Whatever? The effect of social exclusion on adopting persuasive messages

The aversive state of social exclusion can result in a broad range of cognitive deficits. Being unable or unmotivated to process relevant information, we assumed that social exclusion would also affect the success of persuasive attempts. We hypothesized that socially excluded people would adopt attitudes regardless of persuasion quality. In three studies using different manipulations of social exclusion and persuasion, we showed that participants who were socially excluded adopted persuasive messages regardless of argument quality. In contrast, this undifferentiated response was not shown by socially included participants who were more persuaded by high- compared to low-quality arguments. In Study 3, we moreover revealed that this pattern could only be replicated in reliable situations—that is, when the communicator appeared credible. These findings support the assumption that social exclusion can lead to reduced processing of information.     

A Picture Database for Verbs and Nouns with Different Action Content in Turkish

In this study we present a picture database of 160 nouns and 160 verbs. All verbs and nouns are divided into two groups as action and non-action words. Age of acquisition, familiarity, imageability, name agreement and complexity norms are reported alongside frequency, word length and morpheme count for each word. Data were collected from 600 native Turkish adults in total. The results show that although several measures have weak correlations with each other, only age of acquisition had moderate downhill relationships with familiarity and frequency with familiarity and frequency having a rather strong positive correlation with each other. The norms and the picture database are available as supplemental materials for use in psycholinguistic studies in Turkish.     

Operationalizing the "vulnerability" and "stress" components of the hopelessness theory of depression: a multi-wave longitudinal study

The current study tested of the diathesis-stress component of the hopelessness theory (HT) using (1) a "weakest link" approach towards operationalizing vulnerability (e.g., an individual is as vulnerable to depression as his/her most depressogenic inferential style-DIS) and (2) an idiographic approach towards operationalizing high levels of stress. The procedure involved an initial assessment during which participants completed measures assessing DISs and depressive symptoms. The procedure also involved a series of eight follow-up assessments, occurring every 6 weeks, during which depressive symptoms and hassles were assessed. Hypotheses were tested in two samples of adults (i.e., adults diagnosed with a current MDE and adults diagnosed with a past MDE at Time 1). In line with hypotheses, in both samples, depressogenic weakest links were associated with greater elevations in depressive symptoms following elevations in hassles. At the same time, equally strong support was obtained for the HT when stress was operationalized from a nomothetic perspective and when vulnerability was operationalized as a DIS about causes (but not consequences or self).     

Differential context effects between sweet tastes and smells

"Sweet" smells and tastes are perceptually similar, and physiological data indicate some commonality of central processing. However, sweet tastes and sweet smells do not provide interchangeable contexts in psychophysical experiments. The same sweet tastes are perceived as less intense when stronger sweet tastes are present, and they are perceived as more intense when weaker sweet tastes are present, as with sweet smells. However, complementary sets of sweet tastes and smells (e.g., weak sweet tastes, strong sweet smells) do not eliminate these differential context effects (DCEs). The present experiments examined, first, whether DCEs between sweet tastes and smells arise because of differences between odors and tastes in the way that sweetness scales with intensity as concentration rises, and, second, whether DCEs may be smaller for sweet tastes and smells, when contrasted with sweet tastes and nonsweet smells. The findings were clear: DCEs were consistently present, suggesting they are independent of perceptual similarity. These results imply that DCEs are probably not psychological in origin or centrally based; rather, they may have a subcortical locus.     

Summation in Autoshaping with Short- and Long-duration Stimuli

Five autoshaping experiments with pigeons examined the effects of presenting in compound two stimuli that had individually been paired with food. The rate of responding during the compound was the same as for the individual stimuli when the stimulus duration was 10 sec. When the duration of the stimuli was 30 sec, the compound elicited a higher response rate than its components. This enhanced rate of responding during the compound was evident only for the initial portion of each trial. Moreover, the enhanced rate of responding was no greater than for a compound composed of an excitatory and a neutral element. These results present difficulties for both elemental and configural theories of conditioning.     

Partial Reinforcement in Appetitive Pavlovian Conditioning with Rats

Four experiments examined the effects of a partial reinforcement schedule on extinction using appetitive Pavlovian conditioning. Extinction was slower after partial than after continuous reinforcement when the schedules were administered to different groups (Experiment 1). The opposite result was found in Experiments 2 and 3 when both schedules were presented to the same group in the same context. When the schedules were presented to the same group in different contexts, then extinction was again slower after partial reinforcement (Experiment 3). Experiment 4 demonstrated that a change of context facilitates extinction to a greater extent after conditioning with a partial reinforcement schedule than with a continuous one. The results are explained by assuming that the nonreinforced trials of a partial reinforcement schedule create an internal state that serves as a contextual cue.