Vocal-manual trade-offs in hemispheric sharing of human performance control

Experiment 1 established the linear ordering of performance and rated difficulty of three finger-sequencing tasks. Experiment 2 embedded these tasks within a dual-task paradigm employing vocalization of words and nonwords as concurrent activities. Concurrent vocal activity interfered with right-more than with left handed performance, and this lateralized interference effect increased monotonically with increased sequence difficulty. Results are discussed in terms of hemispheric sharing of dual task performance control.     

Lateralized concomitants of human handedness

Literature was reviewed concerning lateral asymmetries of brain and behavior in normal and pathological populations of left-and right-handers. Cerebral asymmetries of structure and function are less pronounced in left-handers as a group than in right-handers as a group, and variability is greater in left-handers.     

Unilateral agraphia after section of the posterior half of the truncus of the corpus callosum

Children ranging in age from 3 to 12 tapped on a morse key with their index finger as fast as possible. After a control test, they concurrently tapped and recited a nursery rhyme, recited animal names, and memorized shapes. Previous results suggested that more interference in a motor task results from attempting at the same time to perform another task controlled by the same, than by a different, hemisphere. Right-handed tapping and talking both used left hemisphere space; left-handed tapping and talking were controlled by different hemispheres. Relative to silent tapping concurrent talking caused a greater drop in right-hand tapping rate than in left-hand tapping rate in both the rhyme and animal conditions. Interference by shape memorizing was equal across hands. The differential effect of speaking on right-hand preference indicates the left lateralization of speech output control. The size of this effect did not vary with increasing grade level. The findings support the view that speech output control is fully lateralized at least by age 3 years.     

Memory comparison time for complex digit stimuli: The effect of number length

Woodworth (1938) reported that naming latency increased linearly with the number of digits per number (number length). In the present study, the Sternberg memory scanning paradigm was utilized to investigate this effect. It was found that the slope of the memory scanning function increased linearly with number length: memory scanning time was 40 msec for one-digit numbers, 70 msec for two-digit numbers and 101 msec for 3 digit numbers. The intercepts of the memory scanning functions did not differ for the three types of numbers. Thus the increase in latency may be due to the memory comparison stage of processing. The data suggest that a memory comparison operation occurs for each digit position of the complex memory items composed of more than one digit.     

Author Correction: Social Job Stressors can Foster Employee Well-Being: Introducing the Concept of Social Challenge Stressors

Journal of Business and Psychology - In the published article “Social Job Stressors Can Foster Employee Well-Being: Introducing the Concept of Social Challenge Stressors”, there was an...     

A longitudinal study of "intrusion-based reasoning" and posttraumatic stress disorder after exposure to a train disaster

Previously, we found that chronic PTSD relates to “intrusion-based reasoning” (IR), i.e. the tendency to interpret distressing intrusions themselves as evidence that danger is impending, regardless of objective danger information (Engelhard et al., Behav. Res. Ther. 39 (2001) 1139). This study was intended to elucidate the causal status of this relation. Twenty-nine residents of a Belgian town witnessed a train crash and were assessed for IR and PTSD symptoms within 1 month and were re-assessed for PTSD at 3.5 months. Fourteen control residents did not witness the crash and were also tested for IR. The IR paradigm involved rating the danger of brief scenarios in which objective danger and presence of intrusions about the crash were systematically varied. The directly exposed residents showed greater danger ratings to scenarios in which intrusions were included than did the controls. IR was strongly related to both acute and chronic PTSD symptoms. It did not significantly predict chronic PTSD symptoms after controlling for acute symptoms, although the partial correlation (r=0.26, p=0.09) was in the expected direction. The data suggest that IR is involved in the onset and maintenance of PTSD symptoms, but more clarity about causality awaits future larger and experimental studies.     

How many selves in emotion experience? Reply to Dalgleish and Power (2004)

T. Dalgleish and M. J. Power (see record 2004-15929-012) suggest that J. A. Lambie and A. J. Marcel's (2002) article implicitly presents a unitary view of self in emotion experience and propose that certain clinical phenomena require multiple selves. This reply summarizes Lambie and Marcel's usages of the term self and examines both Dalgleish and Power's gloss of these and their own usages. This indicates that their own central usage of the term misrepresents Lambie and Marcel and is itself an improper usage. More important, examination of the phenomena claimed to require multiple selves suggests that they do not and that Dalgleish and Power may have misread the relevant clinical literature. Finally, Lambie and Marcel's own conception of dissociative phenomena and multiple selves are outlined, and alternative approaches are sketched. In discussing the usages of the term self and interpretation of cognitive and affective disorders, this reply attempts to clarify certain confusions.     

The Guilty Knowledge Test and the modified Stroop task in detection of deception: an exploratory study

The current study tested whether a simple Stroop paradigm can be used to detect deceptive behavior. 40 university students (34 women), half of whom committed a mock crime, were administered a Guilty Knowledge Test and modified Stroop task to detect guilt or innocence. The Guilty Knowledge Test is a well-known psychophysiological detection method, which consists of multiple-choice questions about details of the crime while skin conductance is recorded. Subjects possessing guilty knowledge are expected to show enhanced differential responses to the relevant stimuli. The modified Stroop task required color-naming of colored words related to the mock crime or an irrelevant crime. Each version of the Stroop task was presented in story form. Subjects possessing guilty knowledge were expected to produce larger reaction times to the relevant version relative to the irrelevant version. The test correctly identified 100% of innocent participants and 78% of guilty participants. In contrast, Stroop interference. i.e., reaction times for irrelevant crime details subtracted from those for mock crime details, did not differentiate between the two groups, suggesting that the story form of the Stroop paradigm is not suitable for lie detection.