Knowing minds, controlling actions: the developmental relations between theory of mind and executive function from 2 to 4 years of age

This longitudinal study examined the concurrent and predictive relations between executive function (EF) and theory of mind (ToM) in 82 preschoolers who were assessed when they were 2, 3, and 4 years old. The results showed that the concurrent relation between EF and ToM, after controlling for age, verbal ability, and sex, was significant at 3 and 4 years of age but not at 2 years of age. Hierarchical regression analyses showed that EF at age 2 significantly predicted ToM at age 3 and that EF at age 3 significantly predicted ToM at age 4, over and above the effects of age, verbal ability, and prior performance on ToM tasks. However, ToM at ages 2 and 3 did not explain a significant amount of variance in EF at age 4. Bootstrap procedures revealed that verbal ability at age 3 fully mediated the relation between ToM at age 2 and EF at age 4.     

Fairness at the collective level: a meta-analytic examination of the consequences and boundary conditions of organizational justice climate

This article uses meta-analytic methods (k = 38) to examine the relationship between organizational justice climate and unit-level effectiveness. Overall, our results suggest that the relationship between justice and effectiveness is significant (ρ = .40) when both constructs are construed at the collective level. Our results also indicate that distributive justice climate was most strongly linked with unit-level performance (e.g., productivity, customer satisfaction), whereas interactional justice was most strongly related to unit-level processes (e.g., organizational citizenship behavior, cohesion). We also show that a number of factors moderate this relationship, including justice climate strength, the level of referent in the justice measure, the hierarchical level of the unit, and how criteria are classified. We elaborate on these findings and attempt to provide a clearer direction for future research in this area.     

Hierarchical integration of agency and communion: a study of influential moral figures

The purpose of this research is to (a) identify which of recent history's influential figures did and which did not personify moral excellence, and (b) to examine the motives that drove these individuals along such divergent paths. In Study 1, 102 social scientists evaluated the moral qualities of influential figures from Time Magazine's lists. In Study 2, we selected the 15 top ranking of these figures to comprise a moral exemplar group and the bottom 15 to comprise a comparison group of similarly influential people. We measured the motivational aspects of their personality (agency and communion) by content-analyzing extant speeches and interviews. Moral exemplars exhibited the hierarchical integration of agency and communion by treating agentic motives as a means to an end of communal motives. Comparison subjects, by contrast, personified unmitigated agency by treating motives of agency as both a means to an end and an end unto itself. These results imply that both the strength and structure of a person's motives account for moral behavior.     

Treating stimuli as a random factor in social psychology: a new and comprehensive solution to a pervasive but largely ignored problem

Throughout social and cognitive psychology, participants are routinely asked to respond in some way to experimental stimuli that are thought to represent categories of theoretical interest. For instance, in measures of implicit attitudes, participants are primed with pictures of specific African American and White stimulus persons sampled in some way from possible stimuli that might have been used. Yet seldom is the sampling of stimuli taken into account in the analysis of the resulting data, in spite of numerous warnings about the perils of ignoring stimulus variation (Clark, 1973; Kenny, 1985; Wells & Windschitl, 1999). Part of this failure to attend to stimulus variation is due to the demands imposed by traditional analysis of variance procedures for the analysis of data when both participants and stimuli are treated as random factors. In this article, we present a comprehensive solution using mixed models for the analysis of data with crossed random factors (e.g., participants and stimuli). We show the substantial biases inherent in analyses that ignore one or the other of the random factors, and we illustrate the substantial advantages of the mixed models approach with both hypothetical and actual, well-known data sets in social psychology (Bem, 2011; Blair, Chapleau, & Judd, 2005; Correll, Park, Judd, & Wittenbrink, 2002).     

Force control under auditory feedback: effector differences and audiomotor memory

Audiomotor integration is a basic form of sensorimotor control for regulating vocal pitch and vocal loudness, but its contribution to general motor control has only been studied minimally. In this paper, auditory feedback for prolonged force control was investigated by comparing manual and oral force generation and testing short-term audiomotor memory for these effectors. Ten healthy volunteers between the ages of 20 and 30 years old were recruited. The participants produced continuous force for 30 sec. with the lip or finger to match auditory targets. In the feedback condition, when auditory feedback was provided for 30 sec., lip force was more variable than finger force. In the memory condition, the force output of both effectors remained stable for approximately 4 sec. after feedback removal, followed by significant decay. A longer short-term memory capacity could facilitate encoding of motor memories for tasks having acoustic goals. The results demonstrate that "audiomotor" integration was effective for sustaining forces, and that audiomotor force memory is comparable to reports of visuomotor force memory.     

