Exercise motivation in university community members: a behavioural intervention

The purpose of this study was to examine how exercise level, exercise motives, and barriers changed from the baseline phase to the follow-up phase after a behavioural and cognitive intervention aimed at increasing exercise. Seventy-five members of our university community (43 subjects in the control group and 32 in the experimental group), all of whom received cognitive feedback, agreed to complete the baseline phase. Only the experimental group received behavioural feedback and a free-access gym ticket with personal training in order to facilitate their adherence to exercise. The results suggest that a combination of behavioural and psychological techniques is an efficient strategy for increasing exercise level. In addition, the results showed that extrinsic motivation predominates the early stages of change-of-exercise behaviour, and that intrinsic motivation is important for progression towards maintenance. Subjects who decreased their exercise level increased their extrinsic exercise motivation and subjects who increased their exercise level decreased the barriers related to intrinsic motivation. These findings indicate that, in order to facilitate exercise adherence, feedback about motives for undertaking exercise is needed, combined with advice about how to improve physical condition. This combination could help eliminate certain barriers that hinder engaging in an active and healthy life-style.     

The effects of bilateral presentations on lateralized lexical decision

We investigated how lateralized lexical decision is affected by the presence of distractors in the visual hemifield contralateral to the target. The study had three goals: first, to determine how the presence of a distractor (either a word or a pseudoword) affects visual field differences in the processing of the target; second, to identify the stage of the process in which the distractor is affecting the decision about the target; and third, to determine whether the interaction between the lexicality of the target and the lexicality of the distractor ("lexical redundancy effect") is due to facilitation or inhibition of lexical processing. Unilateral and bilateral trials were presented in separate blocks. Target stimuli were always underlined. Regarding our first goal, we found that bilateral presentations (a) increased the effect of visual hemifield of presentation (right visual field advantage) for words by slowing down the processing of word targets presented to the left visual field, and (b) produced an interaction between visual hemifield of presentation (VF) and target lexicality (TLex), which implies the use of different strategies by the two hemispheres in lexical processing. For our second goal of determining the processing stage that is affected by the distractor, we introduced a third condition in which targets were always accompanied by "perceptual" distractors consisting of sequences of the letter "x" (e.g., xxxx). Performance on these trials indicated that most of the interaction occurs during lexical access (after basic perceptual analysis but before response programming). Finally, a comparison between performance patterns on the trials containing perceptual and lexical distractors indicated that the lexical redundancy effect is mainly due to inhibition of word processing by pseudoword distractors.     

The self and social cognition: the role of cortical midline structures and mirror neurons

Recent evidence suggests that there are at least two large-scale neural networks that represent the self and others. Whereas frontoparietal mirror-neuron areas provide the basis for bridging the gap between the physical self and others through motor-simulation mechanisms, cortical midline structures engage in processing information about the self and others in more abstract, evaluative terms. This framework provides a basis for reconciling findings from two separate but related lines of research: self-related processing and social cognition. The neural systems of midline structures and mirror neurons show that self and other are two sides of the same coin, whether their physical interactions or their most internal mental processes are examined.     

Multimodal action representation in human left ventral premotor cortex

We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate the neural systems responding to the sight and to the sound of an action. Subjects saw a video of paper tearing in silence (V), heard the sound of paper tearing (A), and saw and heard the action simultaneously (A + V). Compared to a non-action control stimulus, we found that hearing action sounds (A) activated the anterior inferior frontal gyrus and middle frontal gyrus in addition to primary auditory cortex. The anterior inferior frontal gyrus, which is known to be activated by environmental sounds, also seems to be involved in recognizing actions by sound. Consistent with previous research, seeing an action video (V) compared with seeing a non-action video activated the premotor cortex, intraparietal cortex, and the pars opercularis of the inferior frontal gyrus. An A + V facilitation effect was found in the ventral premotor cortex on the border of areas 44, 6, 3a, and 3b for the action stimuli but not for the control stimuli. This region may be involved in integrating multimodal information about actions. These data provide evidence that the ventral premotor cortex may provide an action representation that abstracts across both agency (self and other) and sensory modality (hearing and seeing). This function may be an important precursor of language functions.     

An ontological test of the IAT: Self-activation can increase predictive validity

Extensive research has been conducted demonstrating the predictive validity and reliability of the Implicit Association Test (IAT) for a broad array of behaviors and contexts. However, less work has been done examining its underlying construct validity. This contribution focuses on examining whether a core theoretical foundation of the IAT paradigm is valid, specifically, whether the IAT effect draws on the social knowledge structure (SKS). We present four studies within different domains that show that the IAT does indeed appear to draw on the SKS. The data show that activation of the self before the categorization task enhances the predictive validity of the IAT, as one would expect if the IAT reflects the SKS. We discuss theoretical reasons for these findings, with emphasis also on underlying statistical/psychometric issues.     

