Association between shame aversion and ruminative retribution: Evidence for moderation by externalization of blame and control

Motivation and Emotion - Shame aversion has been theorized to motivate aggression against the self or others as means of down-regulating shame. Additionally, the direction of aggression may depend...     

Fuel for Thought? A Systematic Review of Neuroimaging Studies into Glucose Enhancement of Cognitive Performance

Neuropsychology Review - A transient improvement in cognitive performance can be observed following the ingestion of a glucose drink, a phenomenon known as the ‘glucose facilitation...     

Understanding and taking stock of positive emotion disturbance

The prevailing view on positive emotions is that they correlate with and confer psychological health benefits for the individual, including improved social, physical and cognitive functioning. Yet an emerging wave of scientific work suggests that positive emotions are also related to a range of suboptimal psychological health outcomes, especially when the intensity, duration, or context do not optimize the individual's goals or meet current environmental demands. This paper provides an overview of the “other side” of positive emotion, by describing and reviewing evidence supporting the emerging field of positive emotion disturbance (PED). We review relevant emotion processes and key themes of PED and apply this framework to example emotional disorders, and discuss implications for psychological change and future research agendas.     

Division of the corpus callosum into subregions

Various attempts have been made to subdivide the corpus callosum (CC) into anatomically and functionally distinct subareas. A promising current approach is the use of factor analytic techniques in conjunction with traced MRI images. The traced images are divided into 99 percentile slices, where the widths of the percentile slices are used as variables that are entered into the analysis (Denenberg, Kertesz & Cowell, 1991). Studies that use this technique agree broadly between 6 and 7 factors, but available factor solutions contain inconsistencies and large gaps, which arise when many of the percentile slices do not load appreciably on any of the factors. The present study uses a larger number of brains (N = 184), all normalized, and some methodological refinements in the analysis of the traced MRI images of the CC. A stable 7 factor solution was found, and the factor structure for males and females was very similar.     

A shift of attention may be necessary, but it is not sufficient, for the generation of the Simon effect

The Simon effect is the performance advantage for spatially corresponding, compared to non-corresponding, target-response ensembles when the location of the target is task irrelevant. In four experiments, we tested the predictions of the attention-shift account of the Simon effect. In all experiments, subjects made choice responses with respect to the identity of a central target that followed a spatially non-informative peripheral precue. The first experiment showed a Simon effect away from the precue when the precue was a go/no-go signal: responses to spatially non-corresponding precue-response pairs were faster than responses to spatially corresponding precue-response pairs. The results of the second experiment suggested that this “reverse” Simon effect was not due to inhibition. In the third experiment, a secondary working memory task required the encoding, and later recall, of “oddball” precues. Although the Simon effect was absent, larger Simon effects towards the precue (i.e., responses were faster to spatially corresponding, compared to non-corresponding, precue-response ensembles) were correlated with poorer performance on the memory task. In the last experiment, the identity of completely non-informative precues was congruent, incongruent, or unrelated to the identity of the target. With precues that were unrelated to the identity of the target, there was a Simon effect towards the precues. Conversely, the Simon effect occurred away from the precue when the identity of the precue was related to that of the target. The findings suggest that a shift of attention alone is not sufficient to produce the Simon effect. Rather, the shift of attention must originate from an intentionally defined object. The results are discussed within a framework that integrates the attention-shift and referential-coding hypotheses. Received: 2 December 1999 / Accepted: 23 March 2000     

The researcher goes to school

Educational research in the naturalistic setting is challenging and rewarding for the researcher, but it places new demands upon teachers and administrators. School personnel may view the researcher as an intruder, a fact which researchers must understand from the school's point of view. Research needs and goals must be understood by school personnel prior to the onset of data collection. Research can be successfully implemented in the naturalistic setting if emphathetic researchers work closely with school personnel to facilitate mutual understanding.     

Evaluating evidence of psychological adaptation: how do we know one when we see one?

Evolutionary psychologists argue that human nature contains many discrete psychological adaptations. Each adaptation is theorized to have been functional in humans' ancestral past, and empirical evidence that an attribute is an adaptation can come from showing it possesses complexity, efficiency, universality, and other features of special design. In this article, we present a tutorial review of the evidentiary forms that evolutionary psychologists commonly use to document the existence of human adaptations. We also present a heuristic framework for integrating and evaluating cross-disciplinary evidence of adaptation. Pregnancy sickness, incest avoidance, men's desires for multiple sex partners, and an easily learned fear of snakes are evaluated as possible human adaptations using this framework. We conclude that future research and teaching in evolutionary psychology would benefit from more fully utilizing cross-disciplinary frameworks to evaluate evidence of human adaptation.