Long-lasting effects of subliminal affective priming from facial expressions

Unconscious processing of stimuli with emotional content can bias affective judgments. Is this subliminal affective priming merely a transient phenomenon manifested in fleeting perceptual changes, or are long-lasting effects also induced? To address this question, we investigated memory for surprise faces 24 h after they had been shown with 30-ms fearful, happy, or neutral faces. Surprise faces subliminally primed by happy faces were initially rated as more positive, and were later remembered better, than those primed by fearful or neutral faces. Participants likely to have processed primes supraliminally did not respond differentially as a function of expression. These results converge with findings showing memory advantages with happy expressions, though here the expressions were displayed on the face of a different person, perceived subliminally, and not present at test. We conclude that behavioral biases induced by masked emotional expressions are not ephemeral, but rather can last at least 24 h.     

Individual differences in language lateralisation,schizotypy and the remote-associate task

We tested the hypothesis that the level of reduced laterality in language is correlated with the degrees of schizotypal personality in healthy individuals and with their performance in the remote-associate task (RAT). A total of 53 healthy participants completed a schizotypal personality measure of the Oxford-Liverpool Inventory of Feelings and Experiences (O-LIFE; a questionnaire measuring the level of psychotic proneness), a consonant–vowel–consonant (CVC; requiring the identification of letter trigrams presented tachistoscopically in the left/right visual fields or both), measuring reduced language laterality and a remote-associate task (RAT; requiring to report a word, weakly associated with three cue words). Analysis revealed correlations between CVC and O-LIFE, as well as between CVC and RAT performance. The results suggest that reduced language lateralisation (reduced hemispheric integration) may play a role in schizophrenic language disorganization, as reflected in highly schizotypal individuals, and that hemispheric integration plays a role in the remote-associate task.     

Choice between Single-Response and Multichoice Tasks in Humans

The Psychological Record - The present study examined choice in humans between a single-response task and a task with multiple alternatives (i.e., a multichoice task). The alternatives provided...     

Do Emotions after Receiving Test Results Predict Review Activities? An Intra‐Individual Analysis

In the present study, we examined intra‐individual relations among emotions when receiving test results and subsequent test review activities, and the direct and moderating effects of perceptions of test value. The participants, 90 first‐year students at a private girls' secondary school, self‐reported their present emotional state immediately after receiving their test results and their test review activities 1 week after the tests were returned. The same survey was conducted on four occasions. Results of multilevel analyses indicated that emotions experienced when receiving test results did not predict subsequent learning behavior. The results also showed that relations among emotions and review activities differed across students. Although we investigated whether such individual differences in relations might be attributed to perceptions of test value, no moderating effect could be observed. Furthermore, improvement‐oriented test mindsets were found to be positive predictors of review activities by investigating the direct effect of perceptions of test value. These findings suggest that modifying students' perceptions of test value may promote appropriate learning behavior.     

Conflict management and organizational attitudes among Japanese: individual and group goals and justice

By asking 341 Japanese employees to rate experiences of conflict with their supervisors in terms of conflict concerns and outcomes, we attempted to examine the following two hypotheses: attainment of the individual and group goals would increase the perceived justice (H2), and the perceived justice would increase the outcome satisfaction and organizational commitment (H1: the justice-bond hypothesis). The results of structural equation analysis supported H1, but only partially supported H2; that is, only the group goals increased the perceived justice. Instead, the individual goals directly increased the outcome satisfaction, not by way of the perception of justice. These findings suggest that Japanese employees felt that justice was achieved when they saw the conflicts were resolved in the group-oriented manner, relatively independent of personal interests.     

Understanding priming of color-singleton search: Roles of attention at encoding and “retrieval”

We investigated how the performance of a color-singleton search (the search for a single odd-colored item among homogeneously colored distractors) left a persistent memory trace (lasting up to six intervening trials or ～17 sec) that facilitated a subsequent color-singleton search (when the same targetdistractor color combination was repeated). Specifically, we investigated the roles of attention in the encoding and “retrieval” stages of this priming effect by intermixing trials in which the target location was precued by an onset cue. We found that the encoding of both target and distractor colors was automatic in that whether or not observers had to use color in locating the target in the preceding trial did not substantially affect priming. However, priming required that the color-singleton item be attended in the preceding trial. Once a color singleton display was encoded, our results indicated that priming facilitated the direction of attention to the color-singleton target on a subsequent trial. In short, when a color-singleton item happened to be a critical item to be attended in one situation, another color-singleton item defined by the same color combination tended to attract attention in subsequent encounters.     

"When did I learn and when shall I act?": The developmental relationship between episodic future thinking and memory

This study investigated the development of the ability to reflect on one’s personal past and future. A total of 64 4- to 6-year-olds received tasks of delayed self-recognition, source memory, delay of gratification, and a newly developed task of future-oriented action timing. Although children’s performance on delayed self-recognition, source memory, and action timing improved with age, their performance on delay of gratification did not. Children’s errors in source memory and action timing were solely and strongly associated with each other in older children (5–6 years) even after controlling for age and verbal ability. Results are discussed in terms of mental time travel underlying episodic memory and future thinking that includes both the projection of oneself into the past and future and the appreciation of events’ temporal relations.     

Human Group Choice in Loss Minimization and Gain Maximization Games

The Psychological Record - College students participated as a group in a point-loss minimization game as well as in a point-gain maximization game. The rule of the maximization game was similar to...     

Rapid volitional control of apparent motion during percept generation

How rapidly can one voluntarily influence percept generation? The time course of voluntary visual–spatial attention is well studied, but the time course of intentional control over percept generation is relatively unknown. We investigated the latter question using “one-shot” apparent motion. When a vertical or horizontal pair of squares is replaced by its 90º-rotated version, the bottom-up signal is ambiguous. From this ambiguous signal, it is known that people can intentionally generate a percept of rotation in a desired direction (clockwise or counterclockwise). To determine the time course of this intentional control, we instructed participants to voluntarily induce rotation in a precued direction (clockwise rotation when a high-pitched tone was heard, and counterclockwise rotation when a low-pitched tone was heard), and then to report the direction of rotation that was actually perceived. We varied the delay between the instructional cue and the rotated frame (cue-lead time) from 0 to 1,067 ms. Intentional control became more effective with longer cue-lead times (asymptotically effective at 533 ms). Notably, intentional control was reliable even with a zero cue-lead time; control experiments ruled out response bias and the development of an auditory–visual association as explanations. This demonstrates that people can interpret an auditory cue and intentionally generate a desired motion percept surprisingly rapidly, entirely within the subjectively instantaneous moment in which the visual system constructs a percept of apparent motion.