The role of eye-fixation research in cognitive psychology

Eye-fixation research can be used to address issues of theoretical interest in several areas of cognitive psychology, such as linguistic processing, spatial processing, and reading. The eye-fixation behavior can lead to processing models, assuming that the eye fixates the referent of the symbol being operated on.     

Visual search through short digit sequences is self terminating

Subjects searched through 2, 4, 6, and 8 digit arrays for a target digit, which, when present, was half the time represented once, and half the time twice in the array. Search latencies were shorter under the dual than the single target condition, supporting a self terminating model of search through these displays.     

Conditioning of the microcirculation in the rat

The serotonin-catecholamine balancing mechanism maintains normal vascular tonus and permeability of the microcirculation. Serotonin provokes local vasodilatation and increases capillary permeability in the skin of rats. Released or injected catecholamines inhibit the serotonin-induced peripheral hemodynamic alterations. Following eleotroconvulsive treatment (ECT) (US), there is a catecholamine release and the microcirculatory response to serotonin does not occur. When the administration of a visual stimulus (in six consecutive occasions) proceedingly coincided with the administration of the ECT, it was noted that the light became an effective stimulus for this system. Light alone is an indifferent stimulus to catecholamine release. Thus, the inhibition of the serotonin-induced vasodilatation by ECT (via catecholamine release) became conditioned to the visual-conditional stimulus. Since the net effect of extrinsic serotonin depends on free catecholamines at the vascular bed, the intensity of the serotonin-induced vascular response reflects alterations in the chemical balancing mechanism. This mechanism can be conditioned with the present technique. The result indicates that there is central nervous system mediation.     

Sound and pattern in artificial fluency: Spectrographic evidence

This study was designed to yield objective information relative to Wingate's hypothesis that common influences are operative in conditions widely reported to induce fluency in stutterers (Journal of Speech and Hearing Research, 1969, 12, 677; 1970, 13, 861; Stuttering: Theory and Treatment, New York: Irvington-Wiley, 1976). Spectrographic tracings of the same phrase uttered under four ameliorative conditions and, as usually spoken, were obtained from four stutterers and four normal speakers. Comparisons among these tracings support the inference that the reduction in stuttering typically found in these conditions reflects certain changes in manner of speaking, principally in the pattern of intonation.     

Pathological left-handedness and familial sinistrality in relation to degree of mental retardation

The relationship between personal and familial hand preference and mental retardation was examined. Six unimanual tasks were performed by 232 subjects within four mental retardation severity groups. Family handedness histories were obtained. Right hand preference varied inversely with severity of mental retardation. The handedness of mentally retarded groups at the different functional levels paralleled, but tended much more to the sinistral, than that of the corresponding parent groups. The parent-proband handedness correlations were largely insignificant, especially in lower functioning groups. The findings support both pathological left-handedness theory and an association between brain damage causing mental retardation and familial sinistrality.     

Pastoral counseling and the compassionate God

Taking up a suggestion of Michael Cavanagh in a recent issue of this journal, Marcel Sarot contributes to the theological task of distinguishing conceptions of God that are psychospiritually unhelpful from those that are helpful. More specifically, he argues that the conception of God as compassionate and co-suffering is psychospiritually more helpful than that of God as blissfully impassible. In the final section, he shows that there is some empirical research confirming this conclusion.     

The self and others in the experience of pride

Pride is seen as both a self-conscious emotion as well as a social emotion. These categories are not mutually exclusive, but have brought forth different ideas about pride as either revolving around the self or as revolving around one’s relationship with others. Current measures of pride do not include intrapersonal elements of pride experiences. Social comparisons, which often cause experiences of pride, contain three elements: the self, the relationship between the self and another person, and the other person. From the literature on pride, we distilled three related elements; perceptions and feelings of self-inflation, other-distancing, and other-devaluation. In four studies, we explored whether these elements were present in pride experiences. We did so at an implicit (Experiment 1; N?=?218) and explicit level (Experiment 2; N?=?125), in an academic setting with in vivo (Experiment 3; N?=?203) and imagined pride experiences (Experiment 4; N?=?126). The data consistently revealed that the experience of pride is characterised by self-inflation, not by other-distancing nor other-devaluation.     

Selective Attention and Anxiety: A Perspective on Developmental Issues and the Causal Status

A plethora of studies on selective information processing in anxiety have been carried out over the past two decades. One of the most robust findings is that anxiety is associated with selective attention (SA) for threatening information. The rationale of research into SA is that it is assumed to play a vital role in the maintenance, and even in the etiology of anxiety disorders. It is the aim of this paper to explicate on the validity of this assumption. There is ample evidence that anxiety enhances SA. Although there is a lack of studies on the effect of SA on anxiety, there is now some evidence that SA increases the level of anxiety. This leads us to conclude that SA is not a by-product of anxiety only. Hence, the suggestion that SA plays a role in the maintenance of anxiety disorders seems to be justified. Studies on SA in children suggest that if SA plays any role at all in the development of anxiety disorders, it is not the SA in itself that is a vulnerability factor, but the continuation of this SA. Individuals who develop an anxiety disorder could have difficulty learning to inhibit this SA. Considering the finding that SA increases the level of anxiety, the authors suggest that anxiety in childhood causes failure to inhibit SA, which in turn enhances the vulnerability to anxiety disorder in adulthood.     

Preferences for colours and colour‐‐emotion combinations in early childhood

Previous research has shown that, by the age of 3 to 4 years, children rely not only on perceptual similarity but also on shared category or other underlying structures to draw analogies. The present study extends this work by showing that children as young as 3 years old detect consistent relationships between colours and facial expressions of emotions – two phenomena that share no physical characteristics, violate conventional categories and have no obvious environmental contiguity. Two explanatory hypotheses are put forward: (a) learning by convention, which is explored against the standard of adults’ and older children’s matching patterns, and (b) reliance upon a common underlying but perceptually unavailable dimension – operationalized in terms of emotion and colour preferences in the context of the present study. Both explanatory approaches are discussed and avenues for future work are suggested.