There's more to emotion than meets the eye: A processing bias for neutral content in the domain of emotional prosody

Research on emotion processing in the visual modality suggests a processing advantage for emotionally salient stimuli, even at early sensory stages; however, results concerning the auditory correlates are inconsistent. We present two experiments that employed a gating paradigm to investigate emotional prosody. In Experiment 1, participants heard successively building segments of Jabberwocky "sentences" spoken with happy, angry, or neutral intonation. After each segment, participants indicated the emotion conveyed and rated their confidence in their decision. Participants in Experiment 2 also heard Jabberwocky "sentences" in successive increments, with half discriminating happy from neutral prosody, and half discriminating angry from neutral prosody. Participants in both experiments identified neutral prosody more rapidly and accurately than happy or angry prosody. Confidence ratings were greater for neutral sentences, and error patterns also indicated a bias for recognising neutral prosody. Taken together, results suggest that enhanced processing of emotional content may be constrained by stimulus modality.     

Courtship learning in Drosophila melanogaster: Diverse plasticity of a reproductive behavior

Mechanisms for identifying appropriate mating partners are critical for species propagation. In many species, the male uses multiple sensory modalities to search for females and to subsequently determine if they are fit and receptive. Males can also use the information they acquire in this process to change their courtship behavior and reduce courtship of classes of targets that are inappropriate or unreceptive. In Drosophila, courtship plasticity, in the form of both nonassociative and associative learning, has been documented—the type of learning depending on the nature of the trainer. The conditions in which the male is presented with the training target can profoundly alter the cues that he finds salient and the longevity of the memory that he forms. With the exception of habituation and sensitization, these types of plasticity have an operant component in that the male must be courting to respond to the behavior-altering cues. Courtship plasticity is therefore a complex and rich range of behaviors rather than a single entity. Our understanding of these plastic behaviors has been enhanced by recent advances in our understanding of the circuitry underlying courtship itself and the identification of chemical cues that drive and modify the behavior. Courtship learning is providing a window into how animals can use a variety of sensory inputs to modulate a decision making process at many levels.When confronted with a potential mate, Drosophila melanogaster males perform a stereotyped courtship ritual. This behavior serves at least two obvious functions for the male. The first is to prime conspecific females for copulation. During courtship, the female is assessing the male''s suitability, and if the song he sings (Burnet et al. 1971; von Schilcher 1976a) and pheromones he emits (Grillet et al. 2006; Kurtovic et al. 2007) are correct for her species and of sufficient quality, her willingness to copulate is increased. She will slow her locomotion, present her abdomen to the male, and then spread her wings and genital plates to allow him to mount (Lasbleiz et al. 2006). A second function of courtship is that it allows a male to accumulate information about the target courtship object to assess its suitability and receptiveness. The male uses auditory, mechanosensory, visual, and chemosensory signals from the target to make this assessment (for review, see Villella and Hall 2008; Ejima and Griffith 2009).Since D. melanogaster males will avidly initiate courtship of a wide variety of inappropriate and/or unreceptive targets, including immature males, sexually immature virgin females, mated females, and heterospecific females, the information obtained during courtship is critical to deciding whether to increase the intensity of his effort or terminate pursuit of the target. In the last several years, courtship has become a favored model for those researchers interested in how the nervous system specifies “innate” behaviors. While it is true that a male does not have to be instructed to produce adequate courtship (Hall 1994; Clyne and Miesenbock 2008), this apparently stereotyped behavior is far from static: It can be modified in a dizzying number of ways by experience. In this paper, we will discuss how information gathered during courtship can allow males to learn about specific types of courtship objects and broadly modify future behavioral responses to a particular class of target.     

High-level athletes' perceptions of success in returning to sport following injury

ObjectiveFor many injured athletes, a safe and successful return to sport following injury is the ultimate aim of injury recovery. Little consensus exists however, regarding the meaning of a “successful” return to sport following injury recovery [Evans, L., Mitchell, I., &; Jones, S. (2006). Psychological responses to sport injury: a review of current research. In S. Hanton, &; S. D. Mellalieu (Eds.), Literature reviews in sport psychology (pp. 289–319). New York, NY: Nova Science Publishers]. The purpose of this investigation was to obtain greater insight into this issue by examining high-level athletes' perceptions of a successful return to play following injury.MethodUsing a longitudinal design, 12 elite athletes from Australia and Canada were interviewed on a total of 40 occasions over a six–eight month period.ResultsPerceptions of success centered on (but were not limited to): a return to pre-injury levels and attaining pre-injury goals, staying on the “right” path, creating realistic expectations of post-injury performance, and remaining uninjured.ConclusionsConsistent with previous research [Podlog, L., &; Eklund, R. C. (2007a). Professional coaches perspectives on the return to sport following serious injury. Journal of Applied Sport Psychology, 1, 44–68], findings from this investigation highlight the importance of self-determination theory (SDT) constructs – namely, competence, autonomy and relatedness – in relation to athlete perceptions of a successful return to sport from injury. Such findings support the value of an SDT perspective in guiding future research and intervention efforts aimed at facilitating successful return from injury.     

