power foci occurred in each hemisphere for both overt and imagined taps, one over sensorimotor cortex and the other over posterior parietal cortex, with homologous foci in opposite hemispheres arising from oscillations 180 degrees out of phase. These findings demonstrate temporal isomorphism at a neural level between overt and imagined movements and illustrate a new approach to studying covert actions.     

Duplicate publication and ‘paper inflation’ in the fractals literature

The similarity of documents in a large database of published Fractals articles was examined for redundancy. Three different text matching techniques were used on published Abstracts to identify redundancy candidates, and predictions were verified by reading full text versions of the redundancy candidate articles. A small fraction of the total articles in the database was judged to be redundant. This was viewed as a lower limit, because it excluded cases where the concepts remained the same, but the text was altered substantially. Far more pervasive than redundant publications were publications that did not violate the letter of redundancy but rather violated the spirit of redundancy. There appeared to be widespread publication maximization strategies. Studies that resulted in one comprehensive paper decades ago now result in multiple papers that focus on one major problem, but are differentiated by parameter ranges, or other stratifying variables. This ‘paper inflation’ is due in large part to the increasing use of metrics (publications, patents, citations, etc) to evaluate research performance, and the researchers’ motivation to maximize the metrics. The views in this paper are solely those of the authors, and do not necessarily represent the views of the Department of the Navy or any of its components, UNAM, University of Virginia or University of Karlsruhe.