A standardized set of 260 pictures for Modern Greek: Norms for name agreement, age of acquisition, and visual complexity

The appropriate selection of both pictorial and linguistic experimental stimuli requires a previous languagespecific standardization process of the materials across different variables. Considering that such normative data have not yet been collected for Modern Greek, in this study normative data for the color version of the Snodgrass and Vanderwart picture set (Rossion & Pourtois, 2004) were collected from 330 native Greek adults. Participants named the pictures (providing name agreement ratings) and rated them for visual complexity and age of acquisition. The obtained measures represent a useful tool for further research on Greek language processing and constitute the first picture normative study for this language. The picture norms from this study and previous ones may be downloaded from brm.psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental.     

Neonatal imitation in chimpanzees (<Emphasis Type="Italic">Pan troglodytes</Emphasis>) tested with two paradigms

Primate species differ in their imitative performance, perhaps reflecting differences in imitative capacity. The developmentally earliest form of imitation in humans, neonatal imitation, occurs in early interactions with social partners, and may be a more accurate index of innate capacity than imitation of actions on objects, which requires more cognitive ability. This study assessed imitative capacity in five neonatal chimpanzees, within a narrow age range (7–15 days of age), by testing responses to facial and vocal actions with two different test paradigms (structured and communicative). Imitation of mouth opening was found in both paradigms. In the communicative paradigm, significant agreement was found between infant actions and demonstrations. Additionally, chimpanzees matched the sequence of three actions of the TC model, but only on the second demonstration. Newborn chimpanzees matched more modeled actions in the communicative test than in the structured paradigm. These performances of chimpanzees, at birth, are in agreement with the literature, supporting a conclusion that imitative capacity is not unique to the human species. Developmental histories must be more fully considered in the cross-species study of imitation, as there is a greater degree of innate imitative capacity than previously known. Socialization practices interact with innate and developing competencies to determine the outcome of imitation tests later in life.     

Self-esteem moderates the response to forgiveness instructions among women with a history of victimization

The present study examined whether self-esteem would moderate women’s affect after being exposed to brief instructional interventions tapping into two dimensions of forgiveness: an interpersonal dimension focusing on forgiving the offender, and an intrapersonal dimension focusing on letting go of one’s negative affect toward the offender. The positive and negative affect of 79 women with a history of victimization was assessed after they listened to instructions for either granting forgiveness, letting go of their negative affect, or relaxation (control). Results indicated differential effects of the instructions on emotions directed toward themselves versus toward the offender. Women had more negative emotions about themselves when they received the granting forgiveness instructions, but they had greater positive emotions toward their offenders. Women’s responses were moderated by self-esteem in that there was no differential effect of the instructions among women low in self-esteem, but women high in self-esteem had a relatively positive response to the letting-go instructions and a generally negative reaction to the traditional forgiveness instructions.     

Resolving Nationalist Conflicts: Promoting Overlapping Identities and Pooling Sovereignty—The 1998 Northern Irish Peace Agreement

Nationalist and ethnic conflicts are a continuing source of tension in the post–Cold War period. The underlying factors affecting such conflicts are threat perception, ethnic security dilemmas, and lack of trust between nationalist/ethnic groups. The challenge is to find solutions to these conflicts. International institutions can establish trust and reduce the ethnic security dilemma by providing multiple forums of representation, promoting overlapping identities, and pooling sovereignty. Pooling sovereignty across a number of international representative bodies leads to increased access to governmental policymaking, with each party having a stake in government, and leads to a reduction in political tension and conflict. Thus, international parliamentary institutions may provide a solution to these conflicts. The British-Irish Peace Agreement (Good Friday Agreement) of 1998 is examined as an illustration of this argument.     

The Color-Vision Approach to Emotional Space: Cortical Evoked Potential Data

A framework for accounting for emotional phenomena proposed by Sokolov and Boucsein (2000) employs conceptual dimensions that parallel those of hue, brightness, and saturation in color vision. The approach that employs the concepts of emotional quality. intensity, and saturation has been supported by psychophysical emotional scaling data gathered from a few trained observers. We report cortical evoked potential data obtained during the change between different emotions expressed in schematic faces. Twenty-five subjects (13 male, 12 female) were presented with a positive, a negative, and a neutral computer-generated face with random interstimulus intervals in a within-subjects design, together with four meaningful and four meaningless control stimuli made up from the same elements. Frontal, central, parietal, and temporal ERPs were recorded from each hemisphere. Statistically significant outcomes in the P300 and N200 range support the potential fruitfulness of the proposed color-vision-model-based approach to human emotional space.     

The variance theory of the mirror effect in recognition memory

The mirror effect refers to a rather general empirical finding showing that, for two classes of stimuli, the class with the higher hit rates also has a lower false alarm rate. In this article, a parsimonious theory is proposed to account for the mirror effect regarding, specifically, high- and low-frequency items and the associated receiver-operating curves. The theory is implemented in a recurrent network in which one layer represents items and the other represents contexts. It is shown that the frequency mirror effect is found in this simple network if the decision is based on counting the number of active nodes in such a way that performance is optimal or near optimal. The optimal performance requires that the number of active nodes is low, only nodes active in the encoded representation are counted, the activation threshold is set between the old and the new distributions, and normalization is based on the variance of the input. Owing to the interference caused by encoding the to-be-recognized item in several preexperimental contexts, the variance of the input to the context layer is greater for highthan for low-frequency items, which yields lower hit rates and higher false alarm rates for high- than for low-frequency items. Although initially the theory was proposed to account for the mirror effect with respect to word frequency, subsequent simulations have shown that the theory also accounts for strength-based mirror effects within a list and between lists. In this case, consistent with experimental data, the variance theory suggests that focusing attention to the more difficult class within a list affects the hit rate, but not the false alarm rate and not the standard deviations of the underlying density, leading to no mirror effect.     

Electrophysiological evidence for the "missing link" in crossmodal attention.

Orienting attention involuntarily to the location of a sensory event influences responses to subsequent stimuli that appear in different modalities with one possible exception: orienting attention involuntarily to a sudden light sometimes fails to affect responses to subsequent sounds (e.g., Spence & Driver, 1997). Here we investigated the effects of involuntary attention to a brief flash on the processing of subsequent sounds in a design that eliminates stimulus-response compatibility effects and criterion shifts as confounding factors. In addition, the neural processes mediating crossmodal attention were studied by recording event-related brain potentials. Our data show that orienting attention to the location of a spatially nonpredictive visual cue modulates behavioural and neural responses to subsequent auditory targets when the stimulus onset asynchrony is short (between 100 and 300 ms). These findings are consistent with the hypothesis that involuntary shifts of attention are controlled by supramodal brain mechanisms rather than by modality-specific ones.     

Beyond the gambling paradigm: internal controllability in decision-making.

Much research within decision-making has used the standard gambling paradigm, where decision outcomes depend only on chance. Many real life decisions, however, imply personal control over decision outcomes. This paper addressed the question of how internal controllability influences decision-making. Internal controllability is assumed (i) to enhance unrealistic optimism and (ii) to result in a better cost:benefit ratio. Both tendencies support each other and predict an enhanced attractiveness for internal and controllable choice options. Participants read a scenario and made a decision afterwards. Results supported the prediction: decision-makers take the option they can personally control. This finding widens the narrow perspective inherent in much previous research based on the gambling paradigm.