Spiders crawl easily through the bottleneck: visual working memory for negative stimuli

The special status of spiders in the attentional bottleneck and visual working memory (VWM) was studied. 23 spider-fearfuls (SF) and 23 non-anxious controls (NACs) participated in a serial VWM-task. Each trial showed a 4 x 4 matrix of images and 5 of these were subsequently cued for 150 ms each. Afterwards, one of the 16 displayed images was hidden and probed. The spider image was included in the string of 5 cued images, among the 11 uncued items, or not at all. For both groups, memory was better for cued spiders than for other cued items. SFs also showed improved memory for uncued spiders. The relevance of the results for theories of attention and cognitive models of phobias are discussed.     

Affective guidance in the Iowa gambling task

It has been suggested that affective states can guide higher level cognitive processes and that such affective guidance may be particularly important when real-life decisions are made under uncertainty. We ask whether affect guides decisions in a laboratory task that models real-life decisions under uncertainty. In the Iowa gambling task (IGT), participants search for monetary payoffs in an uncertain environment. Recent evidence against an affective guidance interpretation of the IGT indicates a need to set a standard for what counts as evidence of affective guidance. We present a novel analysis of IGT, and our results show that participants’ galvanic skin response (GSR) reflects an affective process that precedes and guides cognition. Specifically, prior to participants’ knowledge of the optimal strategy, their GSRs are significantly higher when they are about to select from a bad deck, relative to a good deck, and this difference in GSR is correlated with a behavioral preference for the good deck.     

Psychological responses to outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome: a prospective, multiple time-point study

This study examined anxiety and coping responses to the outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in Hong Kong. Trait anxiety, situation-specific coping strategies, and coping flexibility were proposed as predictors of state anxiety during the early phase of the SARS epidemic. Seventy-two Hong Kong undergraduates (31 men, 41 women) participated in a prospective, multiple time-point study. Participants' trait anxiety and coping flexibility had been assessed in an earlier study. Five months later, they reported their anxiety and coping at each of the four time points during the outbreak. Results revealed fluctuations in state anxiety across time points. Results from hierarchical linear modeling showed that trait anxiety as well as the situation-appropriate coping strategies of avoidance and personal hygiene practice accounted for changes in state anxiety.     

Heterosexual risk behaviors in at-risk young men from early adolescence to young adulthood: prevalence,prediction, and association with STD contraction

Health-compromising lifestyles involve stable patterns of behavior and are associated with high-risk social environments and accelerated developmental trajectories. Developmentally, antisocial behavior is associated with such lifestyles. Mediational models predicting a measure of lifetime average sexual risk behavior assessed over a 10-year period (from ages 13-14 to 22-23 years) were examined for a sample of at-risk young men. The measure included years of abstinence from intercourse as well as levels of 3 key heterosexual indicators of risk: frequency of intercourse, number of intercourse partners, and condom use. Predictors included lifetime average measures of contextual, family, and peer process variables and individual behaviors. In addition, similar models for prediction of STD contraction were assessed. A younger age of onset of intercourse was associated with higher numbers of intercourse partners after onset. As hypothesized, findings indicated mediational associations of socioeconomic status, parental monitoring, deviant-peer association, antisocial behavior, and substance use in the prediction of sexual risk behavior. Lower condom use also predicted STD contraction.     

Personality and job performance: test of the mediating effects of motivation among sales representatives

Research shows consistent relations between personality and job performance. In this study the authors develop and test a model of job performance that examines the mediating effects of cognitive-motivational work orientations on the relationships between personality traits and performance in a sales job (N = 164). Covariance structural analyses revealed proximal motivational variables to be influential mechanisms through which distal personality traits affect job performance. Specifically, striving for status and accomplishment mediate the effects of Extraversion and Conscientiousness on ratings of sales performance. Although Agreeableness was related to striving for communion, neither Agreeableness nor communion striving was related to success in this sales job. The importance of the proposed motivational orientations model is discussed.     

Not all triads are created equal: further support for the importance of visual and semantic proximity in object identification

Identification deficits were investigated in ELM, a temporal lobe stroke patient with category-specific deficits. We replicated previous work done on FS, a patient with category specific deficits as a result of herpes viral encephalitis. ELM was tested using novel, computer generated shapes that were paired with artifact labels. We paired semantically close or disparate labels to shapes and ELM attempted to learn these pairings. Overall, ELM's shape-label confusions were most detrimentally affected when we used labels that referred to objects that were visually and semantically close. However, as with FS, ELM had as many errors when shapes were paired with the labels "donut," "tire," and "washer" as he did when they were paired with visually and semantically close artifact labels. Two explanations are put forth to account for the anomalous performance by both patients on the triad of donut-tire-washer.     

The development of reaching and looking preferences in infants to objects of different sizes.

Reaching and looking preferences and movement kinematics were recorded in 5-15-month-old infants, who were divided into 3 age groups. Infants were presented with pairs of cylinders of 3 different diameters: small (1-cm diameter), medium (2.5-cm diameter), and large (6-cm diameter). Whereas infants between 5 and 12 months of age showed a preference for looking first at the large object, a significant preference for reaching to smaller (graspable) objects was observed in 81/2-12-month-old infants. Kinematic measures suggest that the onset of object-oriented action requires a slowing down of the reach and an extended "homing-in" phase. The divergent looking and reaching preferences in infants at different ages may reflect a dissociation during development of visual processing streams subserving object-related action from those related to visual orienting.     

Does the Kantian state dominate?: Freedom and majoritarian rule

Recently, scholars have criticized what they call the “Kantian-Republican” thesis of freedom as non-domination. The main complaint is that domination is unavoidable. This concern can be separated into the problem of state domination, which suggests that the state's intervening powers necessarily dominate its citizens, and the problem of majority domination, which suggests that the People necessarily dominate individual citizen as a result of the potential to form dominating majorities.     

Priming Effects on Cooperative Behavior in Social Dilemmas: Considering the Prime and the Person

We test whether people with a relatively more intrinsic vs. extrinsic value orientation (RIEVO) are particularly likely to enact cooperative behavior in resource dilemmas when they are primed with relatedness goals. In Study 1, high RIEVO participants primed with relatedness exhibited more restrained fishing behavior in a resource dilemma than their unprimed counterparts or participants low in RIEVO. Study 2 replicated this effect and further showed that the prime must signal the possibility of satisfying a valued goal (relatedness satisfaction) in order to elicit the value-consistent behavior. We discuss these results in the context of recent process models of goal priming, and also discuss how these findings contribute to our understanding of cooperative behavior and the predictive power of value constructs more broadly.