Pleasure and displeasure from the body: Perspectives from exercise

We investigated some types of triggers of embarrassment and their personality correlates. A total of 161 undergraduates indicated how embarrassed they would be in a variety of situations classified a priori into three types. The types were based on the kind of trigger they embodied and were derived in part from current theories of embarrassment. Several analytic techniques, including factor analysis, suggested that there are at least three sorts of situations people find embarrassing: committing a faux pas, being the centre of attention, and threatening another's social identity. We created a subscale for each subtype of trigger. Embarrassibility on each subscale was correlated with embarrassibility on the others, but the reliabilities of the subscales substantially exceeded their intercorrelations. Some personality variables, for example, Neuroticism (Eysenck & Eysenck, 1975) correlated with all subscales, whereas other personality variables correlated differentially, for example, Revised Self-Monitoring (Lennox & Wolf, 1984), Interaction Anxiousness (Leary, 1983), and Rejection Sensitivity (Downey & Feldman, 1996). We believe, contrary to previous suggestions (Edelmann & McCusker, 1986), that there are subtypes of triggers of embarrassment and they they roughly correspond to the different causes of embarrassment as proposed by various theorists. We discuss the implications of our results for theories of embarrassment.     

Merely presenting one’s own name along with target items is insufficient to produce a memory advantage for the items: A critical role of relational processing

Psychonomic Bulletin & Review - Using the self as a reference point at encoding produces a memory advantage over other types of encoding activities. Even simply co-presenting a target item with...     

Disturbance of spontaneous and posed facial expressions in Parkinson's disease

The effects of Parkinson's disease (PD) on spontaneous and posed facial activity and on the control of facial muscles were assessed by comparing 22 PD patients with 22 controls. Facial activity was analysed using the Facial Action Coding System (FACS; Ekman & Friesen, 1978). As predicted, PD patients showed reduced levels of spontaneous and posed facial expression in reaction to unpleasant odours compared to controls. PD patients were less successful than controls in masking or intensifying negative facial expressions. PD patients were also less able than controls to imitate specific facial muscle movements, but did not differ in the ability to pose emotional facial expressions. These results suggest that not only is spontaneous facial activity disturbed in PD, but also to some degree the ability to pose facial expressions, to mask facial expressions with other expressions, and to deliberately move specific muscles in the face.     

Response persistence under variable-time schedules following immediate and unsignalled delayed reinforcement

Key pecking of three pigeons was maintained in separate components of a multiple schedule by either immediate reinforcement (i.e., tandem variable-time fixed-interval schedule) or unsignalled delayed reinforcement (i.e., tandem variable-interval fixed-time schedule). The relative rate of food delivery was equal across components, and this absolute rate differed across conditions. Immediate reinforcement always generated higher response rates than did unsignalled delayed reinforcement. Then, variable-time schedules of food delivery replaced the contingencies just described such that food was delivered at the same rate but independently of responding. In most cases, response rates decreased to near-zero levels. In addition, response persistence was not systematically different between multiple-schedule components across pigeons. The implications of the results for the concepts of response strength and the response-reinforcer relation are noted.