Incentive Salience and Improved Performance

Using data from 441 call center employees at a large North American financial services firm, we studied how the frequency of thinking about an incentive available for performance led to increased output on an important performance metric. We find that people think more frequently about noncash tangible incentives (merchandise and travel) than cash incentives and that as the frequency of thought increases, performance increases. This leads to a larger performance boost for tangible incentives compared to a cash incentive of equal purchasing power. These results show an additional benefit from the use of tangible incentives and help answer the question regarding the psychological processes which make incentives motivating.     

Developmental Patterns and Use of the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test for Children and Adolescents with Learning Disabilities

This study examined the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST) by testing 129 children and adolescents with learning disabilities (LD) who were between 7 and 13 years of age. Developmental trends were examined across age groups using scores from the WCST. Several scales yielded developmental patterns, supported by statistically significant main effects for age. Additionally, multiple regression analyses were run examining the relationship of the WCST with other measures. The models yielded were in predicted directions. The results of this study support the clinical utility of the WCST in children and adolescents with LD.     

Self-Determination Theory and Motivational Interviewing: Complementary Models to Elicit Voluntary Engagement by Partner-Abusive Men

Research examining intimate partner violence (IPV) has lacked a comprehensive theoretical framework for understanding and treating behavior. The authors propose two complementary models, a treatment approach (Motivational Interviewing, MI) informed by a theory (Self-Determination Theory; SDT), as a way of integrating existing knowledge and suggesting new directions in intervening early with IPV perpetrators. MI is a client-centered clinical intervention intended to assist in strengthening motivation to change and has been widely implemented in the substance abuse literature. SDT is a theory that focuses on internal versus external motivation and considers elements that impact optimal functioning and psychological well-being. These elements include psychological needs, integration of behavioral regulations, and contextual influences on motivation. Each of these aspects of SDT is described in detail and in the context of IPV etiology and intervention using motivational interviewing.     

Motivated Suspicion: Asymmetrical Attributions of the Behavior of Political Ingroup and Outgroup Members

Suspicious attributional thought was assessed in the context of the political behavior of ingroup and outgroup politicians. Strong Democrats and Republicans read a newspaper article describing a Democratic or Republican politician's support of a bill. Half the participants read that the politician may have been motivated by an ulterior motive, obtaining campaign support from companies that benefited from the bill. In two studies, interaction effects revealed that participants discounted the behavior of an outgroup politician when an ulterior motive was salient. In contrast, they failed to discount the behavior of an ingroup politician when an ulterior motive was salient or either politician when no ulterior motive was salient. Study 2 also revealed evidence that negative, other-directed affect mediated the bias in attributional judgments.     

Psychophysiological and subjective indices of emotion as a function of age and gender

Old, middle-aged and young persons of both genders were presented with slides containing pictorial stimuli that varied in emotional content. Each picture was rated on three dimensions: (1) valence; (2) arousal; and (3) dominance, using a 25-point scale. Heart rate, skin conductance, and forehead and cheek EMG were recorded during each slide presentation. The old and middle-aged groups showed greatly attenuated psychophysiological responses, compared to the young group. However, the old and middle-aged subjects used more extreme ratings than the young subjects on both the valence and arousal dimensions. Females were more valence-sensitive than males, but males in general used more extreme ratings of arousal than females. These results suggest a tendency to report increased felt emotion but decreased physiological response to emotional stimuli across the life span.     

Attentional bias differences between fear and disgust: Implications for the role of disgust in disgust-related anxiety disorders

Research demonstrates a relation between disgust and anxiety-related pathology; however, research has yet to reveal mechanisms by which disgust may contribute to anxiety. The current experiment examined attentional bias characteristics as one route by which disgust influences anxiety. Eighty undergraduate participants completed a rapid serial visual presentation attention task using fear, disgust, or neutral target stimuli. Task-relevance of the target's presentation was also manipulated. Results revealed that task-relevant disgust targets impaired attention among all participants, but task-irrelevant disgust targets impaired attention only in high disgust prone individuals. Difficulty in disengagement characterised both disgust and fear attentional biases, but the difficulty in disengagement was greater for disgust compared to fear attentional biases. High disgust prone individuals displayed exaggerated difficulty in disengaging attention from disgust targets compared to low disgust prone individuals. The results suggest that disgust attentional biases differ from fear attentional biases. The characteristics of disgust attentional biases are discussed as possible mechanisms by which disgust functions in certain anxiety disorders.     

Looking at me,appreciating you: Self-focused attention distinguishes between gratitude and indebtedness

We provide evidence that self-focused attention (both dispositional and situationally induced) affects the evaluation of a benefactor. Specifically, self-focused attention distinguishes between gratitude and indebtedness. In Study 1, gratitude correlated negatively with dispositional public self-focused attention and social anxiety, whereas indebtedness correlated positively with public self-focused attention and social anxiety. In Study 2, participants recalled a recent benefit under either high self-focused attention, induced via a mirror, or low self-focused attention. Highly self-focused individuals recalled increased indebtedness, but not gratitude, toward a benefactor, relative to those in the control condition. Self-focused individuals also felt less commitment and closeness to the benefactor. The implications for the link between self-focus and social emotions (and thus social life) are discussed.     

Detail-oriented cognitive style and social communicative deficits,within and beyond the autism spectrum: Independent traits that grow into developmental interdependence

At the heart of debates over underlying causes of autism is the “Kanner hypothesis” that autistic deficits in social reciprocity, and a cognitive/perceptual ‘style’ favouring detail-oriented cognition, co-vary in autistic individuals. A separate line of work indicates these two domains are normally distributed throughout the population, with autism representing an extremity. This realisation brings the Kanner debate into the realm of normative co-variation, providing more ways to test the hypothesis, and insights into typical development; for instance, in the context of normative functioning, the Kanner hypothesis implies social costs to spatial/numerical prowess. In light of this growing body of research, we review relevant factor analytic and correlational, behavioural studies. Findings are then synthesised into three themes: an alternative triad of primary autistic trait categories – Social Interaction Deficits, Cognitive Inflexibility, and Sensory Abnormalities – that more accurately reflects the factor structure of autistic traits; continuity between clinical and non-clinical autism-spectrum trait presentation; and indications that although social and non-social autistic traits may be initially independent, Kanner-like co-variance emerges behaviourally from dynamic trait interactions over the course of development. A dynamic developmental model subsuming these patterns is offered, and its advantages demonstrated in a novel account of ritualistic behaviours: as developmentally emergent, compensatory mechanisms for interactions between cognitive inflexibility and sensory abnormalities. We conclude with the broader imperative that behavioural scientists appealing for directly and exclusively genetic links may instead benefit from a developmental framing within their own discipline.