Social Media and Language Processing: How Facebook and Twitter Provide the Best Frequency Estimates for Studying Word Recognition

Corpus‐based word frequencies are one of the most important predictors in language processing tasks. Frequencies based on conversational corpora (such as movie subtitles) are shown to better capture the variance in lexical decision tasks compared to traditional corpora. In this study, we show that frequencies computed from social media are currently the best frequency‐based estimators of lexical decision reaction times (up to 3.6% increase in explained variance). The results are robust (observed for Twitter‐ and Facebook‐based frequencies on American English and British English datasets) and are still substantial when we control for corpus size.     

Spicy Adjectives and Nominal Donkeys: Capturing Semantic Deviance Using Compositionality in Distributional Spaces

Sophisticated senator and legislative onion. Whether or not you have ever heard of these things, we all have some intuition that one of them makes much less sense than the other. In this paper, we introduce a large dataset of human judgments about novel adjective‐noun phrases. We use these data to test an approach to semantic deviance based on phrase representations derived with compositional distributional semantic methods, that is, methods that derive word meanings from contextual information, and approximate phrase meanings by combining word meanings. We present several simple measures extracted from distributional representations of words and phrases, and we show that they have a significant impact on predicting the acceptability of novel adjective‐noun phrases even when a number of alternative measures classically employed in studies of compound processing and bigram plausibility are taken into account. Our results show that the extent to which an attributive adjective alters the distributional representation of the noun is the most significant factor in modeling the distinction between acceptable and deviant phrases. Our study extends current applications of compositional distributional semantic methods to linguistically and cognitively interesting problems, and it offers a new, quantitatively precise approach to the challenge of predicting when humans will find novel linguistic expressions acceptable and when they will not.     

Personality,Positivity and Happiness: A Mediation Analysis Using a Bifactor Model

Recent studies suggested an important role of neuroticism and extraversion facets as incremental predictors of subjective well-being outcomes. Research has shown that positive cognitions mediated the relation between personality traits and well-being. The present study examined the relationship between neuroticism and extraversion, measured as general and group factors, and subjective happiness through a general positivity factor. 770 community participants (69.4 % females; M = 55.34; SD = 16.01) completed personality, satisfaction with life, optimism, self-esteem, and subjective happiness scales. A bifactor model was used to parse general and specific variance components for multifaceted constructs. The general positivity factor completely mediated neuroticism-subjective happiness relationships and overlapped with general neuroticism, whilst it partially mediated extraversion-subjective happiness ones. Other paths to happiness involved cheerfulness and enthusiasm. Assertiveness, activity level and excitement-seeking had a weak relationship with subjective happiness and only through positivity. Gregariousness and friendliness had neither direct nor indirect effects on subjective happiness. Life satisfaction had a twofold role as a component of positivity as well as providing an independent contribution to variance in subjective happiness. In keeping with previous research, neuroticism acted as a sort of general negativity factor. Cheerfulness and extraversion made an incremental contribution to variance in subjective happiness. Our findings support the utility of a multifaceted approach to study pathways from personality to well-being. Theoretical and practical implications for promoting well-being were discussed.     

Peer violence in the School Environment and Its Relationship with Subjective Well-Being and Perceived Social Support Among Children and Adolescents in Northeastern Brazil

The general aim of this study was to analyse the relationship between peer violence in the school environment (bullying), subjective well-being and perceived social support from the perspective of 910 children and adolescents in Years 6 and 7 of primary school (M = 11.90 years old; SD = 1.21). The participants were taken from 27 primary schools—both state-run and private, urban and rural—in Cearà state (Brazil). The following instruments were used: the Peer Victimization and Aggression Scale (EVAP); the Social Support from Family and Friends Scale (SSA); an index of satisfaction with different developmental contexts (home, school, neighbourhood); and as indicators of subjective well-being, three scales (Single item on Overall Life Satisfaction, Personal Well-Being Index School Children, Students’ Life Satisfaction Scale). Results indicated that aggression and victimization behaviours correlated negatively with the three well-being indicators used, while social support and satisfaction with different developmental contexts correlated positively. When considering type of involvement in bullying, victims, perpetrators and perpetrator–victims all scored lower on subjective well-being than those not involved in bullying. A model is also presented that explains 42 % of well-being. Understanding how bullying relates to well-being and how social support and favourable developmental contexts can act as protective factors are particularly important when designing public policies aimed at intervening in violence prevention and promoting well-being in childhood and adolescence.