Exploring positive,negative and context‐dependent aspects of proactive behaviours at work

This article is an introduction to the Special Section entitled ‘Exploring positive, negative and context‐dependent aspects of proactive behaviours at work’ which features in this issue of Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology.     

To carry or not to carry — Is this the question? Disentangling the carry effect in multi-digit addition

Recent research has suggested addition performance to be determined by both the need for a carry operation and problem size. Nevertheless, it has remained debatable, how these two factors are interrelated. In the current study, this question was pursued by orthogonally manipulating carry and problem size in two-digit addition verification. As the two factors interacted reliably, our results indicate that the carry effect is moderated by number magnitude processing rather than representing a purely procedural, asemantic sequence of processing steps. Moreover, it was found that the carry effect may not be a purely categorical effect but may be driven by continuous characteristics of the sum of the unit digits as well. Since the correct result of a carry problem can only be derived by integrating and updating the magnitudes of tens and units within the place-value structure of the Arabic number system, the present study provides evidence for the idea that decomposed processing of tens and units also transfers to mental arithmetic.     

“End-of-life” biases in moral evaluations of others

When evaluating the moral character of others, people show a strong bias to more heavily weigh behaviors at the end of an individual’s life, even if those behaviors arise in light of an overwhelmingly longer duration of contradictory behavior. Across four experiments, we find that this “end-of-life” bias uniquely applies to intentional changes in behavior that immediately precede death, and appears to result from the inference that the behavioral change reflects the emergence of the individual’s “true self”.     

Expertise increases the functional overlap between face and object perception

Recent studies indicate that expertise with objects can interfere with face processing. Although competition occurs between faces and objects of expertise, it remains unclear whether this reflects an expertise-specific bottleneck or the fact that objects of expertise grab attention and thereby consume more central resources. We investigated the perceptual costs of expertise by measuring visual thresholds for identifying targets embedded within RSVP sequences presented at varying temporal rates. Car experts and novices searched for face targets among face and car distractors, or watch targets among watch and car distractors. Remarkably, car experts were slower than novices at identifying faces among task-irrelevant cars, yet faster than novices at identifying watches among cars. This suggests that car expertise leads to greater functional overlap between cars and faces while reducing the functional overlap between cars and objects, a result incompatible with the notion of an encapsulated module for exclusive processing of faces.     

Effects of accuracy motivation and need to evaluate on mode of attitude formation and attitude–behavior consistency

This study investigates the effects of accuracy motivation and need to evaluate on online vs. memory-based attitude formation and attitude–behavior consistency. Results show that online attitude formation is more likely when accuracy motivation or the need to evaluate is high. However, cognitive load disrupts online attitude formation even when accuracy motivation is high. Additionally, attitude relevance increases the likelihood of online attitude formation, but attitude accessibility does not. Furthermore, online (vs. memory-based) attitudes are more predictive of subsequent non-hypothetical choice.     

Cues for self-recognition in point-light displays of actions performed in synchrony with music

Self–other discrimination was investigated with point-light displays in which actions were presented with or without additional auditory information. Participants first executed different actions (dancing, walking and clapping) in time with music. In two subsequent experiments, they watched point-light displays of their own or another participant’s recorded actions, and were asked to identify the agent (self vs. other). Manipulations were applied to the visual information (actions differing in complexity, and degradation from 15 to 2 point-lights within the same clapping action) and to the auditory information (self-generated vs. externally-generated vs. none). Results indicate that self-recognition was better than chance in all conditions and was highest when observing relatively unconstrained patterns of movement. Auditory information did not increase accuracy even with the most ambiguous visual displays, suggesting that judgments of agent identity depend much more on motor cues than on auditory (action-generated) or audiovisual (synchronization) information.     

Facial expressions of singers influence perceived pitch relations

In four experiments, we examined whether facial expressions used while singing carry musical information that can be “read” by viewers. In Experiment 1, participants saw silent video recordings of sung melodic intervals and judged the size of the interval they imagined the performers to be singing. Participants discriminated interval sizes on the basis of facial expression and discriminated large from small intervals when only head movements were visible. Experiments 2 and 3 confirmed that facial expressions influenced judgments even when the auditory signal was available. When matched with the facial expressions used to perform a large interval, audio recordings of sung intervals were judged as being larger than when matched with the facial expressions used to perform a small interval. The effect was not diminished when a secondary task was introduced, suggesting that audio-visual integration is not dependent on attention. Experiment 4 confirmed that the secondary task reduced participants’ ability to make judgments that require conscious attention. The results provide the first evidence that facial expressions influence perceived pitch relations.     

真之本性

本文是兰姆赛的一篇经典论文,在文中,兰姆赛提出了他的“真之冗余论”的基本观点：只有具有命题指称并且有断定特性的信念才能成为真之载体,一个信念P是真的,当且仅当P。