When Drivers See Red: Car Color Frustrators and Drivers’ Aggressiveness

Research has found that exposition to red is associated with physiological activation and fighting spirit. A field experiment was conducted to explore whether the color of cars is related to an aggressive response. Drivers waiting at a traffic light were blocked by an experimental car. The color of the car varied (blue, red, green, black, and white). The amount of time that elapsed until the drivers responded by honking their horns or beaming their headlights was the dependent variable. It was found that the red car elicited early aggressive response.     

Identifying bilingual semantic neural representations across languages

The goal of the study was to identify the neural representation of a noun’s meaning in one language based on the neural representation of that same noun in another language. Machine learning methods were used to train classifiers to identify which individual noun bilingual participants were thinking about in one language based solely on their brain activation in the other language. The study shows reliable (p < .05) pattern-based classification accuracies for the classification of brain activity for nouns across languages. It also shows that the stable voxels used to classify the brain activation were located in areas associated with encoding information about semantic dimensions of the words in the study. The identification of the semantic trace of individual nouns from the pattern of cortical activity demonstrates the existence of a multi-voxel pattern of activation across the cortex for a single noun common to both languages in bilinguals.     

Appraisal patterns of envy and related emotions

Envy is a frustrating emotion that arises from upward social comparison. Two studies investigated the appraisals that distinguish benign envy (aimed at improving one's own situation) from malicious envy (aimed at pulling down the superior other). Study 1 found that appraisals of deservingness and control potential differentiated both types of envy. We manipulated these appraisals in Study 2 and found that while both did not influence the intensity of envy, they did determine the type of envy that resulted. The more a situation was appraised as undeserved, the more participants experienced malicious envy. Benign envy was experienced more when the situation was not undeserved, and the most when the situation was appraised as both deserved and controllable. The current research also clarifies how the types of envy differ from the related emotions admiration and resentment.     

Testing the Relationship Between Parents’ and Their Children’s Subjective Well-Being

Casas et al. (J Happiness Stud 9(2):197–205, 2008) found no significant relationship between paired answers given by parents and their 12–16-year-old children (N?=?266) for a single-item scale on overall life satisfaction (OLS). However, a significant, but low (.19) parent–child relationship did appear for the PWI multi-item scale. Overall, children reported higher subjective well being than parents. In this article, we present the results obtained from confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), using more scales and a bigger sample (N?=?1,250) of paired parents and children. The study uses three multiple-item scales: the PWI, the SWLS and the BMSLSS, and six single-item scales: the OLS, two items from Russell’s scale on core affects, one on overall happiness, Fordyce’s happiness item and the optional item of the BMSLSS on overall life satisfaction. Separate CFA for each of the 3 multi-item scales showed good fit statistics. In order to check comparability between parents and children, we tested equal loading and intercept constraints. The models with restricted loadings fit only for the PWI and BMSLSS, but none of the models with restricted intercepts fit. Therefore, it was only possible to estimate two factor correlations for parents and their children, both very low (.16 for the PWI, .18 for BMSLSS), and it was not possible to compare factor means. When correlating scores from the 6 single-item scales for parents and children, they were all found to be significant but very low. As regards items from the multiple-item scales for parents and children many correlations are positive and significant, although very low, but others are non significant. The means of some items were substantially higher for children than for parents. For some items, differences were minor, non-significant or even reversed. All of the results suggest that parents’ well-being is very weakly related to their own children’s well-being, in spite of socialization, common material welfare and genetic influences. However, one outstanding result is that in our Catalan sample, parents’ well-being seems to have a greater influence on their female child’s well-being than on their male child’s.     

A Prospective Investigation of Changes in Avoidant and Active Coping and Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Symptoms among Military Veteran

The present investigation utilized a prospective design to investigate associations between changes in self-reported avoidant and active coping occurring during residential treatment for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and PTSD symptom severity at treatment discharge. Participants were 636 military Veteran patients (91.4?% male; M _age?=?51.7?years) admitted to a Veterans Affairs (VA) residential rehabilitation program for PTSD, between 2000 and 2008. Results indicated that increases in avoidant coping and decreases in active coping from treatment intake to discharge were simultaneously and incrementally predictive of total PTSD symptom severity at treatment discharge, after accounting for PTSD symptom severity at treatment intake. These findings hold particular relevance for treatment-seeking populations with severe PTSD and researchers and clinicians attempting to understand and treat these populations.     

