The effects of existential threat on reading comprehension of worldview affirming and disconfirming information

Terror management theory posits that cultural worldviews buffer people from thoughts and concerns about death. In support of this claim, numerous studies have shown that mortality salience (MS) increases an individual's motivation to uphold and defend important cultural worldviews. We hypothesized that the motivation to defend cultural worldviews following MS would also enhance people's ability to comprehend worldview affirming (vs. disconfirming) information. Three studies investigated this possibility. Study 1 showed that MS (vs. control) increased reading comprehension of a pro‐evolution essay among participants with a strongly evolutionist worldview, but decreased reading comprehension among participants with a strongly creationist worldview. With the use of a pro‐creation essay, Study 2 conceptually replicated these effects and demonstrated that the interactive effect of worldview and death anxiety on reading comprehension was mediated by defensive motivation. Study 3 replicated the results of Studies 1 and 2 among participants with a strongly evolutionist worldview, but only when the information in the essay was perceived as veridical. Discussion focused on the specific process through which MS affects reading comprehension of worldview relevant ideas. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

How general is the “General Factor of Personality”? Evidence from the Texas Adoption Project

Using data from samples of 300 and 220 adoptive families from the Texas Adoption Project, aspects of generality of a “General Factor of Personality” (GFP) were examined: across different personality inventories, across different levels of analysis (items, scales) within an inventory, across self- and others’ judgments, and across sexes, ages, and generations. Considerable, though not complete, generality was found. The average correlation between GFPs from items and scales of a given inventory was .90; between GFPs from the scales of different inventories was .48. Also examined were the heritability of a GFP, its degree of correlation with a general cognitive factor, and its ability to predict real-life criteria such as educational level, marital stability, and substance abuse.     

A rigorous approach for testing the constructionist hypotheses of brain function

Although the target article provides strong evidence against the locationist view, evidence for the constructionist view is inconclusive, because co-activation of brain regions does not necessarily imply connectivity between them. We propose a rigorous approach wherein connectivity between co-activated regions is first modeled using exploratory Granger causality, and then confirmed using dynamic causal modeling or Bayesian modeling.     

Test-retest reliability of an emotion maintenance task

Research on working memory has suggested domain-specific components for visual, verbal, and spatial information, and more recently for emotion. Affective working memory has been proposed as the set of processes involved in the maintenance of emotions to guide behaviour. The current study examined the reliability of an emotion maintenance/affective working memory task over two experimental sessions separated by one week. Subjective accuracy based on individual ratings was found to correlate over time and was highest for negatively valenced pictures. Results suggest that this paradigm is a reliable measure of emotion maintenance, underscoring the utility of this measure as an assessment tool for normative and clinical populations.     

Day-to-day variability in nap duration predicts medical morbidity in older adults

Objective: The objectives for the present study were to (a) examine within-person variability of nap duration and (b) assess how variability in nap duration is related to the number of health conditions in a sample of older adults. For highly variable behaviors such as sleep, it is important to consider fluctuations within the person instead of solely comparing averages of behaviors across persons. Method: Data were drawn from a previous study examining sleep in 103 community-dwelling older adults. Subjective estimates of napping behavior were obtained from sleep diaries and objective estimates of napping behavior were obtained using actigraphy. Both measures were collected for 14 consecutive days. The sampled data were aggregated in terms of (a) average daily time spent napping and (b) average within-person fluctuations in daily nap duration. The health measure consisted of the number of self-reported health conditions. Results: Both the objective and subjective measures revealed that there was considerable day-to-day fluctuation in nap duration and that variability in nap duration, not mean duration, uniquely predicted the number of health conditions, b = .03, b* = .26, t(100) = 2.71, p = .01. Conclusions: Duration of napping in older adults is a highly variable behavior, fluctuating as much within- as between-persons. Furthermore, variability in nap duration from day to day is predictive of greater medical morbidity, suggesting that clinicians should assess for inconsistencies in nap behavior in addition to duration, frequency, and timing. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved).     

Empathy Deficit in Antisocial Personality Disorder: A Psychodynamic Formulation

Empathic difficulty is a highly consequential characteristic of antisocial personality structure. The origin, maintenance, and possible resolution of this profound deficit are not very clear. While reconstructing empathic ability is of primary importance in the treatment of antisocial personality, not many proven procedures are in evidence. In this article, the author offers a psychodynamic formulation of the origin, character, and maintenance of the empathic deficiency in antisocial personality. The author discusses some of the treatment implications from this dynamic formulation.     

Decision makers calibrate behavioral persistence on the basis of time-interval experience

A central question in intertemporal decision making is why people reverse their own past choices. Someone who initially prefers a long-run outcome might fail to maintain that preference for long enough to see the outcome realized. Such behavior is usually understood as reflecting preference instability or self-control failure. However, if a decision maker is unsure exactly how long an awaited outcome will be delayed, a reversal can constitute the rational, utility-maximizing course of action. In the present behavioral experiments, we placed participants in timing environments where persistence toward delayed rewards was either productive or counterproductive. Our results show that human decision makers are responsive to statistical timing cues, modulating their level of persistence according to the distribution of delay durations they encounter. We conclude that temporal expectations act as a powerful and adaptive influence on people's tendency to sustain patient decisions.     

The influence of response conflict on voluntary task switching: a novel test of the conflict monitoring model

The conflict monitoring model of cognitive control posits that response conflict triggers a top-down enhancement of a task’s representation in working memory. In the present study, we conducted a novel test of the conflict monitoring model using a voluntary task switching paradigm. We predicted that a task’s representation would be enhanced following events associated with high response conflict (i.e., incongruent trials and incorrect responses), leading participants to voluntarily choose to repeat that task more often after these events than after events associated with low response conflict (i.e., congruent trials and correct responses). In two experiments, performance following incongruent trials was consistent with the conflict monitoring model. However, performance following incorrect trials did not fit with the model’s predictions. These findings provide novel support for the conflict monitoring model while revealing new effects of incorrect trials that the model cannot explain.     

An Extension of SIC Predictions to the Wiener Coactive Model

The survivor interaction contrasts (SIC) is a powerful measure for distinguishing among candidate models of human information processing. One class of models to which SIC analysis can apply are the coactive, or channel summation, models of human information processing. In general, parametric forms of coactive models assume that responses are made based on the first passage time across a fixed threshold of a sum of stochastic processes. Previous work has shown that the SIC for a coactive model based on the sum of Poisson processes has a distinctive down-up-down form, with an early negative region that is smaller than the later positive region. In this note, we demonstrate that a coactive process based on the sum of two Wiener processes has the same SIC form.