Anxiety and expectancy violations: Neural response to false feedback is exaggerated in worriers

This study investigated how individual differences in anxiety modulate the neural response to errors and performance feedback. The design included false feedback on some trials in order to test the hypothesis that anxious people show stronger neural reactions to feedback that is worse than expected. Participants completed a trial-and-error learning task that required learning the correct key to press in response to face images. EEG was recorded during the task, and the response-locked error-related negativity (ERN) and feedback-locked ERN were computed to measure neural responses to error commission and feedback. As expected, errors produced a response-locked ERN and false feedback produced a feedback-locked ERN in the group as a whole. High levels of trait worry predicted a disproportionately larger ERN following false feedback, but did not predict the magnitude of the response-locked ERN following errors. These results imply that worry-prone people react more strongly to violations of expectations, rather than to errors themselves.     

Three constructions of transference in Freud, 1895-1915

Three distinct constructions of transference which have related though differentiable histories can be identified in Freud's writings. The postulation of discrete meta-psychological, clinical, and universal constructions was completed by 1915, although many significant revisions within those constructions were made thereafter. Most significant is the distinction drawn between the clinical and universal constructions which (while both are founded on the metapsychological construction) facilitates recognition of cultural critical uses of transference as distinct from the clinical transference phenomena and as applicable far beyond the confines of psychopathology.     

Comparing positive and negative patterning in human learning

In human causal learning, positive patterning (PP) and negative patterning (NP) discriminations are often acquired at roughly the same rate, whereas PP is learned faster than NP in most experiments with nonhuman animals. One likely reason for this discrepancy is that most causal learning scenarios encourage participants to treat the presentation and omission of the relevant outcome as two events of comparable significance and likelihood. To investigate this, the current experiments compared PP and NP using a predictive learning paradigm based on a mock gambling task. In Experiment 1, one outcome (winning) was made more salient by being less frequent than the alternative outcome (losing). Under these circumstances, PP was learned faster than NP. In Experiment 2, subjects learned two PP and two NP discriminations, one involved win versus no change outcomes, the other involved lose versus no change outcomes. The subjects learned PP faster than NP, but only when discriminating win from no change. We argue that a difference in difficulty between PP and NP relies on a difference in the salience of the outcomes, consistent with the predictions of a relatively simple model of associative learning.     

Priming productive study strategies with preparatory quizzes in an engineering course

One approach to encourage productive study strategies is to incorporate preparatory quizzes (or pre‐quizzes) in which students are required to submit answers to questions before the underlying material is covered in class. In the present study, students took an introductory mechanical engineering class that either included pre‐quizzes (treatment group) or did not (control group). Students in the treatment group visited the online textbook more often and earlier in advance of deadlines, indicating better management of their study time—behaviors that have been shown to be productive study strategies. They also performed better in the course, indicating that techniques intended to prime productive study strategies can pay off. Finally, measures of productive learning strategies correlated with measures of course performance for both groups. These findings support the pretesting principle, which holds that students study more effectively and learn better when they take practice tests before a lesson.     

Gerontological Counseling Trends in Adultspan Journal: 1999–2019

Using quantitative content analysis, we categorized 76 out of 154 articles (49.35%) published in Adultspan Journal from 1999 to 2019 as focused on gerontological counseling. This study explored publication trends for these articles and compared results with a larger study (Fullen et al., 2019) on publication trends for gerontological counseling across all counseling‐related journals.     

Unskilled and unaware--but why? A reply to Krueger and Mueller (2002)

J. Kruger and D. Dunning (1999) argued that the unskilled suffer a dual burden: Not only do they perform poorly, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it. J. Krueger and R. A. Mueller (2002) replicated these basic findings but interpreted them differently. They concluded that a combination of the better-than-average (BTA) effect and a regression artifact better explains why the unskilled are unaware. The authors of the present article respectfully disagree with this proposal and suggest that any interpretation of J. Krueger and R. A. Mueller's results is hampered because those authors used unreliable tests and inappropriate measures of relevant mediating variables. Additionally, a regression-BTA account cannot explain the experimental data reported in J. Kruger and D. Dunning or a reanalysis following the procedure suggested by J. Krueger and R. A. Mueller.     

Perceptual effects of linguistic category priming: The Stapel and Semin (2007) paradigm revisited in twelve experiments

Linguistic category priming is a novel paradigm to examine automatic influences of language on cognition (Semin, 2008). An initial article reported that priming abstract linguistic categories (adjectives) led to more global perceptual processing, whereas priming concrete linguistic categories (verbs) led to more local perceptual processing (Stapel & Semin, 2007). However, this report was compromised by data fabrication by the first author, so that it remains unclear whether or not linguistic category priming influences perceptual processing. To fill this gap in the literature, the present article reports 12 studies among Dutch and US samples examining the perceptual effects of linguistic category priming. The results yielded no evidence of linguistic category priming effects. These findings are discussed in relation to other research showing cultural variations in linguistic category priming effects (IJzerman, Saddlemyer, & Koole, 2014). The authors conclude by highlighting the importance of conducting and publishing replication research for achieving scientific progress.     

Infants' enumeration of actions: numerical discrimination and its signature limits

Are abstract representations of number – representations that are independent of the particular type of entities that are enumerated – a product of human language or culture, or do they trace back to human infancy? To address this question, four experiments investigated whether human infants discriminate between sequences of actions (jumps of a puppet) on the basis of numerosity. At 6 months, infants successfully discriminated four‐ versus eight‐jump sequences, when the continuous variables of sequence duration, jump duration, jump rate, jump interval and duration, and extent of motion were controlled, and rhythm was eliminated. In contrast, infants failed to discriminate two‐ versus four‐jump sequences, suggesting that infants fail to form cardinal number representations of small numbers of actions. Infants also failed to discriminate between sequences of four versus six jumps at 6 months, and succeeded at 9 months, suggesting that infants’ number representations are imprecise and increase in precision with age. All of these findings agree with those of studies using visual–spatial arrays and auditory sequences, providing evidence that a single, abstract system of number representation is present and functional in infancy.