Age changes in the missing-letter effect revisited

When participants search for a target letter while reading, they make more omissions if the target letter is embedded in frequent function words than in less frequent content words. Reflecting developmental changes in component language and literacy skills, the size of this effect increases with age. With adults, the missing-letter effect is due to both word function and word frequency. With children, it is unclear whether the growing size of the missing-letter effect across development is due to a larger effect of word function, word frequency, or both because previous studies with children seeking to isolate the influence of word frequency and word function suffer from important methodological limitations. With these methodological limitations eliminated (Experiments 1 and 2), performance in a letter detection task was assessed for children in Grades 1, 2, 3, 4, and 7 as well as for undergraduate students. The results revealed that the influence of word function increases with age, whereas the effect of frequency is fairly stable across ages. Furthermore, normative predictability data collected in Experiment 3 revealed that third graders and undergraduate students were equally good at predicting function slots in a sentence.     

The relationship between employee job change and job satisfaction: the honeymoon-hangover effect

Recent research suggests that the turnover process is not fully captured by the traditional sequential model relating job dissatisfaction to subsequent turnover. The present study contributes to this research by modeling within-individual job satisfaction as a function of job change patterns to determine if individual work attitudes change systematically with the temporal turnover process. Specifically, the authors hypothesized that low satisfaction would precede a voluntary job change, with an increase in job satisfaction immediately following a job change (the honeymoon effect), followed by a decline in job satisfaction (the hangover effect). Though this pattern is suggested in the literature, no prior research has integrated and tested this complete temporal model within individuals. Findings based on a sample of managers supported the proposed honeymoon-hangover effect.     

The relation between children's reading comprehension level and their comprehension of idioms

We report an investigation of 9-year-olds' ability to interpret idioms in relation to their reading comprehension level. We manipulated whether the idioms were transparent or opaque, whether they were real or novel, whether they were presented in isolation or in a supportive narrative context. As predicted, children were better able to explain the meanings of idioms in context than in isolation. The good and poor comprehenders did not differ in their abilities to interpret transparent idioms in context, but the poor comprehenders were significantly worse at using context to work out the meanings of opaque idioms. The explanation task revealed the source of information used by the children to derive nontarget interpretations. We discuss these findings in relation to idiom processing strategies and Levorato and Cacciari's global elaboration model.     

The social context of imitation in infancy

Infants increasingly generalize deferred imitation across environmental contexts between 6 and 18 months of age. In three experiments with 126 6-, 9-, 12-, 15-, and 18-month-olds, we examined the role of the social context in deferred imitation. One experimenter demonstrated target actions on a hand puppet, and a second experimenter tested imitation 24h later. When the second experimenter was novel, infants did not exhibit deferred imitation at any age; when infants were preexposed to the second experimenter, all of them did. Imitating immediately after the demonstration also facilitated deferred imitation in a novel social context at all ages but 6 months. Infants' pervasive failure to exhibit deferred imitation in a novel social context may reflect evolutionary selection pressures that favored conservative behavior in social animals.     

Timing variability in circle drawing and tapping: probing the relationship between event and emergent timing

R. Ivry, R. M. Spencer, H. N. Zelaznik, and J. Diedrichsen (2002) have proposed a distinction between timed movements in which a temporal representation is part of the task goal (event timing) and those in which timing properties are emergent. The issue addressed in the present experiment was how timing in conditions conducive to emergent timing becomes established. According to what the authors term the transformation hypothesis, timing initially requires an event-based representation when the temporal goal is defined externally (e.g., by a metronome), but over the first few movement cycles, control processes become established that allow timing to become emergent. Different groups of participants (N = 84) executed either 1 timed interval, 4 timed intervals, or 2 timed intervals separated by a pause. They produced the intervals by either circle drawing, a task associated with emergent timing, or tapping, a task associated with event timing. Analyses of movement variability suggested that similar timing processes were used in the 2 tasks only during the 1st interval. Those results are consistent with the transformation hypothesis and lead to the inference that the transition from event-based control to emergent timing can occur rapidly during continuous movements.     

