The protective role of self-determined prejudice regulation in the relationship between intergroup threat and prejudice

Although plenty of evidence supports the link between intergroup threat and prejudice, few intrapersonal moderators of this association have been investigated. One potentially important moderator is the source of motivation underlying prejudice regulation. In Study 1, we examined whether self-determined prejudice regulation reduces the impact of intergroup threat on various outgroup attitude variables (e.g., modern racism, outgroup affect, etc.). Results suggest that being self-determined in one??s motivation to regulate prejudice buffers the impact of intergroup threat on prejudice, whereas regulating prejudice primarily for non-self-determined reasons serves to exacerbate the threat-prejudice effect. In Study 2, a cross-sectional corroboration of this interaction was obtained using structural equation modeling, revealing that the threat-prejudice link differed significantly across groups of prejudice regulators. The role of self-determination in reducing the harmful effects of intergroup threat is discussed, and implications for prejudice reduction and diversity education are identified.     

Time course of melody recognition: a gating paradigm study

Recognizing a well-known melody (e.g., one's national anthem) is not an all-or-none process. Instead, recognition develops progressively while the melody unfolds over time. To examine which factors govern the time course of this recognition process, the gating paradigm, initially designed to study auditory word recognition, was adapted to music. Musicians and nonmusicians were presented with segments of increasing duration of familiar and unfamiliar melodies (i.e., the first note, then the first two notes, then the first three notes, and so forth). Recognition was assessed after each segment either by requiring participants to provide a familiarity judgment (Experiment 1) or by asking them to sing the melody that they thought had been presented (Experiment 2). In general, the more familiar the melody, the fewer the notes required for recognition. Musicians judged music's familiarity within fewer notes than did nonmusicians, whereas the reverse situation (i.e., musicians were slower than nonmusicians) occurred when a sung response was requested. However, both musicians and nonmusicians appeared to segment melodies into the same perceptual units (i.e., motives) in order to access the correct representation in memory. These results are interpreted in light of the cohort model (Marslen-Wilson, 1987), as applied to the music domain.     

Short-term memory effects of an auditory biofeedback on isometric force control: is there a differential effect as a function of transition trials?

The aim of the present study was to investigate memory effects, force accuracy, and variability during constant isometric force at different force levels, using auditory biofeedback. Two types of transition trials were used: a biofeedback-no biofeedback transition trial and a no biofeedback-biofeedback transition trial. The auditory biofeedback produced a low- or high-pitched sound when participants produced an isometric force lower or higher than required, respectively. To achieve this goal, 16 participants were asked to produce and maintain two different isometric forces (30 ± 5% and 90 N ± 5%) during 25 s. Constant error and standard deviation of the isometric force were calculated. While accuracy and variability of the isometric force varied according to the transition trial, a drift of the force appeared in the no biofeedback condition. This result suggested that the degradation of information about force output in the no biofeedback condition was provided by a leaky memory buffer which was mainly dependent on the sense of effort. Because this drift remained constant whatever the transition used, this memory buffer seemed to be independent of short-term memory processes.     

Externalizing behavior trajectories: The role of parenting, sibling relationships and child personality

Based on longitudinal multilevel modeling and using a multi-informant strategy, this study examines trajectories of externalizing problem behavior (EPB) in childhood as predicted by parental behavior (absolute level of parenting [ALP] and parental differential treatment [PDT]), parental self-efficacy (PSE), child personality and sibling relationships. Besides main effects, several interactions were tested. The effects of changes in parenting on changes in EPB were also examined. A total of 119 families from the French-speaking area of Belgium rearing a child (3- to 5-year-olds at the onset of the study) referred for EPB were studied. The effects of both level-of and changes-in mothers' ALP were partially confirmed, but for fathers, only ALP was predictive. There were some significant interactions between ALP and PDT for both parents. Mothers' PSE explained some variance in EPB, additional to that explained by the parenting measures. Some parenting by personality and by sibling relationship interactions were found.     

Optic-flow-based perception of two-dimensional trajectories and the effects of a single landmark

Human observers can detect their heading direction on a short time scale on the basis of optic flow. We investigated the visual perception and reconstruction of visually travelled two-dimensional (2-D) trajectories from optic flow, with and without a landmark. As in our previous study, seated, stationary subjects wore a head-mounted display in which optic-flow stimuli were shown that simulated various manoeuvres: linear or curvilinear 2-D trajectories over a horizontal plane, with observer orientation either fixed in space, fixed relative to the path, or changing relative to both. Afterwards, they reproduced the perceived manoeuvre with a model vehicle, whose position and orientation were recorded. Previous results had suggested that our stimuli can induce illusory percepts when translation and yaw are unyoked. We tested that hypothesis and investigated how perception of the travelled trajectory depends on the amount of yaw and the average path-relative orientation. Using a structured visual environment instead of only dots, or making available additional extra-retinal information, can improve perception of ambiguous optic-flow stimuli. We investigated the amount of necessary structuring, specifically the effect of additional visual and/or extra-retinal information provided by a single landmark in conditions where illusory percepts occur. While yaw was perceived correctly, the travelled path was less accurately perceived, but still adequately when the simulated orientation was fixed in space or relative to the trajectory. When the amount of yaw was not equal to the rotation of the path, or in the opposite direction, subjects still perceived orientation as fixed relative to the trajectory. This caused trajectory misperception because yaw was wrongly attributed to a rotation of the path: path perception is governed by the amount of yaw in the manoeuvre. Trajectory misperception also occurs when orientation is fixed relative to a curvilinear path, but not tangential to it. A single landmark could improve perception. Our results confirm and extend previous findings that, for unambiguous perception of ego-motion from optic flow, additional information is required in many cases, which can take the form of fairly minimal, visual information.     

