“Self‐promotion”: How regulatory focus affects the pursuit of self‐interest at the expense of the group

Self‐interested behavior may have positive consequences for individual group‐members, but also negatively affects the outcomes of the group when group‐level and individual‐level interests are misaligned. In two studies, we examined such self‐interested, group‐undermining behavior from the perspective of regulatory focus theory. We predicted that when individual and group interests are out of alignment, individuals under promotion focus would be more likely than individuals under prevention focus to pursue individual success at the expense of their group. Two studies provided support for this prediction. Promotion oriented individuals were more willing to act in their self‐interest (at the expense of their group) than individuals under prevention focus when self‐interested goals were not compatible with cooperation. No effect of regulatory focus on group loyalty was found when cooperation formed the only viable route to individual success. We discuss how these findings extend our understanding of the role of regulatory focus in social situations and of the practice of ensuring loyalty in contexts where individual and group goals are misaligned while cooperation is an important part of group success.     

Programming Primes (1968–1976): A Paradigmatic Program and Its Incarnations in the Age of Structured Programming

In response to the so-called ‘software crisis’ of the late 1960s, many approaches were proposed to turn (parts of) software engineering and programming into more systematic disciplines, to turn an art into a science. This paper studies one popular example often used in these proposals, the computation of a list of primes, to discuss some salient features of the proposed programming paradigms. It also looks at the actual implementation in the early 1970s of the prime program on a time-sharing system (MULTICS) and on a complex scientific computer (ILLIAC IV). Confronting theory with practice uncovers what the programming paradigms fail to grasp: the interaction with the user and the interaction with the machine.     

Anxious and depressive avoidance behavior in post-loss psychopathology: a longitudinal study

Background: Avoidance behavior is a central component of cognitive behavioral theories of bereavement-related psychopathology. Yet, its role is still not well understood. This study examined associations of anxious and depressive avoidance behaviors with concurrently and prospectively assessed symptom-levels of prolonged grief disorder (PGD), depression, and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Design and Methods: Two hundred and ninety-one individuals, confronted with loss maximally three years earlier, completed self-report measures of anxious and depressive avoidance and emotional distress and again completed distress measures one year later. Results: Anxious and depressive avoidance were concurrently associated with symptom-levels of PGD, depression, and PTSD, even when controlling for the shared variance between both forms of avoidance and relevant socio-demographic and loss-related variables. Prospective analyses showed that baseline anxious avoidance predicted increased symptom-levels of PGD, depression, and PTSD one year later, among participants who were in their first year of bereavement but not among those who were beyond this first year. Baseline depressive avoidance was significantly associated with elevated PTSD one year later, irrespective of time since loss. Conclusions: Both anxious and depressive avoidance are associated with different indices of poor long-term adjustment following loss. However, anxious avoidance seems primarily detrimental in the first year of bereavement.     

Dissociation of facial attractiveness and distinctiveness processing in congenital prosopagnosia

According to the influential model of Bruce and Young (1986) socially relevant facial information is processed separately from facial information leading to individual face recognition. In recent years functional imaging has identified a network of distinct occipitotemporal cortex areas for the processing of these two kinds of information. Functionally it is not clear at which processing level the “social” and the “recognition” pathways diverge. The study of subjects with a profound face recognition and learning deficit (congenital prosopagnosia—cPA) promises for a better understanding of this issue. We therefore tested the perception of attractiveness (a cue of prime social importance) and distinctiveness (a facial feature related to recognition) in 14 people with cPA. Although attractiveness ratings were highly consistent with controls, cPA subjects' distinctiveness ratings showed random patterns. This dissociation of normal attractiveness processing and impaired distinctiveness processing in cPA helps to specifies the nature of the impairment in this condition while shedding light on the functional architecture of normal face processing.     

