Motives for secondary social sharing of emotions

This study provides new evidence of motives of secondary social sharing of emotions. In a retrospective study, 140 female (Mage = 29.4 yr., SD=12.8) and 116 male (M = 29.5 yr., SD = 13.1) participants were asked to recall a recent situation in which they had talked to a third person about a positive or negative, low or high intensity emotional narrative they had heard. 70% of the respondents reported having secondarily shared the reported event rapidly after the narration with several persons and at several times. Moreover, they not only described the event, the speaker's reaction and their own reactions, but also revealed the identity of their first confidant. Participants reported having spread the emotional narrative more widely in the high negative condition in order to seek emotional support and social comparison.     

Additive utility without restricted solvability on every component

It is shown that restricted solvability need not be required to hold w.r.t. every component for deriving the existence of additive utilities: additive representations can be shown to exist even when restricted solvability holds w.r.t. only two components. In such cases, the uniqueness property of these representations departs from the classical theory in that it is between ordinal and cardinal.     

The hippocampus and prefrontal cortex are differentially involved in serial memory retrieval in non-stress and stress conditions

We previously showed that 24 h after learning, mice significantly remembered the first (D1) but not the second (D2) discrimination in a serial spatial task and that an acute stress delivered 5 min before the test phase reversed this memory retrieval pattern.A first experiment evaluated the effects of dorsal hippocampus (HPC) or prefrontal cortex (PFC) lesions, these two brain areas being well-known for their involvement in serial and spatial memory processes. For this purpose, six independent groups of mice were used: non-lesioned (controls), PFC or HPC-lesioned animals, submitted or not to an acute stress (electric footshocks; 0.9 mA). Results show that (i) non-stressed controls as well as PFC-lesioned mice (stressed or not) remembered D1 but not D2; (ii) stressed controls and HPC-lesioned mice (stressed or not) remembered D2 but not D1; (iii) stress significantly increased plasma corticosterone in controls and PFC-lesioned mice, but not in HPC-lesioned mice which already showed a significant plasma corticosterone increase in non-stressed condition.Since data from this first experiment showed that stress inhibited the hippocampal-dependent D1 memory retrieval, a second experiment evaluated the behavioral effect of intrahippocampal corticosterone injection in non-stressed mice. Results show that intrahippocampal corticosterone injection induced a reversal of serial memory retrieval pattern similar to that induced by acute stress.Overall, our study shows that (i) in non-stress condition, the emergence of D1 is HPC-dependent; (ii) in stress condition, the emergence of D2 requires the PFC integrity; moreover, intrahippocampal corticosterone injection mimicked the effects of stress in the CSD task.     

Contribution of ankle, knee, and hip joints to the perception threshold for support surface rotation

The purpose of the present experiment was to investigate the extent to which subjects can perceive, at very slow velocities, an angular rotation of the support surface about the medio-lateral axis of the ankle, knee, hip, or neck joint when visual cues are not available. Subjects were passively displaced on a slowly rotating platform at .01, .03, and .05 deg/sec. The subjects’ task was to detect movements of the platform in four different postural conditions allowing body oscillations about the ankle, knee, hip, or neck joint. In Experiment 1, subjects had to detect backward and forward rotation (pitching). In Experiment 2, they had to detect left and right rotations of the platform (rolling). In Experiment 3, subjects had to detect both backward/forward and left/right rotations of the platform, with the body fixed and the head either fixed or free to move. Overall, when the body was free to oscillate about the ankle, knee, or hip joints, a similar threshold for movement perception was observed. This threshold was lower for rolling than for pitching. Interestingly, in these postural conditions, an unconscious compensation in the direction opposite to the platform rotation was observed on most trials. The threshold for movement perception was much higher when the head was the only segment free to oscillate about the neck joint. These results suggest that, in static conditions, the otoliths are poor detectors of the direction of gravity forces. They also suggest that accurate perception of body orientation is improved when proprioceptive information can be dynamically integrated.     

