Emotion processing facilitates working memory performance

The effect of emotional stimulus content on working memory performance has been investigated with conflicting results, as both emotion-dependent facilitation and impairments are reported in the literature. To clarify this issue, 52 adult participants performed a modified visual 2-back task with highly arousing positive stimuli (sexual scenes), highly arousing negative stimuli (violent death) and low-arousal neutral stimuli. Emotional stimulus processing was found to facilitate task performance relative to that of neutral stimuli, both in regards to response accuracy and reaction times. No emotion-dependent differences in false-alarm rates were found. These results indicate that emotional information can have a facilitating effect on working memory maintenance and processing of information.     

Emotional responses to honour situations in Turkey and the northern USA

The main goal of the current research is to investigate emotional reactions to situations that implicate honour in Turkish and northern American cultural groups. In Studies 1A and 1B, participants rated the degree to which a variety of events fit their prototypes for honour-related situations. Both Turkish and American participants evaluated situations generated by their co-nationals as most central to their prototypes of honour-related situations. Study 2 examined emotional responses to Turkish or US-generated situations that varied in centrality to the prototype. Highly central situations and Turkish-generated situations elicited stronger emotions than less central situations and US-generated situations. Americans reported higher levels of positive emotions in response to honour-enhancing situations than did Turkish participants. These findings demonstrate that the prototypes of honour relevant situations differ for Turkish and northern American people, and that Turkish honour relevant situations are more emotion-laden than are northern American honour relevant situations.     

Hating the cute kitten or loving the aggressive pit-bull: EC effects depend on CS–US relations

Evaluative conditioning (EC) refers to valence changes of initially neutral stimuli (CSs) through repeated pairings with positive or negative stimuli (USs). The current study is about the moderating role of qualifiers that specify the CS–US relation during these pairings. We show successful EC with pictures of men (CSs) and of liked/disliked animals or landscapes (USs). More importantly, the same pairings resulted in standard and reversed EC effects depending on semantic qualifier of the CS–US relation. CSs loving positive (negative) USs became more positive (negative), while CSs loathing positive (negative) USs became more negative (positive). These data favour a propositional EC account (De Houwer, 2009) over a purely associative account, as they show that it is not only relevant that CS and US are related, but how they are related.     

ON THE IMPORTANCE OF KARL CHRISTIAN FRIEDRICH KRAUSE'S PANENTHEISM

Panentheism is an often‐discussed alternative to Classical theism, and almost any discussion of panentheism starts by way of acknowledging Karl Christian Friedrich Krause (1781–1832) as the person who coined the term.¹ However, apart from this tribute, Krause's own panentheism is almost completely unknown. In what follows, I first present a brief overview of Krause's life and correct some misconceptions of his work before I turn to the core ideas of Krause's own panentheistic system of philosophy. In brief, Krause elaborates a scientific holism that is anchored in intellectual intuition of the Absolute as the one principle of being and recognition. The task of philosophical speculation consequently is twofold: the analytic‐ascending part of philosophy proceeds by way of transcendental reflection and according to Krause enables us to obtain intellectual intuition. The synthetic‐descending part of philosophy starts by way of showing that science as a whole is an explication of the original union of the Absolute as apprehended in intellectual intuition. Once this is achieved, Krause argues that the emerging philosophy of science is most adequately referred to as “panentheism” since everything is what it is “in and through” the Absolute, while the Absolute itself is not reducible to anything in particular. I end by showing how to relate Krause's panentheism to recent philosophical discussion.     

