A fiery conflict: Attachment orientations and the effects of relational conflict on sexual motivation

This study examined the effects of relational conflict on sexual motivation. Sixty‐one couples were videotaped while discussing either a major relationship problem or their daily routine. Both partners then completed measures of sexual motives and rated their romantic partner's sexual attractiveness. Results showed that conflict discussion inhibited relationship‐based motives and had an adverse effect on women's perceptions of partner's attractiveness, but a beneficial effect on men's perceptions. Conflict discussion also inhibited self‐serving sexual motives such as having sex to obtain relief from stress among people with avoidant partners, suggesting that people are unlikely to turn to avoidant partners for sexual consolation. Implications for understanding the role of the sexual system in regulating reactions to relationship distressful events are discussed.     

Short-term memory scanning viewed as exemplar-based categorization

Exemplar-similarity models such as the exemplar-based random walk (EBRW) model (Nosofsky & Palmeri, 1997b) were designed to provide a formal account of multidimensional classification choice probabilities and response times (RTs). At the same time, a recurring theme has been to use exemplar models to account for old-new item recognition and to explain relations between classification and recognition. However, a major gap in research is that the models have not been tested on their ability to provide a theoretical account of RTs and other aspects of performance in the classic Sternberg (1966) short-term memory-scanning paradigm, perhaps the most venerable of all recognition-RT tasks. The present research fills that gap by demonstrating that the EBRW model accounts in natural fashion for a wide variety of phenomena involving diverse forms of short-term memory scanning. The upshot is that similar cognitive operating principles may underlie the domains of multidimensional classification and short-term old-new recognition.     

S-R associations, their extinction, and recovery in an animal model of anxiety: a new associative account of phobias without recall of original trauma

Associative accounts of the etiology of phobias have been criticized because of numerous cases of phobias in which the client does not remember a relevant traumatic event (i.e., Pavlovian conditioning trial), instructions, or vicarious experience with the phobic object. In three lick suppression experiments with rats as subjects, we modeled an associative account of such fears. Experiment 1 assessed stimulus-response (S-R) associations in first-order fear conditioning. After behaviorally complete devaluation of the unconditioned stimulus, the target stimulus still produced strong conditioned responses, suggesting that an S-R association had been formed and that this association was not significantly affected when the outcome was devalued through unsignaled presentations of the unconditioned stimulus. Experiments 2 and 3 examined extinction and recovery of S-R associations. Experiment 2 showed that extinguished S-R associations returned when testing occurred outside of the extinction context (i.e., renewal) and Experiment 3 found that a long delay between extinction and testing also produced a return of the extinguished S-R associations (i.e., spontaneous recovery). These experiments suggest that fears for which people cannot recall a cause are explicable in an associative framework, and indicate that those fears are susceptible to relapse after extinction treatment just like stimulus-outcome (S-O) associations.     

An attachment perspective on human-pet relationships: Conceptualization and assessment of pet attachment orientations

In a series of studies we used attachment theory as a framework to examine human-pet relationships. We proposed that, as in interpersonal relationships, people differ in their degree of anxious or avoidant attachment to their pets, and that these individual differences influence pet-related cognitions, emotions, and behavior. We constructed a self-report scale, the Pet Attachment Questionnaire (PAQ), and examined its factorial structure, associations with attachment patterns in human relationships (Studies 1-2), relation to explicit and implicit expectations concerning a pet (3-4), and reactions to the loss of a pet (5). We found that individual differences in pet attachment do occur in the domains of attachment anxiety and avoidance, and these differences contribute uniquely to the prediction of expectations about the pet and emotional reactions to its death.     

Perceiving numbers affects the subjective temporal midpoint

Temporal experience can be modulated by several environmental factors. There is increasing evidence that numerical quantity may also influence temporal processes. Here, it is shown that merely looking at numbers causes a bias in a time-bisection task that depends on its magnitude. In the first experiment, a group of healthy subjects was submitted to a time-bisection task in which numerical cues were blocked (blocked design). In the second experiment, a new group of participants performed a time-bisection task in which the previous numbers were all randomly arranged in the same block (intermingled design). Results show that temporal performance is biased when numbers of different magnitude are arranged in an intermingled design. These findings argue for a functional interaction between time and numbers, depending on the implicit extrapolation of the size difference between the displayed numbers rather than on the numerical size itself.     

The effect of study time distribution on learning and retention: a Goldilocks principle for presentation rate

In 2 experiments, we investigated the effect of presentation rate on both immediate (5 min) and delayed (2 days) cued recall of paired associates. Word pairs were presented for a total of 16 s per pair, with presentation duration of individual presentations varying from 1 to 16 s. In Experiment 1, participants studied word pairs with presentation rates of 16 × 1 s, 8 × 2 s, 4 × 4 s, 2 × 8 s, or 1 × 16 s. A nonmonotonic relationship was found between presentation rate and cued recall performance. Both short (e.g., 1 s) and long (e.g., 16 s) presentation durations resulted in poor immediate and delayed recall, compared with intermediate presentation durations. In Experiment 2, we replicated these general findings. Moreover, we showed that the 4 s condition resulted in less proportional forgetting than the 1 s and the 16 s conditions.     

Eye gaze cannot be ignored (but neither can arrows)

Recent studies have tried to shed light on the automaticity of attentional shifts triggered by gaze and arrows with mixed results. In the present research, we aimed at testing a strong definition of resistance to suppression for orienting of attention elicited by these two cues. In five experiments, participants were informed with 100% certainty about the future location of a target they had to react to by presentation of either a direction word at the beginning of each trial or instructions at the beginning of each block. Gaze and arrows were presented before the target as uninformative distractors irrelevant for the task. The results showed similar patterns for gaze and arrows-namely, an interference effect when the distractors were incongruent with the upcoming target location. This suggests that the orienting of attention mediated by gaze and arrows can be considered as strongly automatic.