ERP evidence on the interaction between information structure and emotional salience of words

Both emotional words and words focused by information structure can capture attention. This study examined the interplay between emotional salience and information structure in modulating attentional resources in the service of integrating emotional words into sentence context. Event-related potentials (ERPs) to affectively negative, neutral, and positive words, which were either focused or nonfocused in question_–answer pairs, were evaluated during sentence comprehension. The results revealed an early negative effect (90–200 ms), a P2 effect, as well as an effect in the N400 time window, for both emotional salience and information structure. Moreover, an interaction between emotional salience and information structure occurred within the N400 time window over right posterior electrodes, showing that information structure influences the semantic integration only for neutral words, but not for emotional words. This might reflect the fact that the linguistic salience of emotional words can override the effect of information structure on the integration of words into context. The interaction provides evidence for attention–emotion interactions at a later stage of processing. In addition, the absence of interaction in the early time window suggests that the processing of emotional information is highly automatic and independent of context. The results suggest independent attention capture systems of emotional salience and information structure at the early stage but an interaction between them at a later stage, during the semantic integration of words.     

Inaction inertia

Inaction inertia occurs when bypassing an initial action opportunity has the effect of decreasing the likelihood that subsequent similar action opportunities will be taken. This overview of the inaction inertia literature demonstrates the impact of inaction inertia on decision making. Based on research on the causes of inaction inertia, we show that it is a multi-determined phenomenon, explained by both valuation and regret considerations. Moreover, we demonstrate how a sour grapes explanation of inaction inertia might integrate these two accounts. Furthermore, we explain when inaction inertia is most likely to occur and how it can be prevented. We conclude that the inaction inertia literature does not only add to our understanding of this intriguing phenomenon, but also contributes to related social psychological phenomena, such as the sunk cost effect, sequential decision making, decision avoidance (e.g., choice deferral, status quo bias, decisional conflict), and procrastination.     

Reappraising the Moral Nature of Emotions in Decision Making: The Case of Shame and Guilt

Emotions play a crucial role in moral behavior. The present paper does not contest this point but argues that qualifications of certain feelings such as shame and guilt as moral emotions should not exclusively be based on a proximal analysis of their function. A proximal analysis details how moral emotions produce moral behavior. Emotions are qualified as moral when they are elicited by concerns for others rather than the self and produce prosocial action tendencies. Although researchers have acknowledged that moral emotions may also have an ultimate function that details why it is in the individual interest that these moral effects occur, they have neglected to translate such ideas into testable hypotheses. Using guilt and shame as an example, we show how an analysis of ultimate functions accommodates recent findings, which contest the view that guilt is more moral than shame and provides new insights as to when and why moral emotions will produce moral effects.     

Eye movements during recall of aversive memory decreases conditioned fear

Cognitive-behavioral therapy for anxiety disorders typically involves exposure to the conditioned stimulus (CS). Despite its status as an effective and primary treatment, many patients do not show clinical improvement or relapse. Contemporary learning theory suggests that treatment may be optimized by adding techniques that aim at revaluating the aversive consequence (US) of the feared stimulus. This study tested whether US devaluation via a dual task – imagining the US while making eye movements – decreases conditioned fear. Following fear acquisition one group recalled the US while making eye movements (EM) and one group merely recalled the US (RO). Next, during a test phase, all participants were re-presented the CSs. Dual tasking, relative to the control condition, decreased memory vividness and emotionality. Moreover, only in the dual task condition reductions were observed in self-reported fear, US expectancy, and CS unpleasantness, but not in skin conductance responses. Findings provide the first evidence that the dual task decreases conditioned fear and suggest it may be a valuable addition to exposure therapy.     

Constraint Satisfaction, Irredundant Axiomatisability and Continuous Colouring

We observe a number of connections between recent developments in the study of constraint satisfaction problems, irredundant axiomatisation and the study of topological quasivarieties. Several restricted forms of a conjecture of Clark, Davey, Jackson and Pitkethly are solved: for example we show that if, for a finite relational structure M, the class of M-colourable structures has no finite axiomatisation in first order logic, then there is no set (even infinite) of first order sentences characterising the continuously M-colourable structures amongst compact totally disconnected relational structures. We also refute a rather old conjecture of Gorbunov by presenting a finite structure with an infinite irredundant quasi-identity basis.