Don’t make me angry,you wouldn’t like me when I’m angry: Volitional choices to act or inhibit are modulated by subliminal perception of emotional faces

Volitional action and self-control—feelings of acting according to one’s own intentions and in being control of one’s own actions—are fundamental aspects of human conscious experience. However, it is unknown whether high-level cognitive control mechanisms are affected by socially salient but nonconscious emotional cues. In this study, we manipulated free choice decisions to act or withhold an action by subliminally presenting emotional faces: In a novel version of the Go/NoGo paradigm, participants made speeded button-press responses to Go targets, withheld responses to NoGo targets, and made spontaneous, free choices to execute or withhold the response for Choice targets. Before each target, we presented emotional faces, backwards masked to render them nonconscious. In Intentional trials, subliminal angry faces made participants more likely to voluntarily withhold the action, whereas fearful and happy faces had no effects. In a second experiment, the faces were made supraliminal, which eliminated the effects of angry faces on volitional choices. A third experiment measured neural correlates of the effects of subliminal angry faces on intentional choice using EEG. After replicating the behavioural results found in Experiment 1, we identified a frontal-midline theta component—associated with cognitive control processes—which is present for volitional decisions, and is modulated by subliminal angry faces. This suggests a mechanism whereby subliminally presented “threat” stimuli affect conscious control processes. In summary, nonconscious perception of angry faces increases choices to inhibit, and subliminal influences on volitional action are deep seated and ecologically embedded.     

Safe Danger – On the Experience of Challenge,Adventure and Risk in Education

This article reconsiders the presence and value of danger in outdoor and adventurous activities and sports in safety-conscious societies, especially in relation to the education of children and youth. Based on an original analysis of the relation between the concepts of ‘risk’ and ‘danger’, we offer an account of the relation between challenge, adventure, risk and danger, and emphasise the importance of teaching risk recognition, risk assessment, risk management and risk avoidance to children and youth, without the necessity of exposing them to jeopardy in dangerous situations. Our conclusion is that ‘Safe Danger’ describes what educators should seek, namely: the educational benefits of the challenges set by risk-taking and the demands of risk-facing, including those in adventurous situations, which are obtainable in the absence of significant danger, and which contribute to risk education. The educational value of adventurous and outdoor pursuits lies elsewhere than in the opportunities that they present for danger-facing, for example in their promotion of self-reliance, confidence, ability to team-work, and especially in their promotion of risk education, as an integral aspect of everyday life planning, as preparation for the day’s adventurous challenges, and as an instrument of task completion.     

C. G. Jung and Norman Cohn Explain Pizzagate: The Archetypal Dimension of a Conspiracy Theory

Conspiracy theories are born during times of turmoil and uncertainty. Fueled by hysteria and unfounded claims of nefarious plots involving corruption and immorality practiced by unfeeling, immoral libertines, conspiracy theories emphasize the power that small cults of anti-human elites have upon the stability and established moral practices of a society. During the volatile 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, a flurry of conspiracy theories erupted, aimed at demonizing the candidates. One of the most outrageous conspiracy theories, involving child sex trafficking, ritual murder, and cannibalism, is examined to reveal its archetypal elements and relevancy to hard-wired taboos shared by all of humanity.     

Invariants and Information Pickup in The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems: Implications for the Experimental Analysis of Behavior

ABSTRACT

Although Gibson focused his agenda on the study of perception and Skinner on learning as contingencies of reinforcement, they shared a nonrepresentational approach. We propose that the ecological concept of invariants developed in Gibson's book The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems (1966) could underlie Skinner's notion of contingencies of reinforcement as environmental opportunities for behaving. The proposal is divided in 3 parts: the concept of stimulus for perception, the role of the notion of invariants in the operant contingency, and the information for perception and behavior. We conclude that approximating contingencies of reinforcement as instances of environmental invariants can be fruitful for studying a number of phenomena within the context of operant conditioning.     

Applying Person‐Centered Counseling to Sexual Minority Adolescents

Drawing attention to the very unique and complex needs of stigmatized sexual minority youth, the authors explore the therapeutic potential of person‐centered counseling in helping lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender/sexual (LGBT) adolescents who are working toward the acceptance and disclosure of their sexual identity. They suggest that person‐centered counseling embodies 6 aspects that are particularly helpful to LGBT adolescent clients and propose 3 additional methods that compensate for the limitations of the person‐centered approach in this particular helping context.     

