Approach-avoidance,attentional and evaluation biases in hair pulling disorder and their relationship with symptom severity

The present study examined approach-avoidance, attentional and evaluation biases in Hair Pulling Disorder (HPD). Although none of the tasks showed indications of biased action tendencies in response to hair pulling-related pictures, or biased attention for hair pulling-related words, we found that patients were slower to react to hair pulling-related stimuli than to neutral stimuli. This slowing down may indicate that patients are ambivalent towards hair pulling. This “ambivalence” positively correlated with HPD symptom severity, but only on one of the three severity measures we assessed. Concerning action tendencies towards hair pulling-related words, patients were, however, faster to react to hair pulling-related words when compared to words related to resisting hair pulling. Future research is needed to disentangle this ambivalent response pattern in HPD.     

Young Children’s Physiological Reactivity during Memory Recall: Associations with Posttraumatic Stress and Parent Physiological Synchrony

Autonomic reactivity is implicated in stress response and social engagement – both key components of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) – but few studies have examined autonomic reactivity in pediatric samples, and no known studies have examined physiological synchrony among children with PTSD and caregivers. In a sample of 247 young children (94 girls, 153 boys), most (85%) of whom had exposure to trauma and 40% who met criteria for PTSD, we examined children’s patterns of respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) at baseline and in response to a memory recall task, as well as correspondence between parents’ and children’s RSA. Children with PTSD demonstrated significantly higher reactivity than other groups during their recollection of a traumatic memory, but not during other memory tasks. Regarding synchrony, caregivers’ and children’s RSA were more significantly and positively correlated during the trauma recall task among children who had had exposure to a potentially traumatic event but did not meet PTSD criteria, suggesting physiological synchrony may be protective in contexts of trauma. Overall, findings demonstrate physiological reactivity differences among young children with PTSD. While more work is needed to understand the meaning of parent-child physiological synchrony, these data suggest that children’s psychopathology is associated with physiological synchrony processes among young children with exposure to trauma.     

Proverb preferences across cultures: Dialecticality or poeticality?

Peng and Nisbett (1999) claimed that members of Asian cultures show a greater preference than Euro-Americans for proverbs expressing paradox (so-called dialectical proverbs; e.g.,Too humble is half proud). The present research sought to replicate this claim with the same set of stimuli used in Peng and Nisbett’s Experiment 2 and a new set of dialectical and nondialectical proverbs that were screened to be comparably pleasing in phrasing. Whereas the proverbs were rated as more familiar and (in Set 1) more poetic by Chinese than by American participants, no group differences were found in relation to proverb dialecticality. Both the Chinese and Americans in our study rated the dialectical proverbs from Peng and Nisbett’s study as more likable, higher in wisdom, and higher in poeticality than the nondialectical proverbs. For Set 2, both groups found the dialectical proverbs to be as likable, wise, and poetic as the nondialectical proverbs. When poeticality was covaried out, dialectical proverbs were liked better than nondialectical proverbs across both stimulus sets by the Chinese and the Americans alike, and when wisdom was covaried out, the effect of dialecticality was reduced in both sets and groups. Our findings indicate that caution should be taken in ascribing differences in proverb preferences solely to cultural differences in reasoning.     

A test of the tau-dot hypothesis of braking control in the real world

A controlled experiment used instrumented vehicles in a real-world driving task to compare D. N. Lee's (1976) tau-dot hypothesis of braking control with an alternative based on the direct estimation and control of ideal deceleration (T. Yates, M. Harris, & P. Rock, 2004). Drivers braked to stop as closely as possible to a visual target from different starting speeds and times-to-contact. The data provided little support for the tau-dot hypothesis, and analysis suggested that braking in the real world is better explained by a direct deceleration strategy.     

Assessing the influence of dimensional focus during situation model construction

According to Zwaan, Langston, and Graesser's (1995) event-indexing model, when comprehending text, readers monitor changes in a series of critical dimensions: space, time, protagonist, causality, and intentionality. In this study, the influence of dimensional focus was assessed during situation-model construction. Participants read narratives and were instructed to specifically monitor a single dimension while their sentence reading times were recorded. Critical sentence reading times were then analyzed for all shift types. Results support the general prediction that at least the time and protagonist dimensions are resistant to task demands, demonstrating that comprehenders routinely perform dimensional updating processes that are context independent. These results are discussed in the context of the event-indexing model.     

Socially anxious individuals lack unintentional mimicry

So far, evidence for unskilled social behavior in high socially anxious individuals (HAs) is equivocal. One reason may be that shortcomings are often not directly observable. An important shortcoming would be a lack of unintentional mimicry because it communicates sympathy and rapport with the interaction partner. Therefore, we tested whether HAs show less unintentional mimicry of others. Twenty-nine HAs and 43 low socially anxious individuals (LAs) - all female - watched a virtual man (avatar) who displayed a fixed set of head movements while giving an opinionated speech. Four raters scored whether the participants mimicked the avatar's movements within 4 s. The results indicate that HAs did indeed mimic significantly less than LAs. Lacking such pro-social behavior, HAs may indeed be evaluated as less sympathetic by others, confirming their fears of being disliked.     

Aesthetics and Affect: Engaging Energy Communities

ABSTRACT

Engaging publics in participatory events has become a central means to introducing lay people's voices into processes of technoscientific innovation and governance. However, little attention has been paid to the role of aesthetics, especially in terms of opening up potential ways of critically and creatively engaging with technoscientific matters of concern. The terms semblamatic and matters of potentially are proposed as addressing this dimension of aesthetics. Drawing on practice-based design research, a probe workshop with members of energy communities was implemented. Three probe exercises served to open up potential re-articulations of such core themes as energy, communities and futures. Our goals were to examine the whether such probes enabled semblamatic responses and the emergence of matters of potentiality. Findings were mixed. The continued retention of standard meanings of these core themes suggested that such events can be anaesthetic, blunting access to the semblamatic aspects of engagement. Conversely, there was some opening up in which the core themes were creatively re-articulated. The present perspective, with its three novel terms - semblamatic, matters of potentiality, and anaesthetic - might prove useful in alerting scholars to the complex role of aesthetics in the methodological and analytic practices entailed in engagement with publics.