Neuronal deactivation is equally important for understanding emotional processing

In their analyses of the neural correlates of discrete emotionality, Lindquist et al. do not consider the numerous drawbacks to inferring psychological processes based on currently available cognitive neurometric technology. The authors also disproportionately emphasize the relevance of neuronal activation over deactivation, which, in our opinion, limits the scope and utility of their conclusions.     

Sources of Cognitive Exploration: Genetic Variation in the Prefrontal Dopamine System Predicts Openness/Intellect

The personality trait Openness/Intellect reflects the tendency to be imaginative, curious, perceptive, artistic, and intellectual - all characteristics that involve cognitive exploration. Little is known about the biological basis of Openness/Intellect, but the trait has been linked to cognitive functions of prefrontal cortex, and the neurotransmitter dopamine plays a key role in motivation to explore. The hypothesis that dopamine is involved in Openness/Intellect was supported by examining its association with two genes that are central components of the prefrontal dopaminergic system. In two demographically different samples (children: N = 608; adults: N = 214), variation in the dopamine D4 receptor gene (DRD4) and the catechol-O-methyltransferase gene (COMT) predicted Openness/Intellect, as main effects in the child sample and as a gene-gene interaction in adults.     

Perceptual adaptation to sinewave-vocoded speech across languages

Listeners rapidly adapt to many forms of degraded speech. What level of information drives this adaptation, however, remains unresolved. The current study exposed listeners to sinewave-vocoded speech in one of three languages, which manipulated the type of information shared between the training languages (German, Mandarin, or English) and the testing language (English) in an audio-visual (AV) or an audio plus still frames modality (A + Stills). Three control groups were included to assess procedural learning effects. After training, listeners' perception of novel sinewave-vocoded English sentences was tested. Listeners exposed to German-AV materials performed equivalently to listeners exposed to English AV or A + Stills materials and significantly better than two control groups. The Mandarin groups and German-A + Stills group showed an intermediate level of performance. These results suggest that full lexical access is not absolutely necessary for adaptation to degraded speech, but providing AV-training in a language that is similar phonetically to the testing language can facilitate adaptation.     

Body Posture and the Feeling of Social Closeness: An Exploratory Study in a Naturalistic Setting

Previous research has shown that body postures and body movements influence people’s attitudes, preferences and feelings. In the present study, we explored the influence of body posture on the feeling of closeness towards others and how this effect may interact with contextual variables. Study 1 was conducted in a naturalistic setting in which 127 participants observed a series of live dance sequences either standing up or remaining seated. After each sequence, participants reported the feelings elicited by the dance performance on a questionnaire. Visibility of performers’ facial expressions and background tempo were used as contextual variables. Results showed that participants who watched the performance standing up felt significantly closer to the dancers than participants who remained seated. Study 2 was carried out in a laboratory setting to explore the relationship between body posture, tempo and heart rate. Results showed a significant increase in heart rate when standing compared to when sitting and no effect of tempo. The present research demonstrates a link between body posture and social connection providing evidence that standing up strengthens the feeling of closeness to others, and showing that posture not only has an impact on self-related feelings (e.g. fear, anger, sadness) as previous research has shown, but also has an impact on feelings towards others at the base of all human social relations. The present research also suggests that heart rate may be a mediator of the effect of posture on the feeling of closeness.     

The road traveled,the road ahead,or simply on the road? When progress framing affects motivation in goal pursuit

The present research examined the dynamic interplay between the framing of one's progress from an initial state toward an end state (i.e., framed as the distance traveled from the initial state to the current state -‘to-date’ versus framed as the distance left from the current state to the end state -‘to-go’) and construal level in influencing motivation in goal pursuit. In three experiments we found that both state and chronic differences in experienced construal level modulate the impact of progress framing on motivation at a specific stage in goal pursuit, i.e., when consumers are halfway between the initial and end state, but is less consequential at the initial or end stages. This modulation shows that type of framing only affected motivation of people with an abstract, but not a concrete mindset. Under these conditions, progress framed in terms of to-date produced increased motivation compared to a to-go frame. Moreover, perceived goal distance was found to mediate the impact of progress framing on motivation for individuals with an abstract, but not a concrete mindset.