Vision merges with touch in a purely tactile discrimination

To construct a coherent percept of the world, the brain continuously combines information across multiple sensory modalities. Simple stimuli from different modalities are usually assumed to be processed in distinct brain areas. However, there is growing evidence that simultaneous stimulation of multiple modalities can influence the activity in unimodal sensory areas and improve or impair performance in unimodal tasks. Do these effects reflect a genuine cross-modal integration of sensory signals, or are they due to changes in the perceiver's ability to locate the stimulus in time and space? We used a behavioral measure to differentiate between these explanations. Our results demonstrate that, under certain circumstances, a noninformative flash of light can have facilitative or detrimental effects on a simple tactile discrimination. The effect of the visual flash mimics that produced by a constant tactile pedestal stimulus. These findings reveal that sensory signals from different modalities can be integrated, even for perceptual judgments within a single modality.     

The developmental mental-disorder histories of adults with posttraumatic stress disorder: a prospective longitudinal birth cohort study

Clinical and epidemiologic studies have established that posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is highly comorbid with other mental disorders. However, such studies have largely relied on adults' retrospective reports to ascertain comorbidity. The authors examined the developmental mental health histories of adults with PTSD using data on mental disorders assessed across the first 3 decades of life among members of the longitudinal Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study; 100% of those diagnosed with past-year PTSD and 93.5% of those with lifetime PTSD at age 26 had met criteria for another mental disorder between ages 11 and 21. Most other mental disorders had first onsets by age 15. Of new cases of PTSD arising between ages 26 and 32, 96% had a prior mental disorder and 77% had been diagnosed by age 15. These data suggest PTSD almost always develops in the context of other mental disorders. Research on the etiology of PTSD may benefit from taking lifetime developmental patterns of comorbidity into consideration. Juvenile mental-disorder histories may help indicate which individuals are most likely to develop PTSD in populations at high risk of trauma exposure.     

Discrepant fluency increases subjective truth

The present experiment tested the hypothesis that perceptual fluency affects truth judgments especially when the fluency has changed. Participants were asked to judge the truth of statements that were printed in different colors. Perceptual fluency was manipulated by color contrast. Change versus no change of fluency was manipulated by using preceding statements that had the same or a different contrast. As expected, highly fluent statements were judged as more probably true than statements with a low fluency but this effect occurred only when the high fluency meant a change from previous fluency. The role of discrepancies in subjective experiences in terms of their informativeness for social judgments is discussed.     

Bicultural identity, bilingualism, and psychological adjustment in multicultural societies: immigration-based and globalization-based acculturation

ABSTRACT The present investigation examined the impact of bicultural identity, bilingualism, and social context on the psychological adjustment of multicultural individuals. Our studies targeted three distinct types of biculturals: Mainland Chinese immigrants in Hong Kong, Filipino domestic workers (i.e., sojourners) in Hong Kong, and Hong Kong and Mainland Chinese college students. Individual differences in Bicultural Identity Integration (BII; Benet-Martínez, Leu, Lee, & Morris, 2002 ) positively predicted psychological adjustment for all the samples except sojourners even after controlling for the personality traits of neuroticism and self-efficacy. Cultural identification and language abilities also predicted adjustment, although these associations varied across the samples in meaningful ways. We concluded that, in the process of managing multiple cultural environments and group loyalties, bilingual competence, and perceiving one's two cultural identities as integrated are important antecedents of beneficial psychological outcomes.     

Prior knowledge and exemplar frequency

New concepts can be learned by statistical associations, as well as by relevant existing knowledge. We examined the interaction of these two processes by manipulating exemplar frequency and thematic knowledge and considering their interaction through computational modeling. Exemplar frequency affects category learning, with high-frequency items learned more quickly than low-frequency items, and prior knowledge usually speeds category learning. In two experiments in which both of these factors were manipulated, we found that the effects of frequency are greatly reduced when stimulus features are linked by thematic prior knowledge and that frequency effects on single stimulus features can actually be reversed by knowledge. We account for these results with the knowledge resonance model of category learning (Rehder & Murphy, 2003) and conclude that prior knowledge may change representations so that empirical effects, such as those caused by frequency manipulations, are modulated.     

