Memory for details about people: familiarity,relatedness, and gender congruency

This study examines factors that influence memory for details about people. In two experiments, subjects learned fictitious details about familiar (friends, relatives) and/or unfamiliar individuals, and were tested both immediately and after a 1-week delay. To control for a confounding between familiarity and genetic relatedness in Experiment 1, in Experiment 2 specific relationships (identical twin, first cousin, acquaintance) were assigned to unfamiliar individuals. Across experiments, retention was enhanced for familiar compared to unfamiliar individuals, for friends/acquaintances compared to relatives, for more closely than distantly related individuals, and for individuals of the opposite gender as the subject.     

Task-set reconfiguration and perceptual processing: behavioral and electrophysiological evidence

Oriet and Jolic?ur (2003) proposed that an endogenous task-set reconfiguration process acts as a hard bottleneck during which even early perceptual processing is impossible. We examined this assumption using a psychophysiological approach. Participants were required to switch between magnitude and parity judgment tasks within a predictable task sequence while event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded. Stimulus contrast and response stimulus interval (RSI) were manipulated. Behavioral data demonstrated typical task switch costs that decreased as RSI increased. However, whereas ERP analysis of visual ERP component latencies sensitively revealed the contrast effect, a switch-specific postponement of perceptual processing during task-set reconfiguration at short RSIs was not observed. The present findings indicate that the process of task-set reconfiguration does not constitute a hard bottleneck that delays perceptual processing.     

Cognitive reappraisal increases heart rate variability in response to an anger provocation

Adaptive self-regulatory responses to negative events are associated with good mental health, social functioning, and physical health. Two forms of emotion regulation that have received attention within the context of anger are cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression. Research suggests that greater heart rate variability (HRV) is a physiological indicator of adaptive emotion regulation and decreased mental load. In the present experiment, we recorded HRV while 131 undergraduate women viewed an anger-inducing video of a fellow student arguing for a position counter to that of the participant on an important political issue. Immediately prior to viewing, participants were instructed to reappraise, suppress their emotions, or simply watch the video as normal. Participants in the reappraisal condition showed increased HRV whereas those in the suppression and control condition showed no such increase. These results provide support for increased HRV as a biological correlate of adaptive emotion regulation. One implication is that cognitive reappraisal might afford greater autonomic flexibility when an individual is confronted with anger-inducing events.     

Visual search with animal fear-relevant stimuli: A tale of two procedures

The present study assessed preferential attentional processing of animal fear-relevant stimuli in two procedures, Search and Interference tasks, which have been suggested to reflect on attentional capture due to the fear-relevance of the stimuli presented. In the Search task, participants (N = 154) searched fear-relevant (i.e., snakes and spiders) and non fear-relevant (i.e., fish and birds) backgrounds to determine the presence or absence of a deviant animal from the opposite category. In the Interference task, the same participants searched for the presence or absence of a neutral target (a cat) when either a snake, spider or no distracter were embedded amongst backgrounds of other animal stimuli. Replicating previous findings, preferential attentional processing of animal fear-relevant stimuli was evident in both procedures and participants who specifically feared one animal but not the other showed enhanced preferential processing of their feared fear-relevant animal. However, across the entire sample, there was no relationship between self-reported levels of animal fear and preferential processing which may reflect on the fact that substantial preferential attentional processing of fear-relevant animals was evident in the entire sample. Also, preferential attentional processing as assessed in the two tasks was not related. Delayed disengagement from fear-relevant stimuli appeared to underlie performance in the search task but not in the interference task.     

Performance and learning goals for emotion regulation

Goal orientation theory is concerned with performance and learning goals in academic, athletic, and other ability areas. Here we examine performance and learning goals for emotion regulation. We define performance goals for emotion regulation as seeking to prove one’s ability to manage emotions; learning goals for emotion regulation are defined as seeking to improve one’s ability to manage emotions. In two studies, we tested the hypothesis that performance goals for emotion regulation would be associated with greater use of defensive emotion regulation strategies and depressive symptoms. Results from both studies showed that individuals with greater performance goals for emotion regulation reported higher levels of rumination and thought suppression and greater depressive symptoms, while individuals with greater learning goals reported greater use of cognitive reappraisal. The findings suggest that goals for emotion regulation may help explain individual differences in use of defensive versus constructive emotion regulation strategies.     