Midstream Modulation in Biotechnology Industry: Redefining What is ‘Part of the Job’ of Researchers in Industry

In response to an increasing amount of policy papers stressing the need for integrating social and ethical aspects in Research and Development (R&D) practices, science studies scholars have conducted integrative research and experiments with science and innovation actors. One widely employed integration method is Midstream Modulation (MM), in which an ‘embedded humanist’ interacts in regular meetings with researchers to engage them with the social and ethical aspects of their work. While the possibility of using MM to enhance critical reflection has been demonstrated in academic settings, few attempts have been made to examine its appropriateness in industry. This paper describes the outcomes of a case study aiming to find out firstly whether MM can effectively be deployed to encourage and facilitate researchers to actively include social and ethical aspects in their daily R&D practice, and secondly to what extent the integration activities could form an integral part of the engaged industrial researchers’ professional activities. Our data show that after MM, researchers display increased reflexive awareness on the social and ethical aspects of their work and acknowledge the relevance and utility of such aspects on their daily practice. Also, all participants considered actively reflecting on social and ethical aspects to be part of their work. Future research on the role of MM in industrial settings could focus on how to embed social and ethical integration as a regular part of innovation practice. We suggest that one possibility would be through aligning social and ethical aspects with innovation Key Performance Indicators.     

Evidence for an illusion of causality when using the Implicit Association Test to measure learning

Our ability to detect causal relations and patterns of covariation is easily biased by a number of well-known factors. For example, people tend to overestimate the strength of the relation between a cue and an outcome if the outcome tends to occur very frequently. During the last years, several accounts have attempted to explain the outcome-density bias. On the one hand, dual-process performance accounts propose that biases are not due to the way associations are encoded, but to the higher-order cognitive processes involved in the retrieval and use of this information. In other words, the outcome-density bias is seen as a performance effect, not a learning effect. From this point of view, it is predicted that the outcome-density bias should be absent in any testing procedure that reduces the motivation or opportunity to engage in higher-order cognitive processes. Contrary to this prediction, but consistent with the most common single-process learning accounts, our results show that the outcome-density effect can be detected when the Implicit Association Test is used to measure the strength of cue–outcome associations.     

Recognising the forest, but not the trees: an effect of colour on scene perception and recognition

Colour has been shown to facilitate the recognition of scene images, but only when these images contain natural scenes, for which colour is 'diagnostic'. Here we investigate whether colour can also facilitate memory for scene images, and whether this would hold for natural scenes in particular. In the first experiment participants first studied a set of colour and greyscale natural and man-made scene images. Next, the same images were presented, randomly mixed with a different set. Participants were asked to indicate whether they had seen the images during the study phase. Surprisingly, performance was better for greyscale than for coloured images, and this difference is due to the higher false alarm rate for both natural and man-made coloured scenes. We hypothesized that this increase in false alarm rate was due to a shift from scrutinizing details of the image to recognition of the gist of the (coloured) image. A second experiment, utilizing images without a nameable gist, confirmed this hypothesis as participants now performed equally on greyscale and coloured images. In the final experiment we specifically targeted the more detail-based perception and recognition for greyscale images versus the more gist-based perception and recognition for coloured images with a change detection paradigm. The results show that changes to images are detected faster when image-pairs were presented in greyscale than in colour. This counterintuitive result held for both natural and man-made scenes (but not for scenes without nameable gist) and thus corroborates the shift from more detailed processing of images in greyscale to more gist-based processing of coloured images.     

The corrective effects of warning on false memories in the DRM paradigm are limited to full attention conditions

Effects of attention control and forewarning on the activation and monitoring of experimentally induced false memories in the Deese/Roediger-McDermott paradigm were investigated in a young adult sample (N=77). We found that reducing the degree of attention during encoding led to a decrease in veridical recall and an increase in non-presented critical lure intrusions. This effect could not be counteracted by a forewarning instruction. However, these findings did not emerge in a (retrieval supportive) recognition task. It seems that divided attention increases false recall when attention control and forewarning have to compete for limited cognitive resources in a generative free recall as opposed to a retrieval supportive recognition task. Forewarning instructions do not always protect young adults against experimentally induced false memories.