The importance of laughing in your face: influences of visual laughter on auditory laughter perception

Hearing the sound of laughter is important for social communication, but processes contributing to the audibility of laughter remain to be determined. Production of laughter resembles production of speech in that both involve visible facial movements accompanying socially significant auditory signals. However, while it is known that speech is more audible when the facial movements producing the speech sound can be seen, similar visual enhancement of the audibility of laughter remains unknown. To address this issue, spontaneously occurring laughter was edited to produce stimuli comprising visual laughter, auditory laughter, visual and auditory laughter combined, and no laughter at all (either visual or auditory), all presented in four levels of background noise. Visual laughter and no-laughter stimuli produced very few reports of auditory laughter. However, visual laughter consistently made auditory laughter more audible, compared to the same auditory signal presented without visual laughter, resembling findings reported previously for speech.     

Incurious motives to seek information about potential threats

In Study 1, 20 incurious worry reduction motive (IWRM) items were administered to 280 participants along with curiosity and worry scales. With factor analysis, two six‐item scales were developed: focus on distress (IWRM‐FD) and focus on relief (IWRM‐FR). IWRM‐FD was associated with wanting positive news about threats, whereas IWRM‐FR was related to wanting negative news to be free from further worry. Neither the curiosity nor worry scales predicted wanting information. In Study 2, the IWRM scales were administered to 170 participants along with a coping inventory. IWRM‐FD correlated with avoidant‐coping, whereas IWRM‐FR was associated positively with active‐coping and advice‐seeking. The results suggest that IWRM‐FD reflects a desire to minimize distress, whereas IWRM‐FR motivates identifying and dealing directly with problems. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Origins of spatial, temporal and numerical cognition: Insights from comparative psychology

Contemporary comparative cognition has a large repertoire of animal models and methods, with concurrent theoretical advances that are providing initial answers to crucial questions about human cognition. What cognitive traits are uniquely human? What are the species-typical inherited predispositions of the human mind? What is the human mind capable of without certain types of specific experiences with the surrounding environment? Here, we review recent findings from the domains of space, time and number cognition. These findings are produced using different comparative methodologies relying on different animal species, namely birds and non-human great apes. The study of these species not only reveals the range of cognitive abilities across vertebrates, but also increases our understanding of human cognition in crucial ways.     

Salary and Decision Making: Relationship Between Pay and Focus on Financial Profitability and Prosociality in an Organizational Context

This investigation examined the relationship between organizationally based financial incentives and a focus on profit vs. prosociality during decision making. Participants were 84 managers from a Fortune 200 corporation. Managers read a vignette containing a dilemma and freely generated issues that they considered important in resolving the dilemma. These responses were coded for their inclusion on 3 dimensions: financial profitability, well‐being of nonpowerful stakeholders, and legal culpability. The results demonstrated that salary level predicted an increased focus on the dimension related to financial profitability and decreased focus on the dimensions of prosociality and legal concerns. Implications of these findings and future directions for research are discussed.     

Are preference reversals reduced when made explicit?

Previous research has shown that preferences for options, such as gambles, can reverse depending on the response mode. These preference reversals have been demonstrated when tasks were performed sequentially. That is, subjects completed one task before beginning another. In an attempt to eliminate preference reversals, we asked subjects to perform tasks simultaneously. That is, subjects made two types of responses for each pair of gambles before evaluating the next pair. In the condition with no financial incentives, preference reversal rates were slightly reduced. In another condition, subjects were paid for their participation and they were allowed to play a gamble with real monetary compensation. A gamble pair was randomly selected, and if a subject's responses in the two tasks were consistent for that pair, he or she was allowed to play the ‘preferred’ gamble. Otherwise, the experimenter selected the gamble from the pair. With these financial incentives, systematic preference reversals were eliminated for two of the three task combinations. Preference reversals continued to occur for attractiveness ratings versus selling prices, although, even for that pair of tasks, the reversal rate was significantly reduced. For all three task pairs, preference orders from the two tasks appeared to merge into more consistent orders.     

Combined Audience and Video Feedback With Cognitive Review Improves State Anxiety and Self-Perceptions During Speech Tasks in Socially Anxious Individuals

This study investigated the effects of combined audience feedback with video feedback plus cognitive preparation, and cognitive review (enabling deeper processing of feedback) on state anxiety and self-perceptions including perception of performance and perceived probability of negative evaluation in socially anxious individuals during a speech performance. One hundred and forty socially anxious students were randomly assigned to four conditions: Cognitive Preparation + Video Feedback + Audience Feedback + Cognitive Review (CP + VF + AF + CR), Cognitive Preparation + Video Feedback + Cognitive Review (CP + VF + CR), Cognitive Preparation + Video Feedback only (CP + VF), and Control. They were asked to deliver two impromptu speeches that were evaluated by confederates. Participants’ levels of anxiety and self-perceptions pertaining to the speech task were assessed before and after feedback, and after the second speech. Compared to participants in the other conditions, participants in the CP + VF + AF + CR condition reported a significant decrease in their state anxiety and perceived probability of negative evaluation scores, and a significant increase in their positive perception of speech performance from before to after the feedback. These effects generalized to the second speech. Our results suggest that adding audience feedback to video feedback plus cognitive preparation and cognitive review may improve the effects of existing video feedback procedures in reducing anxiety symptoms and distorted self-representations in socially anxious individuals.     

Haptic modality takes its time: Dynamic of activations of sensory modalities in perceptual and memory processes

Based on claims resulting from grounded cognition theory that perceptual and memory processes are using the same distributed systems, the present study investigated the temporal aspect of access to memory traces through haptic and auditory modalities. Unlike in the case of visual or auditory components, the perception of a vibrotactile component is more sequential in nature and therefore cannot be fully processed before the end of the signal. The present study explores the dynamic of components activation in a situation of audio‐vibrotactile asynchrony. We used a short‐term priming paradigm consisting of an association phase (between a vibration and sound) and a test phase testing priming effect of a vibrotactile stimulation on the processing of a target sound. Results showed an interference with a simultaneous processing and a facilitation with a sequential processing. The temporality process of perceptual components is also important at a memory level.     

Equivalence‐based instruction of academic skills: Application to adolescents with autism

This study evaluated the efficacy of three equivalence‐based instruction procedures on the acquisition of novel academic skills by 3 adolescents diagnosed with autism in a school setting. The skills targeted for instruction were related to topics in history, science, and mathematics, and were taught using different training structures from the PEAK‐E curriculum. All participants demonstrated mastery of the trained relations and the tested derived relations following all variants of equivalence‐based instruction.