Why are damped sounds perceived as shorter than ramped sounds?

Hearing is the most accurate sense for perceiving duration. However, rarely it produces inaccurate estimates of duration, for example when it compares the subjective duration of tones that are increasing in intensity over time (i.e., ramped) with that of tones that are decreasing in intensity over time (i.e., damped). The literature reports that the damped tones are perceived as much being shorter than the ramped tones of the same length. The short subjective duration of damped tones may originate from a decay suppression mechanism that parses the source-informative part of many natural sounds (i.e., the beginning) from the less informative part of them (the decay): listeners may interpret the tail of damped tones like an echo or like the decay portion of an impact sound and exclude it from the account of the duration of the tone. In the natural soundscape, the tail of sounds produced in reverberant environments and the tail of impact sounds have a frequency content that is constant throughout the sound’s duration. Here, the carriers used for ramped and damped sounds were a tone constant in frequency and a tone modulated in frequency. The frequency modulation was introduced to prevent the listener from interpreting the tail of these tones as the result of reverberation or the decay portion of an impact sound. Frequency constant damped tones were largely underestimated in duration whereas frequency modulated ones were not (or were only slightly), demonstrating that the decay suppression mechanism is a worthy explanation for the short subjective duration of damped tones.

     

Procrastination: Different time orientations reflect different motives

Because procrastination concerns a person’s ability to meet deadlines, temporal dimension is clearly important to this personality construct. In the present study, the characteristic profile of arousal and avoidant motives of procrastinators were related to past, present, and future time conceptions. Participants (140 women, 135 men; mean age = 49.4, SD = 5.55) completed measures of arousal and avoidance procrastination, and time orientation. Results indicated that avoidant procrastination was associated negatively with present-fatalistic time orientation, and arousal procrastination was associated positively with present-hedonist and negatively with future time orientations. The variance accounted for by time orientations was modest, yet provides further evidence that there are distinct motives for chronic procrastination.     

Risk-induced neophobia: does sensory modality matter?

Recent studies have documented that exposure to high levels of background risk can induce neophobic predator avoidance in prey animals, whereby they respond to any novel cue with an anti-predator response. Such phenotypically plastic predator avoidance may allow prey to maximize anti-predator benefits in variable risk environments. It remains poorly understood whether risk assessment information from different sensory modalities can be integrated to induce generalized, cross-sensory system neophobic responses. Here, we directly test this hypothesis by exposing juvenile convict cichlids (Amatitlania nigrofasciata) to high- versus low-risk environments using either conspecific alarm cue (chemosensory risk) or a model avian predator (visual/mechanical risk) and testing their response to a novel chemosensory cue (Experiment 1) or visual cue (Experiment 2). Our results suggest that regardless of the sensory modality used to increased perceived risk, cichlids pre-exposed to high-risk conditions exhibited increased predator avoidance in response to any novel visual or chemical cue. As expected, cichlids pre-exposed to low-risk conditions did not display any neophobic responses. Our results suggest that induced neophobia is not cue specific; rather, it may function as a generalized response to perceived predation risk.     

Communicating Science Effectively: When an Optimised Video Communication Enhances Comprehension,Pleasantness, and People’s Interest in Knowing More About Scientific Findings

In two experiments (N = 160) we predicted and found that an optimised video science communication was more effective than either a press release science communication (Experiment 1) and a non-optimised video science communication (Experiment 2) in promoting (a) a better comprehension of the communication, (b) a higher perceived pleasantness, and (c) a stronger manifest interest in learning more about its findings, as reflected in participants’ explicit requests to receive supplemental material on the communicated and analogous findings. The results were consistent across experiments. They were also not influenced by the content type of the communication. Implications for communication professionals and future research in the field of media, social influence, education, and applied social psychology are discussed.     

Sex differences in the behavioral responses of dogs exposed to human chemosignals of fear and happiness

Animal Cognition - This research focuses on sex differences in the behavioral patterns of dogs when they are exposed to human chemosignals (sweat) produced in happy and fear contexts. No age, breed...     

Frustration Discomfort Scale (FDS). A Psychometric Study of the Italian Version

The Frustration Discomfort Scale (FDS, Harrington 2005a) was developed as a multidimensional measure of frustration intolerance. Frustration intolerance plays an important role in behavioral and cognitive model of emotional problems (Harrington 2006). The aim of this study is to translate the original English version of FDS into Italian and to assess the validity and reliability of the Italian version for application among Italian population. The Italian version of FDS-R, with the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale were administered on-line to 497 subjects aged from 18 to 66 years old. The exploratory factor analysis suggested a solution with four factors, plus a general factor. The factor analysis supports a multidimensional model of frustration intolerance but the distribution of the items is different. The internal consistency appears optimal for all four factors (range .637–.866). Despite encouraging evidence, the factor structure and other features of the FDS-R are yet to be firmly established.     

Behavioral training and predisposed coping strategies interact to influence resilience in male Long-Evans rats: implications for depression

Effective coping strategies and adaptive behavioral training build resilience against stress-induced pathology. Both predisposed and acquired coping strategies were investigated in rats to determine their impact on stress responsiveness and emotional resilience. Male Long-Evans rats were assigned to one of the three coping groups: passive, active, or variable copers. Rats were then randomly assigned to either an effort-based reward (EBR) contingent training group or a non-contingent training group. Following EBR training, rats were tested in appetitive and stressful challenge tasks. Physiological responses included changes in fecal corticosterone and dehydroepiandrosterone (DHEA) metabolites as well as neuropeptide Y (NPY)-immunoreactivity in the hippocampus and amygdala. Regardless of a rat's predisposed coping strategy, EBR rats persisted longer than non-contingent rats in the appetitive problem-solving task. Furthermore, training and coping styles interacted to yield the seemingly most adaptive DHEA/corticosterone ratios in the EBR-trained variable copers. Regardless of training group, variable copers exhibited increased NPY-immunoreactivity in the CA1 region.     

Visions and Ethics in Current Discourse on Human Enhancement

Since it is now broadly acknowledged that ethics should receive early consideration in discourse on emerging technologies, ethical debates tend to flourish even while new fields of technology are still in their infancy. Such debates often liberally mix existing applications with technologies in the pipeline and far-reaching visions. This paper analyses the problems associated with this use of ethics as “preparatory” research, taking discourse on human enhancement in general and on pharmaceutical cognitive enhancement in particular as an example. The paper will outline and discuss the gap between the scientific and technological state of the art and the ethical debates, pointing out epistemic problems in this context. Furthermore, it will discuss the future role of genuine ethical reflection in discourse on human enhancement, arguing also that such discourse needs to include a technology assessment—in the broad sense of the term—which encompasses, inter alia, anthropological perspectives and aspects of social theory.     

Clinical Dynamics During Adolescence: Psychoanalytic and Attachment Perspectives

In this essay, we discuss the contribution of psychoanalytic theory and attachment to the understanding of dynamics in adolescence. While psychoanalysis describes adolescence as a period of upheaval that challenges the balance achieved in childhood between Ego and Id and begins the shedding of family dependencies and the loosening of infantile object ties, attachment, on the contrary, considers this period as one characterized by the persistence of strong bonds to parents, which become more complex and articulated. In order to illustrate psychoanalytic and attachment perspective, a clinical vignette of a 17-year-old boy is presented and discussed to consider his difficulties in the area of identity and loss.