A laboratory-based procedure for measuring emotional expression from natural speech

Despite dramatic advances in the sophistication of tools for measuring prosodic and content channels of expression from natural speech, methodological issues have limited the simultaneous measurement of those channels for laboratory research. This is particularly unfortunate, considering the importance of emotional expression in daily living and how it can be disrupted in many psychological disorders (e.g., schizophrenia). The present study examined the Computerized assessment of Affect from Natural Speech (CANS), a laboratory-based procedure that was designed to measure both lexical and prosodic expression from natural speech across a range of evocative conditions. The verbal responses of 38 male and 31 female subjects were digitally recorded as they reacted to separate pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral stimuli. Lexical and prosodic expression variables significantly changed across these conditions, providing support for using the CANS in further laboratory research. The implications for understanding the interface between lexical and prosodic expressions are also discussed.     

On the segmentation of Chinese words during reading

Given that there are no spaces between words in Chinese, how words are segmented when reading is something of a mystery. Four Chinese characters, which either constituted one 4-character word or two 2-character words, were shown briefly to subjects. Subjects were quite accurate in reporting the 4-character word, but could usually only report the first 2-character word, demonstrating that word segmentation influences character recognition. The results suggest that even with these simple 4-character strings, there is an element of seriality in reading Chinese words: processing is initially focused at least to some extent on the first word. We also found that the processing of characters that are not consistent with the context is inhibited, suggesting inhibition from word representations to character representations. A simple model of Chinese word segmentation and word recognition is presented to account for the data.     

Can intuition improve deception detection performance?

Two studies examined the role of processing style (intuitive vs. deliberative processing) in a deception detection task. In the first experiment, a thin slicing manipulation was used to demonstrate that intuitive processing can lead to more accurate judgments of deception when compared with traditional deliberative forms of processing. In the second experiment, participants who engaged in a secondary (concurrent) task performed more accurately in a deception detection task than participants who were asked to provide a verbal rationale for each decision and those in a control condition. Overall, the results converge to suggest that intuitive processing can significantly improve deception detection performance.     

Threat, high self-esteem, and reactive approach-motivation: Electroencephalographic evidence

High self-esteem predicts personal resilience but also predicts zealous and antisocial reactions to various threats, such as, failure, uncertainty, and mortality salience. The present research supports a basic motivational interpretation of high self-esteem that can account for its resilient but also its zealous and antisocial tendencies. An experimentally manipulated uncertainty threat caused participants with high self-esteem to react with heightened Relative Left Frontal (F7/F8) EEG Activity, a common neural marker of resilient approach-motivation. As predicted by past theorizing on offensive defensiveness (McGregor, 2006), the obtained pattern of neural results mirrors the interaction effect of self-esteem and threat on various antisocial defenses. It is accordingly suggested that reactive approach-motivation processes may help provide an integrative account for some of the angry, zealous, proud, risky, ideological, meaning-seeking, and worldview defense reactions to various threats that have been reported in the social psychological literature.     

Neonatal auditory evoked responses are related to perinatal maternal anxiety

Maternal stress and anxiety during pregnancy are related to negative developmental outcomes for offspring, both physiological and psychological, from the fetal period through early adolescence. This robust relationship is likely to be partly explained by alterations in fetal neurodevelopmental programming, calling for further examination of neurophysiologically-based cognitive markers that may be related to the altered structure–function relationships that contribute to these negative developmental outcomes. The current investigation examined the relationship between perinatal maternal anxiety and neonatal auditory evoked responses (AERs) to mother and stranger voices. Results indicated that neonates of low-anxiety mothers displayed more negative frontal slow wave amplitudes in response to their mother’s voice compared to a female stranger’s voice, while neonates of high-anxiety mothers showed the opposite pattern. These findings suggest that neonates of perinatally anxious mothers may demonstrate neurophysiologically-based differences in attentional allocation. This could represent one pathway to the negative psychological outcomes seen throughout development in offspring of anxious mothers.     

Investigations of closure processes: What source-monitoring judgments suggest about what is “closing”

On many occasions, the perception of an object is based on incomplete information because portions of the object are occluded from view. Nevertheless, people are able to identify an occluded object, suggesting that the identification is mediated by the activation of completion processes which “fill in” the missing information. Although these completion processes are invoked as causal mechanisms for many phenomena, the processes mediating the “completion” have not been specified. The present experiments tested two potential explanations for closure processes. In each experiment, participants were presented with pictures, complete or incomplete in form, and, on a surprise source-monitoring task, they were then asked to remember whether pictures had been presented complete or incomplete in form. Whether viewing pictures of objects, faces, or camouflaged objects, participants showed a pronounced tendency to claim that incomplete pictures were actually presented complete in form. This bias was evident after the participants described functions for objects (Experiments 1, 1A, and 2), after they evaluated properties of faces (Experiment 4), and after they searched for objects hidden in a complex scene (Experiment 5). However, this bias was not evident after they simply named objects portrayed in pictures (Experiment 3). This bias is interpreted as evidence for the activation of implicit imaginal processing. The results of these experiments are informative in their contribution to our understanding of the bases of closure, an intuitively appealing notion frequently invoked to account for object identification, but, as yet, not fully understood.     

A System for Relational Reasoning in Human Prefrontal Cortex

The integration of multiple relations between mental representations is critical for higher level cognition. For both deductive- and inductive-reasoning tasks, patients with prefrontal damage exhibited a selective and catastrophic deficit in the integration of relations, whereas patients with anterior temporal lobe damage, matched for overall IQ but with intact prefrontal cortex, exhibited normal relational integration. In contrast, prefrontal patients performed more accurately than temporal patients on tests of both episodic memory and semantic knowledge. These double dissociations suggest that integration of relations is a specific source of cognitive complexity for which intact prefrontal cortex is essential. The integration of relations may be the fundamental common factor linking the diverse abilities that depend on prefrontal function, such as planning, problem solving, and fluid intelligence.