Emotions in sport: Perceived effects on attention,concentration, and performance

This study explored attentional patterns associated with positive and negative emotions during sport competition, and athletes' perceptions of the consequences of these attentional changes for concentration and performance. Sixty‐nine athletes completed the Sport Emotion Questionnaire following a national softball competition. They also retrospectively reported their perceptions of how emotions influenced their attention, concentration, and sport performance. Excitement and happiness were more closely associated with concentration than anxiety, dejection, and anger. Although excitement demanded more attention than the negative emotions, the positive emotions were perceived as more likely to lead to a performance‐relevant focus and automatic physical movements, both of which were beneficial for concentration and performance. Emotional intensity increased these effects.     

Impaired artificial grammar learning in agrammatism

It is often assumed that language is supported by domain-specific neural mechanisms, in part based on neuropsychological data from aphasia. If, however, language relies on domain-general mechanisms, it would be expected that deficits in non-linguistic cognitive processing should co-occur with aphasia. In this paper, we report a study of sequential learning by agrammatic aphasic patients and control participants matched for age, socio-economic status and non-verbal intelligence. Participants were first exposed to strings derived from an artificial grammar after which they were asked to classify a set of new strings, some of which were generated by the same grammar whereas others were not. Although both groups of participants performed well in the training phase of the experiment, only the control participants were able to classify novel test items better than chance. The results show that breakdown of language in agrammatic aphasia is associated with an impairment in artificial grammar learning, indicating damage to domain-general neural mechanisms subserving both language and sequential learning.     

Do the “Savage Origins” of Tattoos Cast a Prejudicial Shadow on Contemporary Tattooed Individuals?

We investigated whether increases in tattooing rates and designs have eradicated or altered traditional delinquent tattooing stereotypes. We tested the perceived suitability of tattooed and non‐tattooed individuals for 2 different jobs. Affective evaluations mediated judgments of job suitability, with those displaying traditional tattoos being rated as less suitable for employment than those who were not tattooed and those displaying contemporary tattoos. Those with a contemporary tattoo were judged in the same manner as those who were not tattooed (even by observers who neither had a tattoo nor were considering getting one). These results suggest that the savage associations of tattooing continue for some, but suggest that for other tattoo enthusiasts, a new stereotype has emerged reflecting a shift toward respectability.     

Moving memories: Behavioral synchrony and memory for self and others

Establishing and maintaining connections with others is central to a fulfilling social life. In this respect, behavioral coordination provides one avenue by which interpersonal linkages can be formed. Drawing from the dynamical systems approach, the present research explored whether temporary interpersonal connections founded on coordinated behavior influence memory for self and others. To do so, we measured participants’ incidental recall of self and other-relevant information after a period of either in-phase or anti-phase interpersonal coordination. While participants in the less stable anti-phase condition demonstrated the typical memory advantage for self-related compared to other-related information, this effect was eliminated when participant and confederate movements displayed in-phase coordination. These results are discussed with respect to the interplay between the systems that support interpersonal synchrony and basic social-cognitive processing.     

Factors impacting emergence of behavioral control by underselected stimuli in humans after reduction of control by overselected stimuli

Stimulus overselectivity occurs when only one of potentially many aspects of the environment controls behavior. Adult participants were trained and tested on a trial-and-error discrimination learning task while engaging in a concurrent load task, and overselectivity emerged. When responding to the overselected stimulus was reduced by reinforcing a novel stimulus in the presence of the previously overselected stimulus in a second trial-and-error discrimination task, behavioral control by the underselected stimulus became stronger. However, this result was only found under certain circumstances: when there was substantial overselectivity in the first training phase; when control by the underselected stimulus in the first phase was particularly low; and when there was effective reduction in the behavioral control exerted by the previously overselected stimuli. The emergence of behavioral control by the underselected stimulus suggests that overselectivity is not simply due to an attention deficit, because for the emergence to occur, the stimuli must have been attended to and learned about in the training phase; but that a range of additional learning factors may play a role.     

