Women in power-themed tasks: Need for power predicts task enjoyment and power stress

The implicit power motive predicts individuals’ involvement in activities that allow them to have impact and influence on other people. Moreover, substantial evidence indicates that thwarting individuals’ implicit power motive relates to so-called power stress. The present series of studies addresses both topics among female participants. In study 1, findings indicate that the strength of the implicit power motive moderates the relationship between women’s self-reported dominance and their evaluations of a power-related task: A significant link between self-reported dominance and both motivation for task participation and task enjoyment could be verified only when the implicit power motive was well-pronounced. In the subsequent studies, actual and anticipated thwarting of the satisfaction of a strong implicit power motive was associated with different psychological and behavioral indicators of power stress. Participants with a high implicit power motive felt more negative affect (study 2), reported more negative explicit (study 3) and implicit (study 4) attitudes towards a dominant target person, and were coded more often for visible frown reactions (study 5) when the satisfaction of their implicit power motive was (potentially) thwarted compared to participants with a low implicit power motive and participants with a high implicit power motive that was, however, not at risk of being thwarted.

     

Increased arithmetic complexity is associated with domain-general but not domain-specific magnitude processing in children: A simultaneous fNIRS-EEG study

The investigation of the neural underpinnings of increased arithmetic complexity in children is essential for developing educational and therapeutic approaches and might provide novel measures to assess the effects of interventions. Although a few studies in adults and children have revealed the activation of bilateral brain regions during more complex calculations, little is known about children. We investigated 24 children undergoing one-digit and two-digit multiplication tasks while simultaneously recording functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) and electroencephalography (EEG) data. FNIRS data indicated that one-digit multiplication was associated with brain activity in the left superior parietal lobule (SPL) and intraparietal sulcus (IPS) extending to the left motor area, and two-digit multiplication was associated with activity in bilateral SPL, IPS, middle frontal gyrus (MFG), left inferior parietal lobule (IPL), and motor areas. Oscillatory EEG data indicated theta increase and alpha decrease in parieto-occipital sites for both one-digit and two-digit multiplication. The contrast of two-digit versus one-digit multiplication yielded greater activity in right MFG and greater theta increase in frontocentral sites. Activation in frontal areas and theta band data jointly indicate additional domain-general cognitive control and working memory demands for heightened arithmetic complexity in children. The similarity in parietal activation between conditions suggests that children rely on domain-specific magnitude processing not only for two-digit but—in contrast to adults—also for one-digit multiplication problem solving. We conclude that in children, increased arithmetic complexity tested in an ecologically valid setting is associated with domain-general processes but not with alteration of domain-specific magnitude processing.     

Digital��nye dereven??iki/digital villagers: Russian online projects from the countryside

The rapid growth of the Russian Internet offers great advantages, especially for geographical and cultural peripheries. Nevertheless, the locational inequality in Internet usage within the country has not yet been bridged. Meanwhile, some Russian villagers living in the countryside have started to ??blog back?? to the metropolitan centres. How is the Russian village represented in these accounts by digital??nye dereven??iki? What power relations are characteristic of villagers and townspeople, as they meet in online forums and blogs? The case studies presented in this essay show that, although the traditional dichotomist opposition between centre and periphery has undergone substantial redefinition, the significance of these concepts as value-loaded, culturally coded discursive entities still prevails. The manifestation of hybrid identities, explored in recent research on transnational diasporic communities, has not yet affected the rather static conceptions of core and periphery at work within Russian borders and on the Russian Internet.     

Response priming driven by local contrast, not subjective brightness

We demonstrate qualitative dissociations of brightness processing in visuomotor priming and conscious vision. Speeded keypress responses to the brighter of two luminance targets were performed in the presence of preceding dark and bright primes (clearly visible and flanking the targets) whose apparent brightness values were enhanced or attenuated by a visual illusion. Response times to the targets were greatly affected by consistent versus inconsistent arrangements of the primes, relative to the targets (response priming). Priming effects could systematically contradict subjective brightness matches, such that one prime could appear brighter than the other but could prime as if it were darker. Systematic variation of the illusion showed that response-priming effects depended only on local flanker-background contrast, not on the subjective appearance of the flankers. Our findings suggest that speeded motor responses, as opposed to conscious perceptual judgments, access an early phase of lightness and brightness processing prior to full lightness constancy.     