Flow experience in physical activity: Examination of the internal structure of flow from a process-related perspective

Considering the phenomenology of flow experience reflects attentional processes, Nakamura and Csikszentmihalyi (Handbook of positive psychology, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002) classified the components of flow experience into proximal conditions and the characteristics of a subjective state while being in flow. The present study was conducted to clarify the concept of flow through examination of the interrelationships among the components from a process-related perspective. A total of 1,048 participants completed the Japanese versions of the Flow State Scale-2 (Kawabata et al. in Psychol Sport Exerc 9:465–485, 2008), and based on their scores, 591 respondents were considered to be in a flow state during their physical activity. A proposed higher-order confirmatory factor model and a full structural equation model were tested for the flow respondents. The results of the higher-order model indicated that the 9 flow factors were empirically classified into the flow state and its proximal condition. Furthermore, the outcomes of the full structural model preliminarily supported the hypothesized sequential relationships among flow factors.     

Mental contrasting facilitates academic performance in school children

Two brief intervention studies tested whether teaching students to mentally contrast a desired future with its present reality resulted in better academic performance than teaching students to only think about the desired future. German elementary school children (N = 49; Study 1) and US middle school children (N = 63; Study 2) from low-income neighborhoods who were taught mental contrasting achieved comparatively higher scores in learning foreign language vocabulary words after 2 weeks or 4 days, respectively. Results have implications for research on the self-regulation of commitment to solve assigned tasks in classroom settings, and for increasing academic performance in school children in low-income areas.     

Vision and intelligence at age 83 in the Lothian Birth Cohort 1921

The extent to which visual function, measured as near and distant visual acuity and contrast sensitivity, is correlated with concurrently measured cognitive function and prior intellectual ability was investigated in a narrow age range group known as the Lothian Birth Cohort of 1921 (LBC1921). Participants were aged ~ 83 years at the time of testing (N = 321). A well-fitting structural equation model highlighted a significant contribution of a latent visual trait to a general fluid intelligence factor in old age, independent of the contribution from childhood intelligence. Additionally, childhood intelligence made a significant contribution to the general visual factor in old age. However, the model fitted equally well when the fluid intelligence factor is assumed to be a cause of the visual function latent trait, in which case childhood intelligence does not significantly influence vision in old age. We discuss these results with respect to four possible mechanisms by which vision and cognition can come to be correlated over the lifecourse.     

Is there an advantage for recognizing multi-modal emotional stimuli?

Emotions can be recognized whether conveyed by facial expressions, linguistic cues (semantics), or prosody (voice tone). However, few studies have empirically documented the extent to which multi-modal emotion perception differs from uni-modal emotion perception. Here, we tested whether emotion recognition is more accurate for multi-modal stimuli by presenting stimuli with different combinations of facial, semantic, and prosodic cues. Participants judged the emotion conveyed by short utterances in six channel conditions. Results indicated that emotion recognition is significantly better in response to multi-modal versus uni-modal stimuli. When stimuli contained only one emotional channel, recognition tended to be higher in the visual modality (i.e., facial expressions, semantic information conveyed by text) than in the auditory modality (prosody), although this pattern was not uniform across emotion categories. The advantage for multi-modal recognition may reflect the automatic integration of congruent emotional information across channels which enhances the accessibility of emotion-related knowledge in memory.     

The relationship between self-reported animal fear and ERP modulation: Evidence for enhanced processing and fear of harmless invertebrates in snake- and spider-fearful individuals

The present study used ERPs to compare processing of fear-relevant (FR) animals (snakes and spiders) and non-fear-relevant (NFR) animals similar in appearance (worms and beetles). EEG was recorded from 18 undergraduate participants (10 females) as they completed two animal-viewing tasks that required simple categorization decisions. Participants were divided on a post hoc basis into low snake/spider fear and high snake/spider fear groups. Overall, FR animals were rated higher on fear and elicited a larger LPC. However, individual differences qualified these effects. Participants in the low fear group showed clear differentiation between FR and NFR animals on subjective ratings of fear and LPC modulation. In contrast, participants in the high fear group did not show such differentiation between FR and NFR animals. These findings suggest that the salience of feared-FR animals may generalize on both a behavioural and electro-cortical level to other animals of similar appearance but of a non-harmful nature.