EMG activity in selected target muscles during imagery rising on tiptoes in healthy adults and poststroke hemiparetic patients

The authors sought to gain further knowledge about activation of target muscles during imagery engagement in a motor task. Six hemiparetic patients and 9 healthy participants performed 3 real rises on tiptoes and then, after pausing, 3 imagery rises on tiptoes. Metronome beats guided the rate of rises and descents. Electromyographic (EMG) activity from the medial gastrocnemius and the rectus femoris muscles were monitored bilaterally throughout the performance of both tasks. In 3 healthy participants and 3 individuals with hemiparesis, EMG activity was related to the imagery task in at least 1 of the target muscles. Conversely, in the other participants, motor imagery practice was not accompanied by task-related EMG activity in the monitored muscles. In all cases, the increment in activation level during motor imagery practice was very low in comparison with that of real performance. The findings were not unequivocal; therefore, EMG activity may sometimes, but not always, be recorded during motor imagery practice both in healthy individuals and in poststroke hemiparetic participants. Further research is needed to align motor imagery practice with the objectives of motor rehabilitation.     

The perceptual determinants of person construal: reopening the social-cognitive toolbox

Guided by a heuristic account of social-cognitive functioning, researchers have attempted to identify the cognitive benefits that derive from a categorical approach to person construal. While revealing, this work has overlooked the fact that, prior to the application of categorical thinking as an economizing mental tool, perceivers must first extract category-triggering information from available stimulus cues. It is possible, therefore, that basic perceptual processes may also contribute to people's propensity to view others in a category-based manner. This possibility was explored in 3 experiments in which the authors investigated the ease with which perceivers can extract categorical and identity-based knowledge from faces under both optimal and suboptimal (i.e., inverted faces, blurred faces, rapidly presented faces) processing conditions. The results confirmed that categorical knowledge is extracted from faces more efficiently than identity-related knowledge, a finding that underscores the importance of perceptual operations in the generation of categorical thinking.     

Positive affect as implicit motivator: on the nonconscious operation of behavioral goals

Recent research has revealed that nonconscious activation of desired behavioral states--or behavioral goals--promotes motivational activity to accomplish these states. Six studies demonstrate that this nonconscious operation of behavioral goals emerges if mental representations of specific behavioral states are associated with positive affect. In an evaluative-conditioning paradigm, unobtrusive linking of behavioral states to positive, as compared with neutral or negative, affect increased participants' wanting to accomplish these states. Furthermore, participants worked harder on tasks that were instrumental in attaining behavioral states when these states were implicitly linked to positive affect, thereby mimicking the effects on motivational behavior of preexisting individual wanting and explicit goal instructions to attain the states. Together, these results suggest that positive affect plays a key role in nonconscious goal pursuit. Implications for behavior-priming research are discussed.     

Up and down in middle age: monotonic and nonmonotonic changes in roles, status, and personality

It is proposed that personality (conceptualized in terms of motives and psychological resources) changes normatively not only from young adulthood to middle age but also within middle age and that these changes take place in relation to social and biosocial change over the same period. Data from 123 women studied at ages 27, 43, 52, and 61 largely supported hypotheses about change in social roles, status, health, motives, personality characteristics, emotion regulation, and relationships. Noteworthy aspects of the findings were substantial curvilinear change within middle age and associations of work involvement and physical health with personality change during late middle age.     

Intention memory and achievement motivation: volitional facilitation and inhibition as a function of affective contents of need-related stimuli

Replicating findings of J. Kuhl and M. Kazén (1999), reduction or removal of Stroop interference was achieved after short exposure to primes eliciting positive affect. This effect was need specific: Stroop interference removal (volitional facilitation) was found with positive primes related to achievement needs but not with positive primes related to affiliation or power needs. Five studies are reported. College students and unemployed university graduates participated in 2 studies each and branch managers of a large insurance company in 1 study. Whereas Stroop interference reduction or removal was found in all groups after positive-achievement primes, the 2 groups of unemployed persons additionally showed a significant increase of Stroop interference (volitional inhibition) after exposure to primes related to negative achievement episodes. Results are discussed in the context of Kuhl's personality systems interactions theory.