Examining the role of the fixation cue in inhibition of return.

To clarify the role of the fixation cue in inhibition of return (IOR), the present study compared four conditions: fixation cue immediately after the peripheral cue, in the middle of the stimulus-onset asynchrony (SOA), immediately before the onset of the target, or no fixation cue. With a 200-ms SOA, less IOR was found when the fixation cue was either absent or occurred immediately after the peripheral cue. No differences between the four conditions were found with 400-ms and 800-ms SOAs. These findings suggest that there is a brief period of time in which attention cannot be withdrawn from the peripherally cued location. Once attention has been withdrawn from the peripherally cued location, IOR can be found at short SOAs.     

Domestic Abuse as Terrorism

A number of philosophers and feminist authors have recently equated domestic abuse with the ubiquitous and ill‐defined concept of “terrorism.” Claudia Card, for instance, argues that domestic abuse is a frequently ignored form of terrorism that creates and maintains “heterosexual male dominance and female dependence and service” (Card 2003). Alison Jaggar, in a recent article, also concludes that an acceptable definition of terrorism will find rape and domestic violence to be terrorist acts (Jaggar 2005). Yet there seem to be several obstacles to any simple appropriation of the term “terrorism” for cases of domestic abuse. In this paper I will address what I take to be three significant problems that might be raised with regard to any attempt to identify domestic abuse as an act of terrorism. These problems include the fact that a) definitions of terrorism usually require clear political motivations, b) definitions of terrorism normally require that the terrorist intend to create a climate of terror, and c) adopting the term terrorism for cases of domestic abuse might appear simply inappropriate or unhelpful. I will argue, however, that each of these possible objections can be answered effectively and that domestic abuse rightly falls under the rubric of terrorism.     

The Argument from Skepticism for Contextualism

Epistemic contextualism was originally motivated and supported by the response it provides to skeptical paradox. Although there has been much discussion of the contextualist response to skeptical paradox, not much attention has been paid to the argument from skepticism for contextualism. Contextualists argue that contextualism accounts for the plausibility and apparent inconsistency of a set of paradoxical claims better than any classical invariantist theory. In this paper I focus on and carefully examine the argument from skepticism for contextualism. I argue not only that the prima facie advantage of contextualism is specious, but also that contextualism is in fact at a competitive disadvantage with respect to two classical invariantist views. I also argue that contextualism takes an arbitrary and unsatisfying strategy in its response to skepticism. That contextualism is alone in taking this arbitrary strategy marks a second competitive disadvantage for it. In addition, I argue that the contextualist response to skeptical paradox regenerates a skeptical paradox which contextualism is powerless to solve. Consequently, the argument from skepticism for contextualism fails. Furthermore, this feature of the contextualist response to skeptical paradox completely undermines the motivation and support for contextualism deriving from its treatment of skeptical paradox. I conclude that the argument from skepticism for contextualism fails, and that the contextualist response to skeptical paradox fails to motivate contextualism, pending the success of another argument for the contextualist thesis.     

Baptist Hymnody in the Northern United States: The Case of E. H. Johnson's Sursum Corda

Abstract : Northern and southern Baptists in the United States differed at the turn of the twentieth century. Through their hymnals, especially Sursum Corda edited by E. H. Johnson, they embraced a form of historicism that attempted to recover an earlier time in the church. Gregorian and Anglican chants served as vehicles of historicist interest as did the parts of the historic Mass and traditional English hymns prevalent in Johnson's book. Northern Baptists also leaned toward an ecclesiology that held the ‘church as sacrament’. Hymn texts in Johnson's Baptist hymnal form a bridge between two ecclesiological outlooks by employing a pastiche of sacramental texts and texts based on a memorialist understanding of the Eucharist. This essay employs an interdisciplinary approach to looking at American hymnody involving theology, history, musicology, and liturgics.     

Emotions evoked by the sound of music: characterization, classification, and measurement

One reason for the universal appeal of music lies in the emotional rewards that music offers to its listeners. But what makes these rewards so special? The authors addressed this question by progressively characterizing music-induced emotions in 4 interrelated studies. Studies 1 and 2 (n=354) were conducted to compile a list of music-relevant emotion terms and to study the frequency of both felt and perceived emotions across 5 groups of listeners with distinct music preferences. Emotional responses varied greatly according to musical genre and type of response (felt vs. perceived). Study 3 (n=801)--a field study carried out during a music festival--examined the structure of music-induced emotions via confirmatory factor analysis of emotion ratings, resulting in a 9-factorial model of music-induced emotions. Study 4 (n=238) replicated this model and found that it accounted for music-elicited emotions better than the basic emotion and dimensional emotion models. A domain-specific device to measure musically induced emotions is introduced--the Geneva Emotional Music Scale.     