Traumatic stress, perceived global stress, and life events: prospectively predicting quality of life in breast cancer patients.

The authors investigated the relationship between stress at initial cancer diagnosis and treatment and subsequent quality of life (QoL). Women (n = 112) randomized to the assessment-only arm of a clinical trial were initially assessed after breast cancer diagnosis and surgery and then reassessed at 4 months (during adjuvant treatment) and 12 months (postadjuvant treatment). There were 3 types of stress measured: number of stressful life events (K. A. Matthews et al., 1997), cancer-related traumatic stress symptoms (M. J. Horowitz, N. Wilner, & W. Alvarez, 1979), and perceived global stress (S. Cohen, T. Kamarck, & R. Mermelstein, 1983). Using hierarchical multiple regressions, the authors found that stress predicted both psychological and physical QoL (J. E. Ware, K. K. Snow, & M. Kosinski, 2000) at the follow-ups (all ps < .03). These findings substantiate the relationship between initial stress and later QoL and underscore the need for timely psychological intervention.     

Social Dominance Theory: Its Agenda and Method

The theory has been misconstrued in four primary ways, which are often expressed as the claims of psychological reductionism, conceptual redundancy, biological reductionism, and hierarchy justification. This paper addresses these claims and suggests how social dominance theory builds on and moves beyond social identity theory and system justification theory.     

Motor skill learning in the middle-aged: limited development of motor chunks and explicit sequence knowledge

The present study examined whether middle-aged participants, like young adults, learn movement patterns by preparing and executing integrated sequence representations (i.e., motor chunks) that eliminate the need for external guidance of individual movements. Twenty-four middle-aged participants (aged 55–62) practiced two fixed key press sequences, one including three and one including six key presses in the discrete sequence production task. Their performance was compared with that of 24 young adults (aged 18–28). In the middle-aged participants motor chunks as well as explicit sequence knowledge appeared to be less developed than in the young adults. This held especially with respect to the unstructured 6-key sequences in which most middle-aged did not develop independence of the key-specific stimuli and learning seems to have been based on associative learning. These results are in line with the notion that sequence learning involves several mechanisms and that aging affects the relative contribution of these mechanisms.     

Personal Values and Well-Being among Europeans,Spanish Natives and Immigrants to Spain: Does the Culture Matter?

The aim of this study was to analyze the relationship between personal values and well-being. Two correlational studies are presented with the following random samples: (1) four native samples: two samples from the 2006 European Social Survey (Europe n1 = 28,375, Spain n2 = 1,321) and two Basque samples (n3 = 1,770; n4 = 820); and (2) a sample of immigrants in the Basque Country (quasirandom) (n5 = 1,171). Age range of respondents was 18–60 years. The instruments used were for measuring: (1) personal values (Schwartz’s PVQ-40 or PVQ-21), and (2) well-being (Bradburn’s PNA, Goldberg’s GHQ, and life satisfaction and perceived control items from the World Value Survey). Partial correlation analysis was applied, with PVQ scale response bias controlled. The data supported a positive association of hedonic and psychological well-being with openness to experience and individualist values, and a negative association with power and conservation or collectivist values. Satisfaction with life partially mediated the relationship between personal values and affect. The results support a universal association of healthy values with well-being.     

Can you see me in the snow? Action simulation aids the detection of visually degraded human motion

Using a novel paradigm, we demonstrate that action simulation can directly facilitate ongoing perception of people's movements. Point-light actors (PLAs) representing common human motions were shown embedded in a visual noise reminiscent of "TV snow". At first, the PLAs were perceived clearly, then occluded from view for a short duration, during which it was hypothesized that a real-time action simulation was generated tracking the motion's course. The PLA then reappeared in motion at variable visibility against the noise, whilst detection thresholds for the reappearance were measured. In the crucial manipulation, the test motion was either temporally congruent with the motion as it would have continued during occlusion, and thus temporally matching the simulation, or temporally incongruent. Detection thresholds were lower for congruent than for incongruent reappearing motions, suggesting that reappearing motion that temporally matched the internal action simulation was more likely to be detected.