The Advantage of Disadvantage: Underdogs in the Political Arena

Political candidates are often labeled as underdogs, either by the press or themselves. This paper explores connotations associated with the underdog label in the political arena. We argue that being labeled an underdog has a strategic advantage because it is associated with positive qualities, particularly likeability. The current studies demonstrate that partisan supporters prefer to see their favored candidate as an underdog compared to people not aligned with the candidate, and underdog-labeled entities are perceived to be warmer, and no less competent, than frontrunners. Discussion focuses on the advantages and risks of carrying the underdog label in the political arena.     

Direct and indirect measures of spider fear predict unique variance in children's fear-related behaviour

This study investigated whether direct and indirect measures predict unique variance components of fearful behaviour in children. One hundred eighty-nine children aged between 9 and 12 performed a pictorial version of the emotional Stroop task (EST), filled out the Spider Anxiety and Disgust Screening for Children (SADS-C), the Spider Phobia Questionnaire for Children (SPQ-C), and took part in a Behavioural Assessment Test (BAT). The EST did not correlate with self-reports. Correlations of the self-reports and the BAT remained significant after partialling out EST performance. Likewise, the EST and the BAT still correlated significantly with each other when controlling for the self-reports. This indicates that both direct and indirect measures are useful for predicting unique variance components of fearful behaviour in children. Moreover, it may explain why some previous studies have not found a relationship between self-reported fear and EST performance.     

Examining Visual-Verbal Associations in Children with and Without Reading Disorder

The purpose of this study was to investigate verbal working memory processing both before and after providing semantically elaborated training sentences designed to enhance memory for symbol-word (visual-verbal) pairs. Abilities of 20 children diagnosed with Reading Disorder (RD) and 20 age-matched peers who were normally achieving in reading (NA) were compared (M = 10 years old). Results demonstrated RD children experienced significantly more difficulties on measures of complex auditory-verbal working memory than their NA peers. The best predictor of reading performance was word recall ability measured after students were provided with semantic training sentences. Findings have important implications for identifying young children with potential reading impairment.     

On the nature of the delayed “inhibitory” Cueing effects generated by uninformative arrows at fixation

When the interval between a spatially uninformative arrow and a visual target is short (<500 ms), response times (RTs) are fastest when the arrow points to the target. When this interval exceeds 500 ms, there is a near-universal absence of an effect of the arrow on RTs. Contrary to this expected pattern of results, Taylor and Klein (J Exp Psychol Hum Percept Perform 26:1639–1656, 2000) observed that RTs were slowest when a to-be-localized visual target occurred in the direction of a fixated arrow presented 1 s earlier (i.e., an “inhibitory” Cueing effect; ICE). Here we examined which factor(s) may have allowed the arrow to generate an ICE. Our experiments indicated that the ICE was a side effect of subthreshold response activation attributable to a task-induced association between the arrow and a keypress response. Because the cause of this ICE was more closely related to subthreshold keypress activation than to oculomotor activation, we considered that the effect might be more similar to the negative compatibility effect (NCE) than to inhibition of return (IOR). This similarity raises the possibility that classical IOR, when caused by a spatially uninformative peripheral onset event and measured by a keypress response to a subsequent onset, might represent, in part, another instance of an NCE. Serendipitously, we discovered that context (i.e., whether an uninformative peripheral onset could occur at the time of an uninformative central arrow) ultimately determined whether the “inhibitory” aftermath of automatic response activation would affect output or input pathways.     

Job Flexibility and Job Insecurity: The Dutch Case

Since the 1970s the flexible workforce in the Netherlands has been an important factor of labour force growth. This growth was much stimulated because nonworking women entered the labour market via part-time jobs, temporary jobs, temporary employment agency jobs, and part-time jobs with a weekly changing number of additional working hours. The question raised in this article is whether job flexibility gives rise to feelings of job insecurity. It appears that flexiworkers experience more job insecurity than workers with permanent contracts. For this reason most workers prefer a permanent contract in the future. But there is also a considerable portion of the flexiworkers that actually prefers the concept of flexiwork, both now and in the future. Next, we consider how the Dutch government and work organizations prepare themselves for this new flexiworking situation. How do they keep the demand for flexibility in balance with the need for commitment of workers, so as to ensure quality delivery of products and services? Recent legislation, for example, stimulates flexibility but also protects against job insecurity. Buffers are built into the new flexiwork arrangements so that flexiworkers are protected against hasty dismissal in times of economic recession.     

The Relationship of Temperament Scores to the Way Young Adults Adapt to Change

Temperament has been suggested as affecting the way individuals adapt to changes. This study examined the relationship of temperament, as measured by the Dimensions of Temperament Scale (Lerner, Palermo, Spiro, & Nesselroade, 1982), to three aspects of adaptation for 167 students starting post-secondary education. Loneliness was measured using Schmidt and Sermat's (1983) Differential Loneliness Scale, involvement was measured using Scales of Satisfaction and Activity (Vinsel, Brown, Altman, & Foss, 1980), and affect was measured using the Multiple Affect Adjective Checklist (Zuckerman & Lubin, 1965a). In the sample, feelings of loneliness were related to temperament differentially with regard to friends, romantic-sexual relationships, groups, and family. Involvement was best predicted by the approach/withdrawal dimension, whereas affect was best predicted by the dimensions of mood. The results are consistent with earlier work with children and lend support to the view of temperament as an active mechanism by which the individual adapts to life changes.     

The Effects of Scene Inversion on Change Blindness

In two experiments, participants searched for a difference between two views of a scene. In Experiment 1, the authors extended the change-blindness findings from previous work by R. A. Rensink, J. K. O'Regan, and J. J. Clark (1997), which used an experimenter-induced global transient, to a less artificial situation in which participants searched for a difference in a pair of photographic images presented simultaneously. To examine the idea that meaning-driven endogenous orienting was responsible for the previously observed advantage for changes in center-of-interest items, the authors inverted half of the image pairs. The advantage for center-of-interest items was replicated with upright displays, but it was completely eliminated by inversion, strongly supporting the role of meaning-driven endogenous orienting in this task. With flickering displays (Experiment 2), the center-of-interest effect was completely unaffected by inversion. The authors suggest that when change blindness is induced via flicker, scene modifications are typically found by stimulus-driven rather than by meaning-driven processes.     

Can skilled readers perform a second task in parallel? A functional connectivity MRI study

When asked to search for a target letter while reading, the patterns with which people miss the target letter reveal information about the process of reading itself. Questions remain as to whether this paradigm reflects normal reading processes however. We used a novel continuous-performance neuroimaging paradigm to address this question. In separate scanning runs, subjects either read alone, read while searching for a target letter, or searched non-words continuously. Functional connectivity analysis recovered the full extent of brain areas identified for reading in a localizer scan, with no differences between reading alone and the dual task condition. Differences were found, however, between both reading conditions and the nonword search condition. These results demonstrate that in skilled readers brain activation associated with reading is unaffected by a concurrent letter-search task. They further demonstrate the utility of a naturalistic, continuous-performance paradigm for studying the neural basis of language processing.