The antecedents and belief-polarized effects of thought confidence

This article investigates 2 possible antecedents of thought confidence and explores the effects of confidence induced before or during ad exposure. The results of the experiments indicate that both consumers' dispositional optimism and spokesperson attractiveness have significant effects on consumers' confidence in thoughts that are generated after viewing the advertisement. Higher levels of thought confidence will influence the quality of the thoughts that people generate, lead to either positively or negatively polarized message processing, and therefore induce better or worse advertising effectiveness, depending on the valence of thoughts. The authors posit the belief-polarization hypothesis to explain these findings.     

Aging and involuntary attention capture: electrophysiological evidence for preserved attentional control with advanced age

The present study examined whether people become more susceptible to capture by salient objects as they age. Participants searched a target display for a letter in a specific color and indicated its identity. In Experiment 1, this target display was preceded by a non-informative cue display containing one target-color box, one ignored-color box, and two white boxes. On half of the trials, this cue display also contained a salient-but-irrelevant abrupt onset. To assess capture by the target-color cue, we used the N2pc component of the event-related potential, thought to reflect attentional allocation to the left or right visual field. The target-color box in the cue display produced a substantial N2pc effect for younger adults and, most importantly, this effect was not diminished by the presence of an abrupt onset. Therefore, the abrupt onset was unable to capture attention away from the target-color cue. Critically, older adults demonstrated the same resistance to capture by the abrupt onset. Experiment 2 extended these findings to irrelevant color singleton cues. Thus, we argue that the ability to attend to relevant stimuli and resist capture by salient-but-irrelevant stimuli is preserved with advancing age.     

Minimal Varieties of Involutive Residuated Lattices

We establish the existence uncountably many atoms in the subvariety lattice of the variety of involutive residuated lattices. The proof utilizes a construction used in the proof of the corresponding result for residuated lattices and is based on the fact that every residuated lattice with greatest element can be associated in a canonical way with an involutive residuated lattice. Dedicated to the memory of Willem Johannes Blok     

The Sources of Meaning and Meaning in Life Questionnaire in the Norwegian Context: Relations to Mental Health,Quality of Life,and Self-Efficacy

The Sources of Meaning and Meaning in Life Questionnaire (SoMe) offers dimensional measures of meaningfulness, crisis of meaning, and 26 sources of meaning. It allows for a clearer understanding of the variety of existential orientations, which are known to be linked to both mental and physical health. The Norwegian version of the SoMe was validated by testing 925 randomly selected individuals who were representative for the Norwegian population. Reliability scores were satisfactory; factor analyses suggested a 6-factor structure of the sources of meaning scales. Expected patterns of associations with mental health and quality-of-life factors attested the instrument’s construct validity: Meaningfulness showed positive relationships to all quality-of-life factors. There was no relationship with anxiety but negative relationships with depression and distress. Crisis of meaning established a strong positive relationship with anxiety, depression, and distress and a negative relationship with quality-of-life factors. Criterion validity was documented by expected differences in meaningfulness and crisis of meaning between groups with and without presence of depression disorder. Self-efficacy correlated strongly with sources of meaning from the dimension “accomplishment” and moderately negatively with sources of meaning from the dimension “vertical selftranscendence.”     

Ideomotor compatibility in the psychological refractory period effect: 29 years of oversimplification

Four experiments examined whether the psychological refractory period (PRP) effect can be eliminated with ideomotor compatible (IM) but not stimulus-response compatible (SR) tasks, as reported by A. G. Greenwald and H. G. Shulman (1973). Their tasks were used: a left or right movement to a left- or right-pointing arrow (IM) or to the word left or right (SR) for Task 1; saying "A" or "B" (IM) or "1" or "2" (SR) to an auditory A or B for Task 2. The stimulus onset asynchronies were 0, 100, 200, 300, 500, and 1,000 ms in Experiment 1, and only 0, 100, 200, and 1,000 ms in Experiments 2-4. The arrow was in the center of the screen in Experiments 1-3 and to the left or right in Experiment 4. As in Greenwald and Shulman's Experiment 2, the instructions stated that most often the 2 stimuli would be presented simultaneously. A PRP effect was obtained in all conditions, most likely because response-selection decisions are required even for IM tasks.     