Ties that Bind: A Qualitative Study of Happy Long-Term Marriages

An abundance of literature exists concerning the marital relationship. While most research focuses on divorce and the social consequences of this phenomenon, more recently social scientists have focused on the marriages that remain intact. The purpose of this study was to gain insight into what factors make marriages last. This study used qualitative methodology to gain further insight into long-term marriages. Interviews were conducted with 15 heterosexual couples who had been married for at least 35 years and who identified their marriage as happy. Results indicate that for each couple the factors contributing to the longevity of their happy marriage were numerous and unique. While the most commonly mentioned factors included friendship, love, and similar backgrounds or interests, a wide range of responses were elicited.     

Learning: Association or Computation? Introduction to a Special Section

The fundamental nature of learning is a central problem in psychology. Traditionally, psychologists have assumed that learning must involve the formation of associations. Early last century, the pioneering work of Pavlov on conditioned learning in animals seemed to put this assumption beyond doubt. More recently, many psychologists came to believe that a different kind of process must underlie complex learning, such as language learning in humans, and that this process must be described as computational rather than associative. Whether complex human learning is associative or computational continues to be a subject of intense research. The articles in this Special Section turn this debate on its head by asking whether simple animal learning is associative or computational. Surprisingly, the question is still very much open, and excitingly, it appears quite tractable.     

Kids and Teens in Court (KTIC): A Model for Preparing Child Witnesses for Court

Each year, numerous children testify in the United States in either criminal, civil, or juvenile court cases. Typically, children who testify are alleged victims of sexual or physical abuse or neglect, witnesses to violent crime, or subjects in custodial hearings in civil court. As more maltreatment cases are prosecuted and child custody is contested, an increasing number of children are being called as witnesses in court. Many of these children have already been traumatized by the experiences that led to their need to testify, and participation in the court process can have additional negative effects. This article describes the development and recent formative evaluation of a court preparation program that provides psychoeducation and utilizes components of evidence-based trauma treatment approaches, such as relaxation and in vivo exposure, to support child witnesses and reduce the risk of retraumatization. Children and adolescents participating in the program attend group sessions conducted by mental health clinicians and complete a court-related anxiety measure before and after each session. Results from 175 participants are reported. Findings indicated significant decreases in court-related anxiety with large program effects. Challenges encountered by the program and future directions are discussed.     

Dissociations of writing and praxis: Two cases in point

For normal writing it is essential that both motoric and linguistic competence be present; disruption of one or the other of these faculties may result in qualitatively different types of agraphia. Two right-handed patients became agraphic after left hemisphere lesions; pure apraxic agraphia in the absence of limb apraxia developed in one patient and pure linguistic agraphia in association with severe ideomotor limb apraxia in the other. The performance of these patients not only serves to illustrate the dissociation between the motoric and linguistic faculties that underlie writing but also confirms that ideomotor limb apraxia and apraxic agraphia are distinct and dissociable entities.     

A difficulty for Everett's many‐worlds theory

An argument originated by Brandon Carter presents humankind's imminent extinction as likelier than we should otherwise have judged. We ought to be reluctant to think ourselves among the earliest 0.01 %, for instance, of all humans who will ever have lived; yet we should be in that tiny group if the human race survived long, even at just its present size. While such reasoning attracts many criticisms, perhaps the only grave one is that indeterminism means there is not yet any firm, theoretically predictable fact of how long the human race will survive. This, though, might not save Everett's many‐worlds theory from a variant on Carter's point. Everett seemingly pictures observers as splitting into ever more versions, which explains away all apparent indeterminism; but then, absurdly, all except a vanishingly tiny proportion of one's versions would come into existence near one's death, outweighing all apparent evidence that death was not imminent. The need to avoid such a result severely constrains Everett‐type theories. We need theories in which observer‐versions diverge without increasing their numbers in any straightforward way.