Stereotype validation and intellectual performance: Negative implications for future achievement

Previous research has found that activating negative stereotypes after completion of a task can lead people to feel more certain that they performed poorly (i.e., stereotype validation). The current research examined the implications that stereotype validation may hold for future performance. In two studies, the accessibility of gender stereotypes was manipulated after participants completed an initial test on a topic. After reporting perceptions of their performance, participants completed a follow-up test on the same subject. Consistent with hypotheses, activating negative stereotypes after the initial test was found to increase certainty in negative performance evaluations among stigmatized participants. Importantly, this higher certainty – triggered by stereotypes – predicted decreased performance on the later, follow-up test.     

Exploring attention-based explanations for some violations of Hick’s law for aimed movements

Choice reaction time generally increases linearly with the logarithm of the number of potential stimulus-response alternatives, a regularity known as Hick's law. Two apparent violations of this generalization, which have been reported for aimed eye movements (Kveraga, Boucher, & Hughes, Experimental Brain Research, 146, 307-314, 2002), and arm movements (Wright, Marino, Belovsky, & Chubb, Experimental Brain Research, 179, 475-496, 2007), occurred when the indicator stimulus was an abrupt change at the location that was the target of the to-be-made movement. We report two experiments that examined and rejected the hypothesis that these abrupt-onset indicator stimuli triggered a shift in exogenous attention and that this led to unusually small uncertainty effects. Each experiment compared this indicator stimulus with a single alternative: Experiment 1 tested an indicator stimulus at all locations other than the target; Experiment 2 tested a central pointer to the target. Neither alternative led to an uncertainty effect for pointing responses that was of the size typically observed for other responses using the same stimuli.     

Parental Problem-Solving Abilities and the Association of Sickle Cell Disease Complications with Health-Related Quality of Life for School-Age Children

Children with sickle cell disease (SCD) are at risk for poor health-related quality of life (HRQOL). The current analysis sought to explore parent problem-solving abilities/skills as a moderator between SCD complications and HRQOL to evaluate applicability to pediatric SCD. At baseline, 83 children ages 6–12 years and their primary caregiver completed measures of child HRQOL. Primary caregivers also completed a measure of social problem-solving. A SCD complications score was computed from medical record review. Parent problem-solving abilities significantly moderated the association of SCD complications with child self-report psychosocial HRQOL (p = .006). SCD complications had a direct effect on parent proxy physical and psychosocial child HRQOL. Enhancing parent problem-solving abilities may be one approach to improve HRQOL for children with high SCD complications; however, modification of parent perceptions of HRQOL may require direct intervention to improve knowledge and skills involved in disease management.     

Strategic and automatic threat processing in chronic musculoskeletal pain: a startle probe investigation

Attentional bias research with chronic pain samples has yielded conflicting results. In the present investigation the startle paradigm was used to test the postulate that fear-based mechanisms play an important role in attentional biases for pain-related threat in chronic pain. Participants, including 31 individuals with chronic musculoskeletal pain and 20 healthy controls, completed a startle task designed to measure attention to different types of words (neutral vs sensory pain vs affective pain vs health catastrophe) presented at different levels of cognitive processing (strategic vs automatic). Measures of fear-based individual difference variables, including anxiety sensitivity and fear of pain, were also completed. Startle amplitudes and latencies to acoustic startle probes that followed word presentations were recorded. Data were analyzed with repeated measures ANOVAs and correlational analysis. Significant between-group differences were found indicating that, relative to chronic pain participants, healthy controls had higher startle amplitude index scores for health catastrophe words. There was also a trend among patients with chronic pain for greater startle amplitude index scores for strategic presentations of sensory pain words. In the automatic condition, all participants demonstrated a lower startle latency index for sensory words relative to both affect and health catastrophe words, suggesting participants had more difficulty disengaging from affect and health catastrophe words or were more avoidant of sensory words. Correlational analyses indicated that startle response indices for words related to health catastrophe became more pronounced for chronic pain patients as anxiety sensitivity and fear of pain increased. Implications and directions for future research are discussed.     

Repeated acquisitions and extinctions in classical conditioning of the rabbit nictitating membrane response

The rabbit nictitating membrane (NM) response underwent successive stages of acquisition and extinction training in both delay (Experiment 1) and trace (Experiment 2) classical conditioning. In both cases, successive acquisitions became progressively faster, although the largest, most reliable acceleration occurred between the first and second acquisition. Successive extinctions were similar in rate. The results challenge contextual control theories of extinction but are consistent with attentional and layered-network models. The results are discussed with respect to their implications for the interaction between cerebellar and forebrain pathways for eyeblink conditioning.     

Affect intensity and cardiac arousal.

Relationships between affect intensity and basal, evoked, and perceived cardiac arousal were investigated in 3 experiments. Affect intensity was assessed using Larsen and Diener's (1987) Affect Intensity Measure (AIM). Cardiac arousal was evoked with exercise in the 1st study and with mental arithmetic in the 2nd and 3rd. Perceived cardiac arousal was measured under optimal conditions using a standard heartbeat discrimination procedure. Women as a group scored higher on the AIM. Affect intensity was unrelated to basal or evoked cardiac arousal and was negatively related to perceived cardiac arousal in all 3 studies. Data suggest that affect intensity, although unrelated to actual physiological arousal, is negatively related to the accuracy with which individuals perceive their own arousal. Results are discussed within the context of an expanded arousal-regulation model (Blascovich, 1990).     

Conditioning of the rabbit's nictitating membrane response to a CSA-CSB-US serial compound: manipulations of CSB's associative character.

Response acquisition to a trace conditioned stimulus (CSA) can be facilitated by insertion of a second stimulus (CSB) at the end of the trace interval just before the unconditioned stimulus (US). This effect may arise from serial mediation of trace conditioning, second-order conditioning, or both. Whereas serial mediation relies only on the presence of CSB, associative transfer relies on CSB's associative strength. In the present experiments, the presence of CSB was fixed, whereas CSB's associative strength was manipulated by (a) extinction of CSB, (b) latent inhibition of CSB, and (c) prior CSB-US pairings. In the first 2 cases, the level of responding to CSA was reduced in a fashion parallel to that of CSB. However, in the third case, partial blocking of conditioned response (CR) acquisition to CSA was observed. The results are discussed with reference to the role of associative transfer to both facilitating and blocking CR acquisition to CSA.