Still no evidence for perfect timesharing with two ideomotor-compatible tasks: a reply to Greenwald (2003)

For 30 years, A. G. Greenwald and H. G. Shulman's (1973) psychological refractory period (PRP) study has been cited as evidence for perfect timesharing with ideomotor (IM)-compatible tasks. Recently, M.-C. Lien, R. W. Proctor, and P. A. Allen (2002) failed to replicate these results and concluded that IM compatibility is neither necessary nor sufficient to eliminate the PRP effect. A. G. Greenwald (2003) attributed Lien et al.'s nonreplication to the use of (a) a non-IM-compatible task, (b) varied trial spacing, and/or (c) inappropriate instructions. The authors of the present article argue that the first 2 factors are not critical and that instructions merely affect the criterion for speed versus accuracy. In each of Greenwald's experiments, dual-task costs were evident on response time or error rates. Furthermore, the small dual-task costs in his study are consistent with a bottleneck model. Thus, Greenwald (2003) does not provide evidence that IM-compatible tasks enable perfect timesharing.     

Task switching and response correspondence in the psychological refractory period paradigm

Three experiments examined the effects of task switching and response correspondence in a psychological refractory period paradigm. A letter task (vowel-consonant) and a digit task (odd-even) were combined to form 4 possible dual-task pairs in each trial: letter-letter, letter-digit, digit-digit, and digit-letter. Foreknowledge of task transition (repeat or switch) and task identity (letter or digit) was varied across experiments: no foreknowledge in Experiment 1, partial foreknowledge (task transition only) in Experiment 2, and full foreknowledge in Experiment 3. For all experiments, the switch cost for Task 2 was additive with stimulus onset asynchrony, and the response-correspondence effect for Task 2 was numerically smaller in the switch condition than in the repeat condition. These outcomes suggest that reconfiguration for Task 2 takes place after the central processing of Task 1 and that the crosstalk correspondence effect is due to response activation by way of stimulus-response associations.     

Facial expressivity to acute pain in cocaine-exposed toddlers

Expressive emotion regulation in response to stress following inoculation was examined in 30 18-month-olds. Fourteen were exposed to cocaine in utero and 16 were drug-free. Findings indicated that the cocaine-exposed group displayed fewer discrete negative expressions of distress and anger and more sadness in response to acute pain. These results suggest that cocaine exposure may exert an influence on the expression of emotion into the second year of life. © 1997 Michigan Association for Infant Mental Health     

Proactive versus reactive task-set inhibition: Evidence from flanker compatibility effects

Two converging tests were used to determine whether people proactively inhibit recently performed tasks when switching to new tasks. A task-cuing paradigm was used. In each trial, the relevant stimulus was accompanied by flankers belonging either to the task performed on the immediately preceding trial (lag 1) or a more distant trial (lag 21). If the just-performed task is inhibited when switching to another task, and this inhibition declines across trials, then flanker interference should be smaller with lag 1 flankers than with lag 21 flankers. Experiment 1, following the methods of Hübner, Dreisbach, Haider, and Kluwe (2003), failed to confirm this prediction. The prediction was confirmed in Experiment 2, however, using a design modified to provide greater incentives for task-set inhibition. The results provide evidence that inhibition can be applied proactively, to reduce the ability of an abandoned task to interfere with the performance of other tasks.     

AMICAI: A Method Based on Risk Analysis to Integrate Responsible Research and Innovation into the Work of Research and Innovation Practitioners

Science and Engineering Ethics - The integration of ethics into the day-to-day work of research and innovation (R&I) is an important but difficult challenge. However, with the Aachen method...