Peer Input and Revised Judgment: Exploring the Effects of (Un) Biased Confidence1

An experiment was conducted to test the effects of biased versus unbiased peer input on the revised judgments of others. After completing a set of knowledge items and assessing their confidence in each answer, subjects were: (a) given written input (in the form of answers and confidence assessments) from a peer who had completed the same set of items, and (b) allowed to revise their earlier answers and confidence assessments. Peer input was either overconfident, underconfident, or appropriately confident. Relative to appropriately confident input, both overconfident and underconfident input caused subjects’ accuracy in judgment to suffer. Overconfident input was particularly harmful because it led to more extreme overconfidence without any increase in accuracy. Practical implications of these results are discussed.     

Effects of nonnutritive sucking on state and activity: Term-preterm comparisons

The effects of ad libitum access to a pacifier on the behavioral state and motor activity of preterm infants have been compared with those observed in full-term neonates. Regardless of maturity, nonnutritive sucking (NNS) decreases the amount of time spent in active states and increases that spent in quiescent states, lengthens the longest state bout, and decreases the frequency of state transitions. NNS also reduces overall motor activity as well as that during Active Sleep. Provided such ad libitum sucking opportunity, preterm infants thus appear to derive no less benefit from NNS than do term neonates. This result contrasts with an earlier finding that preterms are less soothed by NNA than are term infants.     

Sleep and the affective response to stress and pain.

OBJECTIVE: The current study examined sleep disturbance (i.e., sleep duration, sleep quality) as a correlate of stress reactivity and pain reactivity. DESIGN AND OUTCOME MEASURES: An ecological momentary assessment design was used to evaluate the psychosocial functioning of men and women with fibromyalgia or rheumatoid arthritis (N=49). Participants recorded numeric ratings of pain, the occurrence of a stressful event, as well as positive and negative affect 7 times throughout the day for 2 consecutive days. In addition, participants reported on their sleep duration and sleep quality each morning. RESULTS: Sleep disruption was not found to be an independent predictor of affect. However, sleep was found to buffer the relationship between stress and negative affect and the relationship between pain and both positive and negative affect. CONCLUSION: These results are consistent with a model in which good-quality sleep acts as a biobehavioral resource that minimizes allostatic load.     

Animacy and competition in relative clause production: a cross-linguistic investigation

This work investigates production preferences in different languages. Specifically, it examines how animacy, competition processes, and language-specific constraints shape speakers' choices of structure. English, Spanish and Serbian speakers were presented with depicted events in which either an animate or inanimate entity was acted upon by an agent. Questions about the affected participant in these events prompted the production of relative clauses identifying these entities (e.g., the bag the woman is punching). Results indicated that in English, animacy plays a strong role in determining the choice of passive structures. In contrast, it plays a less prominent role in Spanish and Serbian structure choices, where more active structures were produced to varying degrees. Critically, the semantic similarity between the agent and the patient of the event correlated with the omission of the agent in all languages, indicating that competition resulted in the agent's inhibition. Similarity also correlated with different functional choices in Spanish. The results suggest that similarity-based competition may influence various stages of production planning but its manifestations are constrained by language-specific grammatical options. Implications for models of sentence production and the relationship between production and comprehension are discussed.