Follow your heart: Emotion adaptively influences perception

The current review introduces a new program of research that suggests the perception of spatial layout is influenced by emotions. Though perceptual systems are often described as closed and insulated, this review presents research suggesting that a variety of induced emotions (e.g., fear, disgust, sadness) can produce changes in vision and audition. Thus, the perceptual system may be highly interconnected, allowing emotional information to influence perceptions that, in turn, influence cognition. The body of work presented here also suggests that emotion-based changes in perception help us solve particular adaptive problems because emotion does not change all perceptions of the world. Taking the adaptive significance of emotion into account allows us to make predictions about when and how emotion influences perception.     

Clarifying the unique associations among intolerance of uncertainty,anxiety, and depression*

Increasing evidence suggests that intolerance of uncertainty (IU) may be a transdiagnostic factor across the anxiety disorders, and to a lesser extent, unipolar depression. Whereas anxiety inherently involves uncertainty regarding threat, depression has traditionally been associated with certainty (e.g. the hopelessness theory of depression). Some theorists posit that the observed relationship between depression and IU may be due to the relationship between depression and anxiety and the relationship between anxiety and IU. The present study sought to elucidate the unique relationships among trait anxiety, depression, and IU in undergraduate (N = 554) and clinical (generalized anxiety disorder; N = 43) samples. Findings suggest that IU may play a larger role in anxiety than depression, although some evidence indicates that inhibitory IU and depression may have a modest but independent relationship.     

The Willingness of Military Members to Seek Help: The Role of Social Involvement and Social Responsibility

Anchored in the social organization theory of action and change, we use data from a large sample of active‐duty Air Force members to examine the direct and indirect influence of social involvement and social responsibility on willingness to seek help in times of need via trust in formal systems and informal supports. Group comparisons are conducted between junior male, junior female, senior male, and senior female service members. The key mediational path in the model for all groups is the connection between social involvement and willingness to seek help via trust in formal systems. These results can inform both unit‐ and community‐level interventions intended to increase the likelihood that active‐duty AF members will seek help in times of need.     

Race differences and type II errors: A comment on Borkowski and Krause

Magnitude comparisons of black-white differences on a variety of cognitive tests give a somewhat different picture of the results of a small-sample study by Borkowski and Krause (1983), who based their conclusions mainly on significance tests. Some of the critical variables in the study consisted of differences scores with unacceptably low reliability, inclining the results toward the favored hypothesis, namely, that the locus of the difference between blacks and whites in psychometric intelligence lies in metaprocesses, or the executive system, and not in the elementary cognitive processes. The results actually show fairly comparable black-white differences in measures of both types of processes.     

Object-based attention with endogenous cuing and positional certainty

Previous studies have concluded that object-based attention does not always arise if attention is cued endogenously (Macquistan, 1997) or if the target location is known with certainty (Shomstein & Yantis, 2002). In the Experiments reported here, we found object-based attention even when the locations of the two targets were known with certainty due to presentation of an endogenous cue. However, object-based attention can be prevented by limiting the exposure time of the object stimuli. These findings provide additional evidence against a search prioritization account of object-based attention. They lead to a fuller view of the role of object boundaries in directing attention. Object-based attention is frequently used spontaneously, even when the object boundaries are irrelevant to the task. However, object segmentation is not necessary for all tasks, because attention can be allocated before the stimulus has been segregated into objects.     

Willingness to pay for advice: The role of rational and experiential processing

Everyday, millions of decision makers receive advice from one or more sources. Although research has addressed some of the issues concerning how people take and use advice that they are given, less is known about the psychological processes that underlie decision makers’ willingness to pay for advice. In the present research, we explore the important role that mode of information processing and decision-specific knowledge have on willingness to pay for advice. In a pretest and two experiments, we use a priming procedure to induce either a rational or experiential mode of processing. We find that people processing information rationally are willing to pay substantially more for advice than those who are processing information experientially, and that this effect is moderated by the individual’s decision-specific knowledge.