Can Romantic Relationship Quality Mediate the Relation Between Psychopathy and Subjective Well-Being?

The relations between psychopathy, romantic relationships, and well-being were investigated in 431 undergraduates. For both males and females, various components of romantic relationship quality were positively correlated with subjective well-being (SWB) and negatively correlated with ill-being. However, only for females was overall romantic relationship quality positively correlated with life satisfaction, happiness and positive affect, and negatively correlated with negative affect and depression. High levels of psychopathy were found in 23.1 % of males and 7.4 % of females. Psychopathy accounted for significant variance in overall relationship quality (7.0 %), commitment (14.1 %), satisfaction (9.3 %), romance (10.7 %) and trust (6.4 %) in romantic relationships for males and in overall relationship quality (3.2 %), commitment (5.3 %), and trust (5.9 %) for females. Romantic relationship quality was able to mediate the relations between psychopathy and SWB and this mediation was moderated by gender.     

Brief Behavioral Intervention for Young Children with Disruptive Behaviors

Parent reported behavioral difficulties in young children are relatively common. Without adequate intervention, some children will later present with more severe problem behaviors. Parent management training is one of the best methods of treatment for behavior problems; however, existing treatments can be lengthy and difficult to conduct outside of a research setting. The Brief Behavioral Intervention was designed as a briefer version of a manualized parent management training treatment package. Thirty-one parents of children aged 2–6.5 presenting with behavior problems were included in this initial study of treatment effectiveness. Based on parent and teacher report, treatment was effective in a mean of 7.2 sessions.     

CAB: Connectionist Analogy Builder

The ability to make informative comparisons is central to human cognition. Comparison involves aligning two representations and placing their elements into correspondence. Detecting correspondences is a necessary component of analogical inference, recognition, categorization, schema formation, and similarity judgment. Connectionist Analogy Builder (CAB) determines correspondences through a simple iterative computation that matches elements in one representation with elements playing compatible roles in the other representation while simultaneously enforcing structural constraints. CAB shows promise as a process model of comparison as its performance can be related to human performance (e.g., solution trajectory, error patterns, time‐on‐task). Furthermore, CAB's bounded working memory allows it to account for the inherent capacity limitations of human processing. CAB's strengths are its parsimony, transparency of operations, and ability to generate performance predictions. In this paper, CAB is evaluated against benchmark phenomena from the analogy literature.     

Is better beautiful or is beautiful better? Exploring the relationship between beauty and category structure

We evaluate two competing accounts of the relationship between beauty and category structure. According to the similarity-based view, beauty arises from category structure such that central items are favored due to their increased fluency. In contrast, the theory-based view holds that people’s theories of beauty shape their perceptions of categories. In the present study, subjects learned to categorize abstract paintings into meaningfully labeled categories and rated the paintings’ beauty, value, and typicality. Inconsistent with the similarity-based view, beauty ratings were highly correlated across conditions despite differences in fluency and assigned category structure. Consistent with the theory-based view, beautiful paintings were treated as central members for categories expected to contain beautiful paintings (e.g., art museum pieces), but not in others (e.g., student show pieces). These results suggest that the beauty of complex, real-world stimuli is not determined by fluency within category structure but, instead, interacts with people’s prior knowledge to structure categories.     

The role of kinematics in cortical regions for continuous human motion perception

It has been proposed that we make sense of the movements of others by observing fluctuations in the kinematic properties of their actions. At the neural level, activity in the human motion complex (hMT+) and posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS) has been implicated in this relationship. However, previous neuroimaging studies have largely utilized brief, diminished stimuli, and the role of relevant kinematic parameters for the processing of human action remains unclear. We addressed this issue by showing extended-duration natural displays of an actor engaged in two common activities, to 12 participants in an fMRI study under passive viewing conditions. Our region-of-interest analysis focused on three neural areas (hMT+, pSTS, and fusiform face area) and was accompanied by a whole-brain analysis. The kinematic properties of the actor, particularly the speed of body part motion and the distance between body parts, were related to activity in hMT+ and pSTS. Whole-brain exploratory analyses revealed additional areas in posterior cortex, frontal cortex, and the cerebellum whose activity was related to these features. These results indicate that the kinematic properties of peoples’ movements are continually monitored during everyday activity as a step to determining actions and intent.     

The Influence of Personality on the Decision to Cheat

Seventeen transgressive behaviors were studied in the context of six personality variables using survey methods. The personality variables were impulsivity, sensation seeking, empathetic perspective taking, guilt, and shame, with social desirability used as a control. Confirmatory factor analysis indicated a five-factor model as having the best fit. Those five factors are competitive cheating, self-cheating, school cheating, relationship cheating, and breaking a social contract. A structural equation model indicated that only impulsivity, sensation seeking, and empathetic perspective taking were related to frequency of transgressive behaviors, thus supporting the hypothesis that moral decision making has a critical automatic component.     

Physiological and behavioral signatures of reflective exploratory choice

Physiological arousal, a marker of emotional response, has been demonstrated to accompany human decision making under uncertainty. Anticipatory emotions have been portrayed as basic and rapid evaluations of chosen actions. Instead, could these arousal signals stem from a “cognitive” assessment of value that utilizes the full environment structure, as opposed to merely signaling a coarse, reflexive assessment of the possible consequences of choices? Combining an exploration–exploitation task, computational modeling, and skin conductance measurements, we find that physiological arousal manifests a reflective assessment of the benefit of the chosen action, mirroring observed behavior. Consistent with the level of computational sophistication evident in these signals, a follow-up experiment demonstrates that anticipatory arousal is modulated by current environment volatility, in accordance with the predictions of our computational account. Finally, we examine the cognitive costs of the exploratory choice behavior these arousal signals accompany by manipulating concurrent cognitive demand. Taken together, these results demonstrate that the arousal that accompanies choice under uncertainty arises from a more reflective and “cognitive” assessment of the chosen action’s consequences than has been revealed previously.