Getting a cue: the need to belong and enhanced sensitivity to social cues

To successfully establish and maintain social relationships, individuals need to be sensitive to the thoughts and feelings of others. In the current studies, the authors predicted that individuals who are especially concerned with social connectedness--individuals high in the need to belong--would be particularly attentive to and accurate in decoding social cues. In Study 1, individual differences in the need to belong were found to be positively related to accuracy in identifying vocal tone and facial emotion. Study 2 examined attention to vocal tone and accuracy in a more complex social sensitivity task (an empathic accuracy task). Replicating the results of Study 1, need to belong scores predicted both attention to vocal tone and empathic accuracy. Study 3 provided evidence that the enhanced performance shown by those high in the need to belong is specific to social perception skills rather than to cognitive problem solving more generally.     

Taking Care of Business: Self-Help and Sleep Medicine in American Corporate Culture

This article argues that corporate management in the United States has expanded its scope beyond office walls and encompasses many aspects of workers' daily lives. One new element of corporate training is the micromanagement of sleep; self-help books, newspaper reports, magazine articles, and consulting firms currently advise workers and supervisors on optimizing productivity by cultivating certain sleep habits. Although consultants and self-help books make specific recommendations about sleep, most medical research is inconclusive about sleep's benefits for human performance. Using the ideas of Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze as a philosophical backdrop, this article examines the complex and often contradictory links between self-help, medicine, and corporate governance.     

The consequences of encoding information on the maintenance of internally generated images and thoughts: the role of meaning complexes

Three experiments investigated the hypothesis that internally generated images and thoughts were driven by meaning complexes, a construct which reflects a synthesis of semantic meaning and personal salience (Klinger, 1999). Experiments 1 and 2 contrasted the mutual inhibition between encoding words and non-words on: (i) the frequency that thoughts and images unrelated to the task (task unrelated thought, TUT) were experienced (Experiment 1) and (ii) on the intensity of images generated from long-term memory and maintained under dual task conditions, which whilst familiar were not of particular personal salience (Experiment 2). Experiment 3 examined the physiological arousal associated with the experience of TUT in a semantic encoding task. Evidence suggested that, in general, internally generated images and thoughts, irrespective of the personal salience, were suppressed by the co-ordination of information in working memory. In addition, only the experience of spontaneous images and thoughts of personal salience (TUT, Experiments 1 and 3) interfered reliably with the encoding/retrieval of semantic information from memory. Finally, in Experiment 3, physiological arousal, as indexed by mean heart rate, was associated with a high frequency of TUT. The results of all three experiments support the notion that the maintenance of spontaneously occurring images and thoughts is simultaneously influenced by both the semantic content and the personal salience of the information held in working memory.     

The dead donor rule: how much does the public care...and how much should we care?

In this brief commentary, we reflect on the recent study by Siminoff, Burant, and Youngner of public attitudes toward "brain death" and organ donation, focusing on the implications of their findings for the rules governing from whom organs can be obtained. Although the data suggest that many seem to view "brain death" as "as good as death" rather than "dead" (calling the dead donor rule into question), we find that the study most clearly demonstrates that understanding an individual's definition of death is neither a straightforward task nor a good predictor of views about donation. Reflecting on the implications for ongoing debates over the dead donor rule, we suggest that perhaps it is not a change in policy that is warranted, but rather a change in the priorities that have garnered such intense focus on this issue within the field of bioethics.     

Event memory and misinformation effects in a gorilla (<Emphasis Type="Italic">Gorilla gorilla gorilla</Emphasis>)

Event memory and misinformation effects were examined in an adult male gorilla ( Gorilla gorilla gorilla). The gorilla witnessed a series of unique events, involving a familiar person engaging in a novel behavior (experiment 1), a novel person engaging in a novel behavior (experiment 2), or the presentation of a novel object (experiment 3). Following a 5- to 10-min retention interval, a tester gave the gorilla three photographs mounted on wooden cards: a photograph depicting the correct person or object and two distractor photographs drawn from the same class. The gorilla responded by returning a photograph. If correct, he was reinforced with food. Across three experiments, the gorilla performed significantly above chance at recognizing the target photograph. In experiment 4, the gorilla showed at-chance performance when the event was followed by misinformation (a class-consistent, but incorrect photograph), but significantly above-chance performance when no misinformation occurred (either correct photograph or no photograph). Although the familiarity can account for these data, they are also consistent with an episodic-memory interpretation.     

Longitudinal prediction of child outcomes from differing measures of parenting in a low-income sample

This study examined predictions from preschool parenting measures to middle childhood cognitive and socioemotional child outcomes to explore whether parenting assessment methodologies that require more time, training, and expense yield better predictions of child outcomes than less intensive methodologies. Mother-child dyads (N = 278) in low-income African American families were assessed when the child was in preschool, using maternal report, the Home Observation for Measurement of the Environment-Short Form (P. Baker & F. Mott, 1989; R. Bradley & B. Caldwell, 1984), and structured observational measures of parenting. Child outcomes reported by children, mothers, teachers, and direct assessment were collected 4 years later. All parenting methodologies showed some predictive value; however, observational parenting measures showed the strongest and most consistent predictions of child outcomes.     

Inhibition of return for faces

Inhibition of return (IOR) refers to slower reaction times when a target appears unpredictably in the same location as a preceding cue, rather than in a different location. In the present study, frontal images of human faces were presented intact as face configurations, were rearranged to produce scrambled-face configurations, or were pixilated and randomized to produce nonface configurations. In an orienting paradigm designed to elicit IOR, face and scrambled-face stimuli were used as cues (Experiment 1), as targets (Experiment 2), or along with pixilated nonface stimuli as both cues and targets (Experiment 3). The magnitude of IOR for subsequent localization targets was unaffected by cue configuration. Likewise, the magnitude of IOR was unaffected by target configuration. These results suggest that IOR is a "blind" mechanism that is unaffected by the mere occurrence of biologically relevant cue and target stimuli.     

Motor maps and synergies

Consider the process of raising and lowering the arm in the sagittal plane. Different parts of different muscles operate over different sectors of the angular range. How and why does the nervous system implement this differential muscle activation according to joint angle? We contend that such control depends on the adaptive formation of motor maps. These solve the problem of redundancy in the musculoskeletal system by connecting a relatively small number of cortical columns in the motor cortex to a large number of alpha motor neuron pools. We argue that motor maps are formed such that each functional muscle is activated in proportion to its moment arm about the movement. Because of this the required agonist and antagonist turning forces are generated with a minimum demand for metabolic energy. We know from biomechanical principles that, at any given posture, those muscle fibres that change length most in response to a small joint-angle change are those with the greatest moment arm. Likewise those that change least have the smallest. By establishing a model of the polynomial relationships between the lengths of functional muscles l and the corresponding changes in joint angles theta, the nervous system can generate signals partial differentiallj/ partial differentialthetai (where lj is the length of the jth functional muscle and thetai is the magnitude of the ith elemental movement). These signals create motor maps by modulating the gains of descending motor pathways. As a result, functional muscles are activated in proportion to their moment arms. This reduces the demand for metabolic energy to a minimum. Since moment arms change with joint angle, it also accounts for the experimental observations above. Such motor mapping effectively provides a minimum energy "wired-in" synergy. Established in utero, motor maps are the first stage of synergy formation and provide the basis for the development of subsequent task-dependent synergies.