Color,context, and compositionality

Color adjectives have played a central role in work on language typology and variation, but there has been relatively little investigation of their meanings by researchers in formal semantics. This is surprising given the fact that color terms have been at the center of debates in the philosophy of language over foundational questions, in particular whether the idea of a compositional, truth-conditional theory of natural language semantics is even coherent. The challenge presented by color terms is articulated in detail in the work of Charles Travis. Travis argues that structurally isomorphic sentences containing color adjectives can shift truth value from context to context depending on how they are used and in the absence of effects of vagueness or ambiguity/polysemy, and concludes that a deterministic mapping from structures to truth conditions is impossible. The goal of this paper is to provide a linguistic perspective on this issue, which we believe defuses Travis’ challenge. We provide empirical arguments that color adjectives are in fact ambiguous between gradable and nongradable interpretations, and that this simple ambiguity, together with independently motivated options concerning scalar dimension within the gradable reading accounts for the Travis facts in a simpler, more constrained, and thus ultimately more successful fashion than recent contextualist analyses such as those in Szabó (Perspectives on semantics, pragmatics and discourse: A festschrift for Ferenc Kiefer, 2001) or Rothschild and Segal (Mind Lang, 2009).     

Form and meaning in early morphological processing: Comment on Feldman, O'Connor, and Moscoso del Prado Martin (2009)

Feldman, O’Connor, and Moscoso del Prado Martín (2009) reported evidence for differential priming of semantically transparent (talker—talk) and semantically opaque (corner—corn) morphological pairs under masked presentation conditions. The present commentary argues that these data should not call into question the theory that morphologically structured words undergo a segmentation process based solely on form, because (1) these results do not contradict existing evidence for morphoorthographic segmentation, (2) funnel plots suggest that the lack of priming observed for semantically opaque items in this study is inconsistent with findings in the existing literature, and (3) orthographic characteristics of the semantically opaque pairs in this study (rather than semantic factors) are the most likely explanation for these discrepant results.     

Expected car use reduction in response to structural travel demand management measures

Selecting the appropriate travel demand management (TDM) measures aiming to reduce the environmental problems associated with private transportation demands a thorough understanding of the behavioral consequences of different measures. In this scenario based study, the expected car use reduction in response to one push measure (i.e. raised tax on fossil fuel), one pull measure (i.e. improved public transport), and a combination of the two measures were analyzed. The aim was to compare the expected car use reduction in response to the different TDM measures, the car use reduction strategies used to achieve this reduction, and factors important for the expected car use reduction (i.e. background factors, internal motivational factors (general intention and personal norm), and perceived personal impact of the measure). In a two step between-subject design, a sample of car users first answered a pre-questionnaire and subsequently three groups of car users (N = 274) each evaluated one of the TDM measures. Results demonstrated that the combined measure led to larger expected car use reduction compared to the measures evaluated individually and the reduction was mainly expected to be made by means of trip chaining and changing travel mode. Moreover, internal motivational factors, such as personal norm or general intention, and the perceived impact of the measure, were found to be important for the expected car use reduction in response to the TDM measures.     

A comparison of clinical features in trichotillomania and obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Trichotillomania (TM) recently has been conceptualized as a variant of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). However, no systematic data have compared the clinical features of these two disorders. Here we report data from 8 TM and 13 OCD patients which suggest important clinical differences between groups. First, TM patients reported a significantly greater degree of pleasure during hair-pulling than OCD patients reported during performance of ritualistic behaviors. Second, TM was accompanied by significantly fewer associated obsessive-compulsive symptoms. Third, the groups differed with regard to other clinical features including anxiety, depression, and personality characteristics. We conclude that TM is not conceptualized best as a variant of OCD.     

Neural systems involved in fear and anxiety measured with fear-potentiated startle

A good deal is now known about the neural circuitry involved in how conditioned fear can augment a simple reflex (fear-potentiated startle). This involves visual or auditory as well as shock pathways that project via the thalamus and perirhinal or insular cortex to the basolateral amygdala (BLA). The BLA projects to the central (CeA) and medial (MeA) nuclei of the amygdala, which project indirectly to a particular part of the acoustic startle pathway in the brainstem. N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA) receptors, as well as various intracellular cascades in the amygdala, are critical for fear learning, which is then mediated by glutamate acting in the CeA. Less predictable stimuli, such as a long-duration bright light or a fearful context, activate the BLA, which projects to the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BNST), which projects to the startle pathway much as the CeA does. The anxiogenic peptide corticotropin-releasing hormone increases startle by acting directly in the BNST. CeA-mediated behaviors may represent stimulus-specific fear, whereas BNST-mediated behaviors are more akin to anxiety. NMDA receptors are also involved in extinction of conditioned fear, and both extinction in rats and exposure-based psychotherapy in humans are facilitated by an NMDA-partial agonist called D-cycloserine. ((c) 2006 APA, all rights reserved).