Integrating personality,context, relationship,and emotion type into a model of display rules

This research sets out to examine individual variations in perceptions of display rules. Based upon Mischel and Shoda’s [Mischel, W., & Shoda, Y. (1995). A cognitive-affective system theory of personality: Reconceptualizing situations, dispositions, dynamics, and invariance in personality structure. Psychological Review, 102, 246–268.] model of the Cognitive-Affective Personality System (CAPS), we proposed that extraversion and neuroticism would serve to explain within-cultural individual differences and within-individual differences in endorsement of display rules. To test this hypothesis, participants reported the expressivity level of the display rule they endorsed by responding to the revised version of the Display Rule Assessment Inventory. Multi-level analyses showed that compared to those of introverts, the display rules of extraverts tended to be more suppressive when the relationship was distant rather than close. Extraversion also enhanced a neurotic’s degree of suppression in public compared to private situations. Processes describing how personality interacts with situations in personalizing display rules were offered in light of the CAPS model to account for these interactions between personality and situation in the operation of display rules for emotional expression.     

The cost of question concealment: eye-tracking and MEG evidence

Although natural language appears to be largely compositional, the meanings of certain expressions cannot be straightforwardly recovered from the meanings of their parts. This study examined the online processing of one such class of expressions: concealed questions, in which the meaning of a complex noun phrase (the proof of the theorem) shifts to a covert question (what the proof of the theorem is) when mandated by a sub-class of question-selecting verbs (e.g., guess). Previous behavioral and magnetoencephalographic (MEG) studies have reported a cost associated with converting an entity denotation to an event. Our study tested whether both types of meaning-shift affect the same computational resources by examining the effects elicited by concealed questions in eye-tracking and MEG. Experiment 1 found evidence from eye-movements that verbs requiring the concealed question interpretation require more processing time than verbs that do not support a shift in meaning. Experiment 2 localized the cost of the concealed question interpretation in the left posterior temporal region, an area distinct from that affected by complement coercion. Experiment 3 presented the critical verbs in isolation and found no posterior temporal effect, confirming that the effect of Experiment 2 reflected sentential, and not lexical-level, processing.     

Goal neglect and Spearman's g: competing parts of a complex task

In goal neglect, a person ignores some task requirement though being able to describe it. Goal neglect is closely related to general intelligence or C. Spearman's (1904) g (J. Duncan, H. Emslie, P. Williams, R. Johnson, & C. Freer, 1996). The authors tested the role of task complexity in neglect and the hypothesis that different task components in some sense compete for attention. In contrast to many kinds of attentional limits, increasing the real-time demands of one task component does not promote neglect of another. Neither does neglect depend on preparation for different possible events in a block of trials. Instead, the key factor is complexity in the whole body of knowledge specified in task instructions. The authors suggest that as novel activity is constructed, relevant facts, rules, and requirements must be organized into a "task model." As this model increases in complexity, different task components compete for representation, and vulnerable components may be lost. Construction of effective task models is closely linked to g.     

Changes in cue associability across training in human causal learning

A series of experiments studied the amount learned about two food cues (A and B) whose presentation in a meal was followed by an allergy (+) in a fictitious patient. Participants were trained with A+ and C+ in Phase 1 and then with AB+ or AB++ in Phase 2. Subsequent testing revealed that BC was more allergenic than AD, showing that more had been learned about B than A in Phase 2. Participants were also trained with A+, then with AB+, and finally with AB++. The results of interpolating AB+ between A+ and AB++ training were consistent with the hypothesis that pretraining with Cue A selectively suppressed attention to its associate across the AB+ trials and, thereby, reduced the amount subsequently learned about B on AB++ trials.     

Self-affirmation increases acceptance of health-risk information among UK adult smokers with low socioeconomic status.

This study reports an experiment designed to test whether self-affirmation can overcome defensive processing of risk information in a sample of UK adult smokers with low socioeconomic status. Participants (N = 57) were randomized to either a self-affirmation or control condition before reading a government-sponsored antismoking leaflet and completing measures of message acceptance, intention, and self-efficacy. Participants' subsequent behavior (taking leaflets) was recorded surreptitiously. Results showed that the manipulation significantly increased message acceptance, intention and behavior, and that the effects of the manipulation on behavior were mediated through message acceptance and intention. The practical and theoretical implications of the findings are discussed in relation to the possible use of self-affirmation manipulations to enhance the effectiveness of smoking cessation interventions.