Animacy Effect and Language Specificity: Judgment of Unaccusative Verbs by Korean Learners of English as a Foreign Language

This study investigated the tendency of overpassivization of unaccusative verbs by Korean learners of English as a foreign language (FL). Sixty Korean native college students participated in the study, along with 17 English-speaking counterparts serving as a comparison group. Consistent with the findings of previous research, this study found Korean students’ tendency to incorrectly accept passive-voice with inanimate subjects. The results of this study highlighted the role of lexical animacy, the hierarchy of agentivity, and language-specific effects on FL judgment. The findings of this study suggest a robust language-specific L1 effect on L2 acquisition and a greater involvement of cognition in FL use than language input.     

Redundancy effects in the perception and memory of visual objects

Is visual representation of an object affected by whether surrounding objects are identical to it, different from it, or absent? To address this question, we tested perceptual priming, visual short-term, and long-term memory for objects presented in isolation or with other objects. Experiment 1 used a priming procedure, where the prime display contained a single face, four identical faces, or four different faces. Subjects identified the gender of a subsequent probe face that either matched or mismatched with one of the prime faces. Priming was stronger when the prime was four identical faces than when it was a single face or four different faces. Experiments 2 and 3 asked subjects to encode four different objects presented on four displays. Holding memory load constant, visual memory was better when each of the four displays contained four duplicates of a single object, than when each display contained a single object. These results suggest that an object's perceptual and memory representations are enhanced when presented with identical objects, revealing redundancy effects in visual processing.     

Savoring Helps Most When You Have Little: Interaction Between Savoring the Moment and Uplifts on Positive Affect and Satisfaction with Life

Savoring the moment is a means of generating, prolonging, or intensifying positive emotions while a positive event is occurring. While the occurrence of positive events is integral to savoring the moment, there is a paucity of research examining the interaction of the two. This study examines the longitudinal interaction of savoring the moment and the number of everyday positive events (uplifts) that occur over 2 weeks on measures of positive affect and satisfaction with life. Significant interactions between savoring and uplifts were found, indicating that those participants with low levels of savoring and low numbers of uplifts were at risk, as they experienced low levels of both positive affect and satisfaction with life. The other three groups (high savoring/high uplifts, low savoring/high uplifts, high savoring/low uplifts) had similarly positive outcomes. The findings imply the utility of increasing savoring when individuals experience few positive events.     

Differences in brain information transmission between gifted and normal children during scientific hypothesis generation

The purpose of the present study was to investigate differences in neural information transmission between gifted and normal children involved in scientific hypothesis generation. To investigate changes in the amount of information transmission, the children's averaged-cross mutual information (A-CMI) of EEGs was estimated during their generation of scientific hypotheses. We recorded EEG from 25 gifted and 25 age-matched normal children using 16 electrodes on each subject's scalp. To generate hypotheses, the children were asked to observe 20 "quail eggs" that gave rise to questions. After observation, they were asked to generate a scientific hypothesis--a tentative causal explanation for the questions evoked. The results of this study revealed several distinguishing brain activities between gifted and normal children during hypothesis generation. In contrast to normal children, gifted children showed increased A-CMI values between the left temporal and central, between the left temporal and parietal, and between the left central and parietal locations while generating a hypothesis. These results suggested that gifted children more efficiently distribute the cognitive resources essential to cope with hypothesis generation.     

Hope, defense mechanisms, and adjustment: implications for false hope and defensive hopelessness

Two studies replicated and expanded an earlier finding that defense style plays a crucial role in the relation between hope and dysphoria (Kwon, 2000). Lower hope and higher defense style immaturity were each associated with greater dysphoria, depression proneness, and maladjustment. Individuals with low hope and low defense immaturity did not have poor outcomes, supporting the existence of a subtype of low hope (defensive hopelessness) that may have adaptive value. The combination of high hope and high defense immaturity was not associated with maladaptive outcomes, arguing against the false hope construct. Additionally, the findings remained after controlling for levels of anxiety. Thus, it appears that the results are not attributable to general distress or negative affectivity. Finally, domain-specific hope was shown to correlate most strongly with matching areas of adjustment, providing evidence for the validity of the construct.     

Two different types of obsession: autogenous obsessions and reactive obsessions

We propose that obsessions are categorized into two subtypes, i.e. autogenous obsessions and reactive obsessions, which are different in terms of identifiability of their evoking stimuli, subjective experiences, contents, and subsequent cognitive processes. Autogenous obsessions tend to come abruptly into consciousness without identifiable evoking stimuli, which are perceived as ego-dystonic and aversive enough to be repelled, and include sexual, aggressive, and immoral thoughts or impulses. On the other hand, reactive obsessions are evoked by identifiable external stimuli, which are perceived as relatively realistic and rational enough to do something toward the stimuli, and include thoughts about contamination, mistake, accident, asymmetry, loss, etc. Through three empirical studies, we confirmed the differences between the two types of obsessional intrusion in their frequency, subjective experiences, subsequent appraisal and control strategy. In particular, autogenous obsessions led to high appraisal on 'control over thought' and 'importance of thought' and frequent use of 'avoidant control strategies', while reactive obsessions linked with high appraisal on 'responsibility' and frequent use of 'confrontational control strategies'. These findings are expected to provide a basis for classifying and explaining the heterogeneous phenomena of obsessive-compulsive disorder.     

Family Members as Boundary Managers: Behaviors that Promote and Limit Service Members’ Involvement in Daily Family Life

When military service members deploy, they move outside the immediate boundary of their families. However, because boundaries are permeable, service members remain a psychological part of their families in spite of their physical absence. The extent of service members’ continued involvement in daily family life is likely tied to their non-deployed family members’ actions to manage this boundary. In the current study, we were interested in identifying non-deployed family members’ actions to either promote, or limit, service members’ involvement in daily family life during deployment. These actions by family members constitute boundary management behaviors. We collected qualitative data from a sample of Army reservists (N = 13) and their household family members (N = 15). Findings indicated that family members used a variety of boundary management behaviors during deployment, some of which promoted reservists’ involvement, and others which limited it. In addition, boundary management behaviors varied by who they targeted, their intentionality, and their implications for reservists’ well-being. Findings illustrate the value in equipping military families with language that enables them to communicate openly about the significance of their boundary management behavior over the course of deployment so that they may arrive at a balance between stretching and restricting boundaries that best suits their unique needs.     

Developmental Reversals in Report Conformity: Psycho‐Legal Implications

Young children, young adults, and older adults witnessed a scene in groups of four same‐aged acquaintances. Unbeknownst to the group, a technology allowed the scene to appear differently to one member (minority) than to the others (majority), which obviated the need to rehearse confederates or to artificially provide misinformation for the report conformity effect. After viewing, participants had public recollections, and 3 days later, their cued memory and confidence (for adults) were tested privately. Majority members' reports influenced the minority members' but only for adults, not for children (17% conformity compared with 35% for adults), thus providing evidence of developmental reversals in memory reports of verbatim details. Answer changes between the sessions were dramatically higher for minority participants at all three ages (6.7 vs. 66.7% for children, 10 vs. 50% for younger adults, and 26.7 vs. 63.3% for older adults). We discuss the implications of these findings for questioning cowitnesses.Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.