Reexamining the word length effect in visual word recognition: New evidence from the English Lexicon Project

In the present study, we reexamined the effect of word length (number of letters in a word) on lexical decision. Using the English Lexicon Project, which is based on a large data set of over 40,481 words (Balota et al., 2002), we performed simultaneous multiple regression analyses on a selection of 33,006 English words (ranging from 3 to 13 letters in length). Our analyses revealed an unexpected pattern of results taking the form of a U-shaped curve. The effect of number of letters was facilitatory for words of 3–5 letters, null for words of 5–8 letters, and inhibitory for words of 8–13 letters. We also showed that printed frequency, number of syllables, and number of orthographic neighbors all made independent contributions. The length effects were replicated in a new analysis of a subset of 3,833 monomorphemic nouns (ranging from 3 to 10 letters), and also in another analysis based on 12,987 bisyllabic items (ranging from 3 to 9 letters). These effects were independent of printed frequency, number of syllables, and number of orthographic neighbors. Furthermore, we also observed robust linear inhibitory effects of number of syllables. Implications for models of visual word recognition are discussed.     

No Place to Hide: When Shame Causes Proselfs to Cooperate

Shame is considered a social emotion with action tendencies that elicit socially beneficial behavior. Yet, unlike other social emotions, prior experimental studies do not indicate that incidental shame boosts prosocial behavior. Based on the affect as information theory, we hypothesize that incidental feelings of shame can increase cooperation, but only for self-interested individuals, and only in a context where shame is relevant with regards to its action tendency. To test this hypothesis, cooperation levels are compared between a simultaneous prisoner's dilemma (where “defect” may result from multiple motives) and a sequential prisoner's dilemma (where “second player defect” is the result of intentional greediness). As hypothesized, shame positively affected proselfs in a sequential prisoner's dilemma. Hence ashamed proselfs become inclined to cooperate when they believe they have no way to hide their greediness, and not necessarily because they want to make up for earlier wrong-doing.     

The Necklace of Numbers

The necklace of numbers is a symbol that came in one of my dreams at the end of 2006, at the time when I was about to leave France, my native country, and come to the United States. As I was going through the process of becoming an American citizen, I felt compelled to reconnect to my French roots. The result was this personal account which tells the most important dreams that led me to this country. It is also a tale of a mid-life transformation, a tale of an immigrant viewed from inside, and a tale of individuation by following the path of love.     

Differential reactions of virtual actors and observers to the triggering and interruption of psychological momentum

The present study compared virtual actors’ and observers’ perceptions of positive and negative psychological momentum (PM) and their responses to sudden interruptions of momentum. Participants with experience playing competitive table tennis imagined that they were playing a table tennis game (virtual actors), whereas participants who lacked experience playing competitive table tennis imagined that they were observing a table tennis game (observers). While viewing an audiovisual simulation of a table tennis match, participants were exposed to either an ascending (i.e., positive momentum) or descending (i.e., negative momentum) scoring sequence that was either suddenly interrupted or not interrupted at all. Participants’ PM perceptions were measured at the conclusion of the simulation. Results indicated that observers’ PM perceptions were lower than were virtual actors’ following the negative momentum sequence. More generally, interrupting positive momentum lowered PM perceptions, whereas interrupting negative momentum increased PM perceptions. Implications for the study of PM in sport are discussed.     

The French Lexicon Project: Lexical decision data for 38,840 French words and 38,840 pseudowords

The French Lexicon Project involved the collection of lexical decision data for 38,840 French words and the same number of nonwords. It was directly inspired by the English Lexicon Project (Balota et al., 2007) and produced very comparable frequency and word length effects. The present article describes the methods used to collect the data, reports analyses on the word frequency and the word length effects, and describes the Excel files that make the data freely available for research purposes. The word and pseudoword data from this article may be downloaded from http://brm.psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental.     

Back to the Real: Efficacy and Perception of a Modified Cognitive Interview in the Field

Since the Cognitive Interview (CI) was developed, many experiments have been published, but only two have investigated its efficacy in real criminal cases. Here, a Modified CI (MCI) is tested with real interviews in an inquisitor justice system. Several moderators and the interviewers' attitudes towards the CI/MCI are also examined. Eighty‐one witnesses were interviewed by 27 French military police officers, with a Standard Police Interview, a Structured Interview (SI), or an MCI. The MCI produced the most forensically relevant information, especially for victims. Trainees judged the SI and the MCI useful, usable, and acceptable, and felt efficient in using them, beliefs that increased after 1 year of practice. The self‐efficacy was linked with the declared use of the techniques. In all, this study confirmed the efficacy of the CI/MCI as a tool to be used in the field, with some cautions to be underlined, notably because of the small sample size considered. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.