The “dual usage problem” in the explanations of “joint attention” and children’s socioemotional development: A reconceptualization

The term “joint attention”, which first gained currency in the early 1960s in studies of the development of language and symbolic thought, remains significant in the developmental literature. However, its meaning is unclear. A definitional problem exists similar to what Patterson [Patterson, M. L. (1982). A sequential functional model of nonverbal exchange. Psychological Review, 89, 231–249] described as the “dual usage” problem in the study of behaviour. The dual usage problem manifests when the behaviours of interest are used interchangeably with the function served by those behaviours. Similarly, the behaviours or skills that are taken to show joint attention are used interchangeably with the functions served by these behaviours. Scant attention is given to how the behaviours are generated and regulated and how they contribute to development. The purpose of the present position paper was: (1) to identify and illustrate the ways in which the behaviours and functions of joint attention have been confounded in the literature; (2) to provide a revised operationalization of joint attention incorporating the idea of Consummative Joint Attention, which is defined as a process variable that integrates these two theoretically different and complementary aspects of “joint attention;” and (3) to test this revised definition with evidence from a sample of hearing mothers and their 18- to 36-month-old hearing or deaf toddlers. We suggest that a reconceptualization and revised definition of joint attention as a process served by a particular sequence of complementary and well-timed events in the behaviour of mother–child interaction are particularly well-suited to testing joint attention as an early prelingual mechanism and to detecting early problems with psychosocial and adaptive development created by ineffective patterns of social interaction.     

Semantic processing of crowded stimuli?

Effects of semantic processing of crowded characters were investigated using numbers as stimuli. In an identification task, typical spacing effects in crowding were replicated. Using the same stimuli in a magnitude comparison task, a smaller effect of spacing was observed as well as an effect of response congruency. These effects were replicated in a second experiment with varying stimulus-onset asynchronies. In addition, decreasing performance with increasing onset-asynchrony (so-called type-B masking) for incongruent flankers indicates semantic processing of target and flankers. The data show that semantic processing takes place even in crowded stimuli. This argues strongly against common accounts of crowding in terms of early stimulus-driven impairments of processing.     

Dreaming of white bears: the return of the suppressed at sleep onset

The present study examined the effects of thought suppression on sleep-onset mentation. It was hypothesized that the decrease of attentional control in the transition to sleep would lead to a rebound of a suppressed thought in hypnagogic mentation. Twenty-four young adults spent two consecutive nights in a sleep laboratory. Half of the participants were instructed to suppress a target thought, whereas the other half freely thought of anything at all. To assess target thought frequency, three different measures were used in the wake state and mentation reports were repeatedly prompted by a computer at sleep onset. In support of the hypothesis, results revealed a reversal of target thought frequency at sleep onset: Participants instructed to suppress reported fewer target thoughts than did controls before falling asleep, but more target thoughts afterwards.     

Visual attention amplifies response priming of pointing movements to color targets

We studied the influence of spatial visual attention on the time course of primed pointing movements. We measured pointing responses to color targets preceded by color stimuli priming either the same response as the target or the opposite response. The effects of visual attention at the prime and target locations were studied by varying both the cue-prime and prime-target intervals when presenting either exogenous attentional cues or, in a separate experiment, endogenous cues whose processing was a precondition for performing the task. Pointing trajectories revealed large priming effects in which pointing responses were first controlled by prime signals and then captured in midflight by target signals. Priming effects were strongly amplified when the relevant prime locations were visually attended at optimal cue-prime SOAs, with attention modulating the entire time course of the primed pointing movements. We propose that visual attention amplifies the earliest waves of visuomotor feedforward information, elicited in turn by primes and by targets.     

On believing indirectly for practical reasons

Philosophical Studies - It is often argued that there are no practical reasons for belief because we could not believe for such reasons. A recent reply by pragmatists is that we can often believe...