Would male conspicuous consumption capture the female eye? Menstrual cycle effects on women's attention to status products

In line with evolutionary principles of reproduction and mate selection, the current research shows that women's attention to status cues fluctuates across their menstrual cycle. Specifically, we show that women pay more attention to status products in a visual display around ovulation than in other phases of their menstrual cycle. Pill use eliminates these cycle phase effects. The results are discussed in relation to research on female mating goals and conspicuous consumption.     

The representation of abstract words: why emotion matters

Although much is known about the representation and processing of concrete concepts, knowledge of what abstract semantics might be is severely limited. In this article we first address the adequacy of the 2 dominant accounts (dual coding theory and the context availability model) put forward in order to explain representation and processing differences between concrete and abstract words. We find that neither proposal can account for experimental findings and that this is, at least partly, because abstract words are considered to be unrelated to experiential information in both of these accounts. We then address a particular type of experiential information, emotional content, and demonstrate that it plays a crucial role in the processing and representation of abstract concepts: Statistically, abstract words are more emotionally valenced than are concrete words, and this accounts for a residual latency advantage for abstract words, when variables such as imageability (a construct derived from dual coding theory) and rated context availability are held constant. We conclude with a discussion of our novel hypothesis for embodied abstract semantics.     

Gamers against science: The case of the violent video games debate

This article explores the notion that scientific research programs and empirical findings are fundamentally devalued when they threaten a perceiver's social identity. Findings from three studies show the following: (1) identification with the group of “gamers” (i.e., people who play video games on a regular basis) influences the extent to which perceivers devalue research suggesting that playing violent video games has negative consequences; (2) this effect is mediated by the feeling that the group of gamers is being stigmatized by such research (Studies 1 and 2) as well as by anger about this research (Study 2); (3) the effect of in‐group identification on negative research evaluations cannot be explained by attitude or behavioral preference inconsistency (Studies 1 and 3); and (4) strongly identified gamers not only devalue a specific scientific study but also generalize their negative evaluations to the entire field of violent video games research (Study 3). The findings suggest that the influence of social identity processes on the evaluation of research is larger than it has previously been recognized. Implications of these findings for science communication are discussed. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Impact of Children's Language Ability on Parent Cognitions and Harsh Discipline Practices

This study examined associations between children's language ability and maternal cognitions about the intentionality and aversiveness of child behaviour, and mothers' reported harsh discipline responses to child misbehaviour. We tested associations with each type of cognition separately as well as in a single model to explore their unique associations. Participants included 69 mothers and their 18‐ to 37‐month‐old children. Mothers completed the Parenting Scale and were asked to rate the aversiveness and intentionality cognitions in response to eight common toddler problem behaviours. The Preschool Language Scale was administered to the children by an objective evaluator. A path analysis demonstrated that children's language ability was associated with maternal intentionality cognitions about their children's behaviour, which, in turn, was associated with mothers' harsh discipline. These findings highlight the importance of examining developmental markers of harsh parenting. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Paradoxical Effects of Warning in the Production of Children's False Memories

The effects of warning on false recognition and associated subjective experience of false recollection and familiarity were investigated in 7- to 13-year-old children and young adults (N = 259) using the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm. Two warning conditions (warning with an example of a critical lure and warning without an example of a critical lure) were compared to a control condition, in which no warning was received. We found that 7- to 8-year-olds exhibited higher false recognition in the warning-with-example condition compared with the control condition; in contrast, 12- to 13-year-olds and young adults exhibited reduced false recognition in the warning-with-example condition. No effect of warning was observed in 10- to 11-year-olds. The subjective experience associated with false memories was similar across ages. In contrast, age-related increases in subjective recollection were found for true memories. The processes that enhance or suppress false memories during development are discussed.     

Systems Factorial Technology provides new insights on the other-race effect

The other-race effect refers to the difficulty of discriminating between faces from ethnic and racial groups other than one’s own. This effect may be caused by a slow, feature-by-feature, analytic process, whereas the discrimination of own-race faces occurs faster and more holistically. However, this distinction has received inconsistent support. To provide a critical test, we employed Systems Factorial Technology (Townsend & Nozawa in Journal of Mathematical Psychology, 39, 321–359, 1995), which is a powerful tool for analyzing the organization of mental networks underlying perceptual processes. We compared Taiwanese participants’ face discriminations of both own-race (Taiwanese woman) and other-race (Caucasian woman) faces according to the faces’ nose-to-mouth separation and eye-to-eye separation. We found evidence for weak holistic processing (parallel processing) coupled with the strong analytic property of a self-terminating stopping rule for own-race faces, in contrast to strong analytic processing (serial self-terminating processing) for other-race faces, supporting the holistic/analytic hypothesis.     

Attentional bias during emotional processing: evidence from an emotional flanker task using IAPS

Attention is biased towards threat-related stimuli. In three experiments, we investigated the mechanisms, processes, and time course of this processing bias. An emotional flanker task simultaneously presented affective or neutral pictures from the international affective picture system database either as central response-relevant stimuli or surrounding response-uninformative flankers. Participants’ response times to central stimuli was measured. The attentional bias was observed when stimuli were presented either for 1500?ms (Experiment 1) or 500?ms (Experiment 2). The threat-related attentional bias held regardless of the stimuli competing for attention even when presentation time was further reduced to 200?ms (Experiment 3). The results indicate that automatic and controlled mechanisms may interact to modulate the orientation of attention to threat. The data presented here shed new light on the mechanisms, processes, and time course of this long investigated by still largely unknown processing bias.