Ability Emotional Intelligence Predicts Quality of Life beyond Personality,Affectivity, and Cognitive Intelligence

The current study explored the incremental validity of the ability emotional intelligence test to predict suicidal ideation (a subjective indicator of Quality of Life) beyond the ‘Big Five’ personality dimensions, affectivity, and general cognitive ability in a sample of 184 university students (mean age 29.50 years). Hierarchical regression analyses revealed that after controlling for demographic variables, the Big Five personality traits, affectivity, and the cognitive intelligence, the block of ability emotional intelligence scores explained a statistically significant increment of variance in suicidal ideation. It is noteworthy that the predictive power of the ability emotional intelligence appeared to be mostly due to the contribution of its two branch scores–regulation of emotion and understanding of emotion. Findings are discussed with reference to emotional intelligence theory and suicidal behaviors.     

Direct and indirect effects of third-party relationships on interpersonal trust

Past studies of the determinants of interpersonal trust have focused primarily on how trust forms in isolated dyads. Yet within organizations, trust typically develops between individuals who are embedded in a complex web of existing and potential relationships. In this article, the authors identify 3 alternative ways in which a trustor and trustee may be linked to each other via third parties: network closure (linked via social interactions with third parties), trust transferability (linked via trusted third parties), and structural equivalence (linked via the similarity of their relationships with all potential third parties within the organization). Each of these is argued to influence interpersonal trust via a distinct social mechanism. The authors hypothesized that network closure and structural equivalence would predict interpersonal trust indirectly via their impact on interpersonal organizational citizenship behaviors performed within the interpersonal relationship, whereas trust transferability would predict trust directly. Social network analyses of data gathered from a medium-sized work organization provide substantial support for the hypotheses and also suggest important directions for future research.     

A comparison between the effectiveness of solution‐focused brief therapy and the quadripartite model of social competence and a fusion model of these two methods on increasing social adjustment of female students residing in Tehran dormitories

The objective of this study is to compare the effectiveness of solution‐focused brief therapy, the quadripartite model of social competence, and a fusion model of these two methods on increasing social competence of female students residing in Tehran dormitories. The studied sample includes 60 patients, randomly placed in three experimental groups and one control group. Analysis of covariance has been used to test the difference between group means. The results demonstrate that all three treatment methods were effective on the increase of social adjustment in the students. While no significant differences were observed between the solution‐focused and the quadripartite model of social competence treatment methods, the combination model exhibits superior efficacy on the increase of social adjustment in the test subjects.     

Influenceability of Sex Differences under Conditions of Risk Taking

In an experiment on the effect of intensity accents on the perception of time intervals between tones. H. G. Tekman (2001) found that the regular placement of deviant time intervals in short sequences of tones reduced detection, especially if intensity accents marked the deviant time intervals. That was the opposite of what one wòuld have expected on the basis of the dynamic attending theory of M. R. Jones (1976). The effect might have occurred because temporally deviant tones create cumulative onset shifts that affect all the subsequent tones. If the deviations were randomly placed, then they could follow each other in close succession and change the local tempo. In the present study, the changes of local tempo, which might have acted as a cue for the detection of temporal deviations in the random sequences, were eliminated by compensating for deviant time intervals with equal deviations in the opposite direction in the interval that followed. That change in the stimuli eliminated the negative main effect of regularity, and the accenting interacted with regularity in favor of detection in the regular sequences. However, a simple advantage of regular over random sequences was not observed. The author discusses possible reasons for the lack of a facilitatory effect of regularity.     

A Dual Process Account of Coarticulation in Motor Skill Acquisition

Many tasks, such as typing a password, are decomposed into a sequence of subtasks that can be accomplished in many ways. Behavior that accomplishes subtasks in ways that are influenced by the overall task is often described as “skilled” and exhibits coarticulation. Many accounts of coarticulation use search methods that are informed by representations of objectives that define skilled. While they aid in describing the strategies the nervous system may follow, they are computationally complex and may be difficult to attribute to brain structures. Here, the authors present a biologically- inspired account whereby skilled behavior is developed through 2 simple processes: (a) a corrective process that ensures that each subtask is accomplished, but does not do so skillfully and (b) a reinforcement learning process that finds better movements using trial and error search that is not informed by representations of any objectives. We implement our account as a computational model controlling a simulated two-armed kinematic “robot” that must hit a sequence of goals with its hands. Behavior displays coarticulation in terms of which hand was chosen, how the corresponding arm was used, and how the other arm was used, suggesting that the account can participate in the development of skilled behavior.     

