Crying threshold and intensity in major depressive disorder

Clinical lore suggests that depression is associated with frequent and intense crying. To test these postulations empirically, a standardized cry-evoking stimulus was presented to depressed and nondepressed participants, and their likelihood of crying and the magnitude of crying-related changes in their emotion experience, behavior, and autonomic physiology were compared. Unexpectedly, crying was no more likely in depressed than in nondepressed participants. Within the nondepressed group, participants who cried exhibited increases in the report and display of sadness and had greater cardiac and electrodermal activation than did participants who did not cry. There was less evidence of this crying-related emotional activation within the depressed group. The lack of emotional activation among clinically depressed participants who cried provides a tantalizing clue concerning how emotions are dysregulated in this disorder.     

Effects of lexicality and distinctiveness on repetition blindness

The repetition blindness (RB) paradigm developed by K. M. Arnell and P. Jolicoeur (1997) was used to examine effects of lexicality (word vs. nonword target pairs) and target distinctiveness on RB. Distinctiveness was manipulated by having both targets (Experiments 1 and 2) or only the first target (Experiment 3) brighter than nontarget items. All 3 experiments demonstrated strong RB for word targets but no RB for nonword targets. This confirms that RB depends on pre-existing memory representations. In fact, there was repetition facilitation for nonwords in Experiments 2 and 3. These experiments also demonstrated that RB is reduced when targets are distinctive. This finding is better understood interms of RB as a failure of memory rather than as a failure of perception.     

The accuracy of abstracts in psychology journals

This article provides an empirically supported reminder of the importance of accuracy in scientific communication. The authors identify common types of inaccuracies in research abstracts and offer suggestions to improve abstract-article agreement. Abstracts accompanying 13% of a random sample of 400 research articles published in 8 American Psychological Association journals during 1997 and 1998 contained data or claims inconsistent with or missing from the body of the article. Error rates ranged from 8% to 18%, although between-journal differences were not significant. Many errors (63%) were unlikely to cause substantive misinterpretations. Unfortunately, 37% of errors found could be seriously misleading with respect to the data or claims presented in the associated article. Although deficient abstracts may be less common in psychology journals than in major medical journals (R. M. Pitkin, M. A. Branagan, & L. F. Burmeister, 1999), there is still cause for concern and need for improvement.     

Background beliefs in Bayesian inference

We report five experiments in which the role of background beliefs in social judgments of posterior probability was investigated. From a Bayesian perspective, people should combine prior probabilities (or base rates) and diagnostic evidence with equal weighting, although previous research shows that base rates are often underweighted. These experiments were designed so that either piece of information was supplied either by personal beliefs or by presented statistics, and regression analyses were performed on individual participants to assess the relative influence of information. We found that both prior probabilities and diagnostic information significantly influenced judgments, whether supplied by beliefs or by statistical information, but that belief-based information tended to dominate the judgments made.     

How (and where) does moral judgment work?

Moral psychology has long focused on reasoning, but recent evidence suggests that moral judgment is more a matter of emotion and affective intuition than deliberate reasoning. Here we discuss recent findings in psychology and cognitive neuroscience, including several studies that specifically investigate moral judgment. These findings indicate the importance of affect, although they allow that reasoning can play a restricted but significant role in moral judgment. They also point towards a preliminary account of the functional neuroanatomy of moral judgment, according to which many brain areas make important contributions to moral judgment although none is devoted specifically to it.     

Culture and beliefs about time: comparisons among black Americans, black Africans, and white Americans

The authors investigated the extent to which racial factors, cultural factors, or both influence a person's beliefs about physical time, personal time, and experienced and remembered duration. A total of 750 Black American, Black African, and White American students responded to a questionnaire on these beliefs about time. Factor analysis was used to compare belief structures. Pairwise comparisons, performed separately for each statement, tested the direction and strength of the reported beliefs. The groups showed many similarities, but they also showed some differences. All 3 groups differed in beliefs about physical and personal time, but they did not differ in beliefs about duration experiences. This evidence does not support simplistic views of racial or cultural influences. Culture may differentially influence beliefs about physical time and personal time. Beliefs about duration experiences may represent an ethnic factor that transcends cultures.     

Suppositions, extensionality, and conditionals: a critique of the mental model theory of Johnson-Laird And Byrne (2002)

P. N. Johnson-Laird and R. M. J. Byrne proposed an influential theory of conditionals in which mental models represent logical possibilities and inferences are drawn from the extensions of possibilities that are used to represent conditionals. In this article, the authors argue that the extensional semantics underlying this theory is equivalent to that of the material, truth-functional conditional, at least for what they term "basic" conditionals, concerning arbitrary problem content. On the basis of both logical argument and psychological evidence, the authors propose that this approach is fundamentally mistaken and that conditionals must be viewed within a suppositional theory based on what philosophical logicians call the Ramsey test. The Johnson-Laird and Byrne theory is critically examined with respect to its account of basic conditionals, nonbasic conditionals, and counterfactuals.