Listeners feel the beat: Entrainment to English and French speech rhythms

Can listeners entrain to speech rhythms? Monolingual speakers of English and French and balanced English–French bilinguals tapped along with the beat they perceived in sentences spoken in a stress-timed language, English, and a syllable-timed language, French. All groups of participants tapped more regularly to English than to French utterances. Tapping performance was also influenced by the participants’ native language: English-speaking participants and bilinguals tapped more regularly and at higher metrical levels than did French-speaking participants, suggesting that long-term linguistic experience with a stress-timed language can differentiate speakers’ entrainment to speech rhythm.     

Control of the corridor illusion in baboons (Papio papio) by gradient and linear-perspective depth cues

The corridor illusion was recently demonstrated in baboons with background pictures containing rich depth information (Barbet and Fagot 2002, Behavioural Brain Research 132 111-115). In the current research we determined the contribution of gradient texture and perspective lines to that illusion. In experiment 1, the corridor illusion was tested in two baboons, with pictures of a hallway as backgrounds, or the same image of the hallway represented by perspective lines. Findings confirmed that the baboons experience the corridor illusion with the picture of the hallway, and showed that this illusion remained with the perspective-line backgrounds. The same procedure was adopted in experiment 2, but with a hallway drawn from gradient textures. The two baboons experienced the illusion in this experiment too. Thus both gradient and perspective line cues convey sufficient information to control the corridor illusion in baboons. In baboons, the processing of these two kinds of depth cues interacts with the perception of object size, suggesting homologous processes of pictorial depth perception in humans and non-human primates.     

Do Children Behave Better When Parents’ Emotion Coaching Practices are Stimulated? A Micro-Trial Study

The links between parents’ emotion regulation practices and children’s behavioral outcomes are well established. The aim of the current study designed as a randomized micro-trial was to test experimentally if and to what extent stimulating parents’ emotion coaching practices improves preschoolers’ behavioral outcomes, i.e. positive affect, irritability, non-compliance, persistence and enthusiasm. In line with this objective, the emotion coaching practices of parents of 4-to-5-year-old children were stimulated in a brief 15-min lab session. Immediately afterwards, parents and children were observed during a free-play session and frustration laboratory tasks designed to elicit negative emotions in children. The results indicated that, compared to the control group, parents whose emotion coaching practices had been stimulated displayed higher positive affect and were more emotionally sensitive during free play. Positive behaviors persisted in frustration tasks; parents were more behaviorally and emotionally responsive towards their children. In turn, children of these parents displayed higher persistence and enthusiasm but only when they had to deal with negative emotional arousal during frustration tasks. Mediation analyses also confirmed that the influence of the stimulation of parents’ emotion coaching practices on children’s outcomes, i.e. persistence and enthusiasm, was mediated by the parents’ behavior.     

Decision making under risk condition in patients with Parkinson's disease: a behavioural and fMRI study

We aimed to study whether previously described impairment in decision making under risky conditions in patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) is affected by deficits in using information about potential incentives or by processing feedback (in terms of fictitious gains and losses following each decision). Additionally, we studied whether the neural correlates of using explicit information in decision making under risk differ between PD patients and healthy subjects. We investigated ten cognitively intact PD patients and twelve healthy subjects with the Game of Dice Task (GDT) to assess risky decision making, and with an fMRI paradigm to analyse the neural correlates of information integration in the deliberative decision phase. Behaviourally, PD patients showed selective impairment in the GDT but not on the fMRI task that did not include a feedback component. Healthy subjects exhibited lateral prefrontal, anterior cingulate and parietal activations when integrating decision-relevant information. Despite similar behavioural patterns on the fMRI task, patients exhibited reduced parietal activation. Behavioural results suggest that PD patients' deficits in risky decision making are dominated by impaired feedback utilization not compensable by intact cognitive functions. Our fMRI results suggest similarities but also differences in neural correlates when using explicit information for the decision process, potentially indicating different strategy application even if the interfering feedback component is excluded.     

The effect of deleting schwa (mute e) on spoken word recognition in French]

We studied the processing of two word strings in French made up of a determiner and a noun which contains a schwa (mute e). Depending on the noun, schwa deletion is present ("la tir'lire"), optional ("le ch(e)min") or absent ("la cornemuse"). In a production study, we show that schwa deletion, and the category of the noun, have a large impact on the duration of the strings. We take this into account in two perception studies, which use word repetition and lexical decision, and which show that words in which the schwa has been deleted usually take longer to recognize than words that retain the schwa, but that this depends also on the category of the word. We explain these results by examining the influence of orthography. Based on the model proposed by Grainger and Ferrand (1996), which integrates the written dimension, we suggest that two sources of information, phonological and orthographic, interact during spoken word recognition.