Setting semantics: conceptual set can determine the physical properties that capture attention

The ability of a stimulus to capture visuospatial attention depends on the interplay between its bottom-up saliency and its relationship to an observer’s top-down control set, such that stimuli capture attention if they match the predefined properties that distinguish a searched-for target from distractors (Folk, Remington, & Johnston, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance, 18, 1030–1044 1992). Despite decades of research on this phenomenon, however, the vast majority has focused exclusively on matches based on low-level physical properties. Yet if contingent capture is indeed a “top-down” influence on attention, then semantic content should be accessible and able to determine which physical features capture attention. Here we tested this prediction by examining whether a semantically defined target could create a control set for particular features. To do this, we had participants search to identify a target that was differentiated from distractors by its meaning (e.g., the word “red” among color words all written in black). Before the target array, a cue was presented, and it was varied whether the cue appeared in the physical color implied by the target word. Across three experiments, we found that cues that embodied the meaning of the word produced greater cuing than cues that did not. This suggests that top-down control sets activate content that is semantically associated with the target-defining property, and this content in turn has the ability to exogenously orient attention.     

Examination of Negative Peer Contagion in a Residential Care Setting

There has been ongoing concern about the negative impact of residential treatment on youth in care. Research examining the impact of negative peer influence in juvenile justice, education, and residential care settings is reviewed. A study was conducted to examine the impact of negative peer contagion on the level of problem behavior in a residential care program, and the extent to which caregiver experience and youth time-in-program mediated that relationship. The study used archival data for 1,438 first-time admissions to a large Midwestern out-of-home residential program for youth with emotional and behavioral problems. Hierarchical Linear Modeling was used to examine the relationship between daily reports of conduct and oppositional defiant disorder (CD/ODD) behaviors and the percentage of conduct disorder youth living in a home. Greater exposure to conduct disordered peers was not related to increased rates of CD/ODD behavior. CD/ODD behavior was directly related to direct care staff level of experience and youth time in program. Implications for residential care are discussed.     

Emotion expression in body action and posture

Emotion communication research strongly focuses on the face and voice as expressive modalities, leaving the rest of the body relatively understudied. Contrary to the early assumption that body movement only indicates emotional intensity, recent studies have shown that body movement and posture also conveys emotion specific information. However, a deeper understanding of the underlying mechanisms is hampered by a lack of production studies informed by a theoretical framework. In this research we adopted the Body Action and Posture (BAP) coding system to examine the types and patterns of body movement that are employed by 10 professional actors to portray a set of 12 emotions. We investigated to what extent these expression patterns support explicit or implicit predictions from basic emotion theory, bidimensional theory, and componential appraisal theory. The overall results showed partial support for the different theoretical approaches. They revealed that several patterns of body movement systematically occur in portrayals of specific emotions, allowing emotion differentiation. Although a few emotions were prototypically expressed by one particular pattern, most emotions were variably expressed by multiple patterns, many of which can be explained as reflecting functional components of emotion such as modes of appraisal and action readiness. It is concluded that further work in this largely underdeveloped area should be guided by an appropriate theoretical framework to allow a more systematic design of experiments and clear hypothesis testing. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved).     

Visual working memory supports the inhibition of previously processed information: evidence from preview search

In four experiments we assessed whether visual working memory (VWM) maintains a record of previously processed visual information, allowing old information to be inhibited, and new information to be prioritized. Specifically, we evaluated whether VWM contributes to the inhibition (i.e., visual marking) of previewed distractors in a preview search. We evaluated this proposal by testing three predictions. First, Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrate that preview inhibition is more effective when the number of previewed distractors is below VWM capacity than above; an effect that can only be observed at small preview set sizes (Experiment 2A) and when observers are allowed to move their eyes freely (Experiment 2B). Second, Experiment 3 shows that, when quantified as the number of inhibited distractors, the magnitude of the preview effect is stable across different search difficulties. Third, Experiment 4 demonstrates that individual differences in preview inhibition are correlated with individual differences in VWM capacity. These findings provide converging evidence that VWM supports the inhibition of previewed distractors. More generally, these findings demonstrate how VWM contributes to the efficiency of human visual information processing--VWM prioritizes new information by inhibiting old information from being reselected for attention.