The effect of limited attention and delay on negative arousing false memories

ABSTRACT

Previous research has shown that, in comparison to neutral stimuli, false memories for high arousing negative stimuli are greater after very fast presentation and limited attention at study. However, full compared to limited attention conditions still produce comparably more false memories for all stimuli types. Research has also shown that emotional stimuli benefit from a period of consolidation. What effect would such consolidation have on false memory formation even when attention is limited at study? The aim of the present study was to investigate the effect of fast presentation on false memory production for negatively-arousing and neutral items over time using the DRM paradigm. Sixty-eight participants studied Negative and neutral DRM lists with fast or slow presentation conditions. Half completed a recognition test immediately and half completed a recognition test after one-week. Results revealed that, for fast presentation, negative critical lures increased after one week and were comparable to negative critical lures in the slow presentation encoding conditions. Neutral critical lures in the fast presentation condition did not change and remained lower compared to the slow presentation condition. These findings are the first demonstration that arousing negative false memories can increase over time when attention at encoding is limited.     

The precuneus and the insula in self-attributional processes

Attributions are constantly assigned in everyday life. A well-known phenomenon is the self-serving bias: that is, people’s tendency to attribute positive events to internal causes (themselves) and negative events to external causes (other persons/circumstances). Here, we investigated the neural correlates of the cognitive processes implicated in self-serving attributions using social situations that differed in their emotional saliences. We administered an attributional bias task during fMRI scanning in a large sample of healthy subjects (n = 71). Eighty sentences describing positive or negative social situations were presented, and subjects decided via buttonpress whether the situation had been caused by themselves or by the other person involved. Comparing positive with negative sentences revealed activations of the bilateral posterior cingulate cortex (PCC). Self-attribution correlated with activation of the posterior portion of the precuneus. However, self-attributed positive versus negative sentences showed activation of the anterior portion of the precuneus, and self-attributed negative versus positive sentences demonstrated activation of the bilateral insular cortex. All significant activations were reported with a statistical threshold of p ≤ .001, uncorrected. In addition, a comparison of our fMRI task with data from the Internal, Personal and Situational Attributions Questionnaire, Revised German Version, demonstrated convergent validity. Our findings suggest that the precuneus and the PCC are involved in the evaluation of social events with particular regional specificities: The PCC is activated during emotional evaluation, the posterior precuneus during attributional evaluation, and the anterior precuneus during self-serving processes. Furthermore, we assume that insula activation is a correlate of awareness of personal agency in negative situations.     

Temporal Contiguity and Contingency Judgments: A Pavlovian Analogue

The two experiments reported examine the role of temporal contiguity on judgments of contingency in a human analogue of the Pavlovian task. The data show that the effect of the actual delay on contingency judgment depends on the observer's expectation regarding the delay. For a fixed contingency between the cue and the outcome, ratings of the contingency are higher when the actual delay is congruent with the observer's expectation than when it is incongruent. We argue that our data can be understood within the context of the temporal coding hypothesis.     

The Interplay of News Frames on Cognitive Complexity

This research considers how distinct news frames work in combination to influence information processing. It extends framing research grounded in prospect theory (Tversky & Kahneman, 1981) and attribution theory (Iyengar, 1991) to study conditional framing effects on associative memory. Using a 2 × 3 experimental design embedded within a probability survey (N= 379), tests examined the effects of two different frame dimensions—loss‐gain and individual‐societal—on the complexity of individuals' thoughts concerning the issue of urban growth. Findings indicate that news frames interact to generate more or less complex cognitive responses, with societal‐gain frame combinations generating the most detailed cognitions about the causes, components, and consequences of urban growth. Directions for research on media framing are discussed.