Obsessive-compulsive disorder patients display enhanced latent inhibition on a visual search task

Latent inhibition (LI) is a phenomenon that reflects the ability to ignore irrelevant stimuli. LI is attenuated in some schizophrenic patient groups and in high schizotypal normal participants. One study has found enhanced LI in patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD [Swerdlow, N. R., Hartston, H. J., & Hartman, P. L., 1999. Enhanced visual latent inhibition in obsessive-compulsive disorder. Biological Psychiatry, 45, 482-488]). The present experiment replicated this finding using a within-subject visual search LI task, with OCD patients displaying more LI than healthy controls. The contrasting LI effects in schizophrenia and OCD are discussed in terms of how these groups differentially process relevant and irrelevant stimuli, and how that outcome affects subsequent behavior.     

Binaural and temporal integration of the loudness of tones and noises

Subjects judged the loudness of tones (Experiment 1) and of bursts of noise (Experiment 2) that varied in intensity and duration as well as in mode of presentation (monaural vs. binaural). Both monaural and binaural loudness, for both types of signals, obeyed the bilinear-interaction prediction of the classic temporal integration model. The loudness of short tones grows as a power function of both intensity and duration with different exponents for the two factors (.2 and .3, respectively). The loudness of wide-band noises grows as a power function of duration (with an exponent of approximately .6) but not of sound pressure. For tones, binaural summation was constant but fell short of full additivity. For noises, summation changed across level and duration. Temporal summation followed the same course for monaural and binaural tonal stimuli but not for noise stimuli. Notwithstanding these differences between tone and noise, we concluded that binaural and temporal summation are independently operating integrative networks within the auditory system. The usefulness of establishing the underlying metric structure for temporal summation is emphasized.     

Seeing the World Through “Pink‐Colored Glasses”: The Link Between Optimism and Pink

This study investigated optimism, which is considered a personality trait, from the grounded cognition perspective. Three experiments were conducted to investigate the association between pink and optimism. In Experiment 1A, 22 undergraduates (10 females; M_age = 23.68) were asked to classify words as optimistic or pessimistic as fast as possible. Half the words were presented in pink and half in black. Experiment 1B (N = 24; 14 females; M_age = 22.82) was identical to 1A except for the color of the words—black and light blue instead of pink—to rule out the possible influence of brightness. Experiment 2 exposed 144 participants (74 females; M_age = 25.18) to pink or yellow and then measured their optimism level. The findings for Experiments 1A and 1B indicated an association between pink and optimism regardless of brightness. Experiment 2 found that mere exposure to pink increased optimism levels for females. These results contribute to the dynamic view of personality, current views on optimism, and the growing literature on grounded cognition.     

Cooperative,pure, and selfish trusting: Their distinctive effects on the reaction of trust recipients

Three types of trusting have been distinguished conceptually and empirically. In cooperative trusting the trust giver explicitly expects a reaction from the trust recipient that fits with the equality norm. In pure trusting, no explicit expectation is expressed by the giver. In selfish trusting the giver explicitly expects a reaction that benefits himself or herself at the expense of the recipient. We asked whether the three types of trust elicit distinctive reactions from trust recipients. Each participant was paired with a fictitious player who ostensibly enabled him or her to divide money between them. As hypothesized, both cooperative and pure trusting elicited more equal allocations than did selfish trusting. A second hypothesis, that cooperative trust would yield more equal allocations than pure trust, was not supported. Results are discussed in terms of equality norm, self‐interest norm, reciprocity norm, reactance theory, social sanctioning, and the need to comply with others' expectations. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Heidegger on Human Finitude: Beginning at the End

Interpreters generally understand Heidegger's notion of finitude in one of two ways: (1) as our mortality – that, in the end, we are certain to die; or (2) the susceptibility of our self‐ and world‐understanding to collapse – the fragility and vulnerability of human sense‐making. In this paper, I put forward an alternative account of what Heidegger means by ‘finitude’: human self‐ and world‐understanding is non‐transparently grounded in a ‘final end.’ Our self‐ and world‐understanding, that is, begins at the end, and authenticity requires us to interpretively appropriate the full range of this understanding. After laying out this view of finitude, via an analogical appeal to the Socratic account of action and desire in the Gorgias, I discuss its relationship to the two leading views of finitude mentioned above.     

Escalation of Commitment: The Effect of Number and Attractiveness of Available Investment Alternatives

Purpose  

The purpose of this study was to examine the hypothesis that decision difficulty increases the likelihood of commitment to a failing project (escalation). The hypothesis was based on findings regarding status quo bias. Three aspects of decision difficulty were tested: equivalence of options, option set size and attractiveness structure of the alternatives.     

From emotional intelligence to intelligent choice of partner

The authors examined interpersonal correlates of emotional intelligence (EI) in a sample of individuals with a history of depression. The authors focused on potentially adaptive relationship dynamics associated with EI that may help protect these vulnerable individuals from further distress. Participants with high EI, as measured with the Mayer-Salovey-Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test, saw their partners as less hostile, critical, and rejecting in their support styles than did participants with low EI. Partners' own reports mostly corroborated these findings. Unexpectedly, although partners of high EI participants reported offering less active and directive support than did partners of low EI participants, high EI participants perceived their partners as more supportive than did low EI participants. Partners of emotionally intelligent participants also reported being more conscientious and open to experiences, offering some evidence of the stress-buffering hypothesis associated with higher EI.     

Speeded induction under uncertainty: The influence of multiple categories and feature conjunctions

When people are uncertain about the category membership of an item (e.g., Is it a dog or a dingo?), research shows that they tend to rely only on the dominant or most likely category when making inductions (e.g., How likely is it to befriend me?). An exception has been reported using speeded induction judgments where participants appeared to use information from multiple categories to make inductions (Verde, Murphy, &; Ross, 2005). In two speeded induction studies, we found that participants tended to rely on the frequency with which features co-occurred when making feature predictions, independently of category membership. This pattern held whether categories were considered implicitly (Experiment 1) or explicitly (Experiment 2) prior to feature induction. The results converge with other recent work suggesting that people often rely on feature conjunction information, rather than category boundaries, when making inductions under uncertainty.