Is it a letter? Is it a number? Processing of numbers within SMS shortcuts

For efficiency reasons, words in electronic messages are sometimes formed by combining letters with numbers, as in gr8 for “great.” The aim of this study was to investigate whether a digit incorporated into a letter-digit shortcut would retain its numerosity. A priming paradigm was used with letter-digit shortcuts (e.g., gr8) and matched pseudoshortcuts (e.g., qr8) as primes. The primes were presented simultaneously with sets of dots (targets) for which even/odd decisions were required, or they appeared 250 msec before target onset. When pseudoshortcuts were presented, decision latencies were shorter when the target and the digit in the prime were matched in parity than when they were mismatched. This main effect of match was not significant for shortcuts. The results suggest that the number concepts of digits combined with letters become activated but are quickly suppressed or deactivated when the digit is part of an existing shortcut.     

“We All Have Feelings for Our Girlfriends:” Progressive (?) Representations of Lesbian Lives on the <Emphasis Type="Italic">The L Word</Emphasis>

The Showtime series The L Word (2004–2009) marked one of the first dramatized representations of prominent lesbian characters. While many popular culture scholars are focusing attention on the recent “gaying” of television narrative (e.g., Battles and Hilton-Morrow in Critical Studies in Media Communication 19: 87–105, 2002; Shugart in Text and Performance Quarterly 23: 30–54, 2003; Critical Studies in Media Communication 20: 67–91, 2003), far less attention is given to non-romantic interpersonal relationships surrounding main characters in these narratives. Sexuality scholarship notes that lesbian individuals must negotiate their self-disclosure to heterosexuals (Dindia in Dialectical approaches to studying personal relationships, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Inc., Mahwah, NJ, 1998), and that this can be challenging for forming relationships and maintaining identity (Meyer in Communication Quarterly 51: 262–276, 2004). Ultimately, this essay argues that despite the gains in visibility and even in intimacy, The L Word articulates an ideology of avoidance whereby the underlying problems of heterosexism and homophobia are left unchallenged.     

Impact of social anxiety and social context on college students’ emotion regulation strategy use: An experience sampling study

Motivation and Emotion - Socially anxious individuals typically select more avoidant emotion regulation (ER) strategies than non-anxious individuals, contributing to interpersonal difficulties. The...     

Auditory language comprehension: an event-related fMRI study on the processing of syntactic and lexical information

The functional specificity of different brain areas recruited in auditory language processing was investigated by means of event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while subjects listened to speech input varying in the presence or absence of semantic and syntactic information. There were two sentence conditions containing syntactic structure, i.e., normal speech (consisting of function and content words), syntactic speech (consisting of function words and pseudowords), and two word-list conditions, i.e., real words and pseudowords. The processing of auditory language, in general, correlates with significant activation in the primary auditory cortices and in adjacent compartments of the superior temporal gyrus bilaterally. Processing of normal speech appeared to have a special status, as no frontal activation was observed in this case but was seen in the three other conditions. This difference may point toward a certain automaticity of the linguistic processes used during normal speech comprehension. When considering the three other conditions, we found that these were correlated with activation in both left and right frontal cortices. An increase of activation in the planum polare bilaterally and in the deep portion of the left frontal operculum was found exclusively when syntactic processes were in focus. Thus, the present data may be taken to suggest an involvement of the left frontal and bilateral temporal cortex when processing syntactic information during comprehension.     

Aging and the psychological refractory period: task-coordination strategies in young and old adults

The apparently deleterious effect of aging on dual-task performance is well established, but there is little agreement about the source of this effect. Studies of the psychological refractory period (PRP) indicate that young adults can flexibly control dual-task performance through task-coordination strategies. Thus, the performance of older adults might differ from young adults because older adults use different task-coordination strategies. To test this hypothesis, the executive-process interactive control (EPIC) architecture was applied to quantify the reaction time data from two PRP experiments conducted with young (age 18-26) and older (age 60-70) adults. The results show that participants' ability to coordinate the processing of two tasks did not decline with age. However, dual-task time costs were greater in the older adults. Three sources for this increase were found: generalized slowing, process-specific slowing, and the use of more cautious task-coordination strategies by the older adults.     

Applying artificial neural network models to clinical decision making

Because psychological assessment typically lacks biological gold standards, it traditionally has relied on clinicians' expert knowledge. A more empirically based approach frequently has applied linear models to data to derive meaningful constructs and appropriate measures. Statistical inferences are then used to assess the generality of the findings. This article introduces artificial neural networks (ANNs), flexible nonlinear modeling techniques that test a model's generality by applying its estimates against "future" data. ANNs have potential for overcoming some shortcomings of linear models. The basics of ANNs and their applications to psychological assessment are reviewed. Two examples of clinical decision making are described in which an ANN is compared with linear models, and the complexity of the network performance is examined. Issues salient to psychological assessment are addressed.     

Phonological priming effects on speech onset latencies and viewing times in object naming

An earlier experiment (Meyer, Sleiderink, & Levelt, 1998) had shown that speakers naming object pairs usually inspected the objects in the required order of mention (left object first) and that the viewing time for the left object depended on the word frequency of its name. In the present experiment, object pairs were presented simultaneously with auditory distractor words that could be phonologically related or unrelated to the name of the object to be named first. The speech onset latencies and the viewing times for that object were shorter after related distractors than after unrelated distractors. Since this phonological priming effect, like the word frequency effect, most likely arises during wordform retrieval, we conclude that the shift of gaze from the first to the second object is initiated after the word form of the first object’s name has been accessed.