Measuring Cultural Intelligence in the Turkish Context

The present article reports the results of two studies designed to evaluate the psychometric properties of the cultural intelligence (CI) scale in the Turkish context. The proposed four‐factor (cognitive, metacognitive, motivational, and behavioral) structure of CI was confirmed by confirmatory factor analysis. The results supported the discriminant validity of the four‐factor model of the CI scale in relation to the Big Five personality factors and the emotional intelligence factors. Furthermore, CI explained additional variance in intercultural task performance over and above that explained by demographic characteristics and emotional intelligence. With regard to internal consistency and test–retest reliability, the CI scale showed acceptable results and was in concordance with the prior studies. Taken together, these findings suggest that the Turkish version of CI scale is a reliable and valid measure that can be used to measure individual's intercultural capabilities.     

Adaptive memory: enhanced source memory for animate entities

ABSTRACT

The animacy effect refers to enhanced memory for animate over inanimate items. In two studies, we examined whether this memory advantage generalises to source memory. A multinomial processing tree model was used to disentangle item recognition, source memory, and guessing processes. In Study 1, animate and inanimate words were presented at different spatial locations on the screen. Animacy was associated with enhanced source memory for the spatial locations of the items. In Study 2, pseudowords were associated with animate and inanimate properties. Replicating previous results, the pseudowords were better remembered when they were associated with animate properties than when they were associated with inanimate properties. What is more, participants had enhanced source memory for the association between the pseudowords and the animate properties. The results strengthen the idea that animate items are associated with richer mnemonic representations than inanimate items.     

Bodily Thought and the Corpse Problem

Abstract: A key consideration in favour of animalism—the thesis that persons like you and me are identical to the animals we walk around with—is that it avoids a too many thinkers problem that arises for non‐animalist positions. The problem is that it seems that any person‐constituting animal would itself be able to think, but if wherever there is a thinking person there is a thinking animal distinct from it then there are at least two thinkers wherever there is a thinking person. Most find this result unacceptable, and some think it provides an excellent reason for accepting animalism. It has been argued, however, that animalists face an analogous problem of too many thinkers, the so‐called corpse problem, as they must accept both 1) that we are distinct from our bodies, as our bodies can and we cannot persist through death as corpses and 2) that our bodies can think. I argue that the best reasons animalists have for accepting the two claims that generate the distinctness part of the problem double up as reasons to reject the claim that our bodies can think, and vice versa. I argue further that Lockeans cannot similarly get around their problem of too many thinkers.     

Using stressful films to analyze risk factors for PTSD in analogue experimental studies – which film works best?

Abstract

To understand mental disorders, analogue paradigms provide an indispensable contribution. In posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), the stressful film paradigm is a frequently used analogue approach: Films depicting traumatic events are shown to non-clinical participants in order to elicit stress responses analogue to responses to traumatic events in real life. Previous studies used a large variety of films, which is problematic with regard to the comparability of results. The main goal of this study was to identify a film clip that (a) consistently provokes stress reactions and (b) provokes reactions that are as similar as possible to traumatic stress.

We randomly exposed 105 male and female participants to one of four stressful films, differing, e.g., in content and origin. Intrusive memories of the film, reported immediately after the film and during a diary phase of three days, as well as distress, heart rate, and several mood states were measured. A film clip depicting rape elicited the most consistent reactions that were characterized by a higher heart rate, more distress and more intrusive memories, compared to the other three clips. Intrusive memories across all films were especially related to an increase in heart rate and disgust in response to the film.     

High working memory capacity does not always attenuate distraction: Bayesian evidence in support of the null hypothesis

Individual differences in working memory capacity (WMC) predict individual differences in basically all tasks that demand some form of cognitive labor, especially if the persons conducting the task are exposed to distraction. As such, tasks that measure WMC are very useful tools in individual-differences research. However, the predictive power of those tasks, combined with conventional statistical tools that cannot support the null hypothesis, also makes it difficult to study the limits of that power. In this article, we review studies that have failed to find a relationship between WMC and effects of auditory distraction on visual–verbal cognitive performance, and use meta-analytic Bayesian statistics to test the null hypothesis. The results favor the assumption that individual differences in WMC are, in fact, not (always) related to the magnitude of distraction. Implications for the nature of WMC are discussed.