Dreading the boards: stress response to a competitive audition characterized by social-evaluative threat

The capacity of psychosocial stressors to provoke the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal axis has been demonstrated to vary depending upon a number of psychological factors. Laboratory stressors characterized by social-evaluative threat are proposed to be the most efficacious in the elicitation of a cortisol stress response. Salivary cortisol, cardiovascular, and subjective responses of 16 healthy adults facing a naturalistic stressor characterized by social-evaluative threat (competitive performance auditions) were examined. Audition exposure was sufficient to provoke significant cortisol, arterial blood pressure (systolic and diastolic), and subjective stress responses. Cortisol response reactivity (area under the curve with respect to increase [AUCi]) also correlated with participants' subjective rating of social-evaluative threat. The competitive performance audition context is therefore considered a promising context in which to further explore cortisol responsivity to social-evaluative threat.     

Experimenter Behavior as an Unintended Determinant of Experimental Results

Sound motion pictures were made of 19 Es conducting a person perception experiment with 53 Ss. Ss' task was to rate the degree of success or failure of people pictured in photos. From some of the Ss, Es had been led to expect ratings of success and from some ratings of failure. Actually, Ss were assigned at random to the “success-perceiving” or “failure-perceiving” group, Es showed significant behavioral variation in the way in which they conducted the experiment, Es whose experimental behavior reflected greater interpersonal involvement or warmth obtained ratings of the photos as more successful, Es whose experimental behavior reflected a greater task orientation, greater competence, and a more professional manner obtained ratings significantly more in accordance with their expectancy, regardless of the particular nature of that expectancy.     

Giving cognition a helping hand: The effect of congruent gestures on object name retrieval

The gestures that accompany speech are more than just arbitrary hand movements or communicative devices. They are simulated actions that can both prime and facilitate speech and cognition. This study measured participants’ reaction times for naming degraded images of objects when simultaneously adopting a gesture that was either congruent with the target object, incongruent with it, and when not making any hand gesture. A within‐subjects design was used, with participants (N= 122) naming 10 objects under each condition. Participants named the objects significantly faster when adopting a congruent gesture than when not gesturing at all. Adopting an incongruent gesture resulted in significantly slower naming times. The findings are discussed in the context of the intrapersonal cognitive and facilitatory effects of gestures and underline the relatedness between language, action, and cognition.     

Interference Effects from Observed Movement in Parkinson's Disease

Previous research has demonstrated that Parkinson's disease patients have an increased susceptibility to response conflict. In the present study, the authors investigate whether Parkinson's patients have a similar sensitivity to interference from observed movements. In all, 10 patients and 10 controls performed horizontal and vertical arm movements while watching a video of either a person performing similar movements or a moving dot. Movements were performed in the same plane (congruent) and orthogonal to the observed movement (incongruent). The off-axis variance of movements was our index of interference. Although patients tended to exhibit more off-axis variability than did controls, both groups demonstrated similar congruence effects, with greater variance in incongruent conditions. These results indicated that increased susceptibility to interference in Parkinson's disease does not extend to interference from observed movements.     

Militant protestantism: An analysis of the theology of political resistance and its impact on Northern Ireland

Ian Paisley is a controversial figure in the politics of Northern Ireland. Throughout the Troubles, and even before, he has led protests in opposition to religious and political developments in the province. He has also been associated with organisations that claimed to be ready to defend Ulster if the British Government's security policy collapsed. These organisations were prepared to use force if necessary. Paisley has been very vocal in his criticism of the British Government as well as other bodies of State. But Paisley claims to be a fundamentalist Christian and considers his comments and actions to be in conformity with his religious convictions. This article explores the theological and historical foundations of Paisley's thinking and endeavours to account for the political theology of Protestant fundamentalists like Paisley.     

Do hands attract attention?

Social stimuli, like faces (Kanwisher, McDermott, & Chun, 1997) or bodies (Downing, Jiang, Shuman, & Kanwisher, 2001), engage specific areas within the visual cortex. Behavioural research reveals an attentional bias to these same stimuli (Ro, Friggel, & Lavie, 2007). The current study examined whether there is an attentional bias towards hands, and whether such a bias is distinct from any bias towards human bodies. In a two-alternative, forced-choice dot-probe task, participants saw two side-by-side pictures for 500 ms. A probe dot then appeared on either side and participants indicated where the dot appeared. Participants were significantly faster to respond when the probe location coincided with the location of pictures of bodies, hands, or feet, compared to dogs, starfish, hand tools, toaster ovens, inverted hands, or inverted bodies. Results suggest an attentional bias to bodies and body parts but found no evidence of a difference in attentional advantage of hands over bodies or feet.     

Measuring trust in teams: Development and validation of a multifaceted measure of formative and reflective indicators of team trust

This article describes the development and validation of a multidimensional instrument designed to measure trust within teams. Trust is conceptualized as a latent variable resulting from distinct but related (formative) indicators, i.e., propensity to trust and perceived trustworthiness, which lead to (reflective) indicators, i.e., behaviours cooperation and monitoring between team members. The instrument was tested in two different samples. The first sample included 98 hospital professionals (14 teams) and provided data for the exploratory factor analysis of this instrument (Study 1). The second sample included responses from 112 teams (395 individuals) from three social-care institutions and was used to apply confirmatory factor analysis (Study 2). Data attesting to the underlying factor structure, internal homogeneity, construct validity, and consensual power of agreement within teams and discriminant power across teams of the instrument are presented. The final 21-item, four-factor version of this measure demonstrates good psychometric properties, with acceptable levels of reliability and validity. We conclude that the scales form a parsimonious, valid, and efficient instrument to assess trust in teams. Potential applications of this measure in research and practice are described and the implications of these findings for future research are discussed.     

Changes in Physiological Stress and Self-Reported Mood in Younger and Older Adults After Exposure to a Stressful Task

ABSTRACT

The objective of the current study was to compare the trajectories of physiological levels of stress and self-report measures of mood in younger and older adults and to examine how a stress induction would affect performance. The current study examined physiological and subjective indicators of stress and mood before, mid-way through, and after being exposed to a stressful computer task. Stress levels and negative affect increased after stress induction relative to levels before and after the stressful task. Practice on the task helped to improve performance (accuracy and reaction time) but high workload measured during the task mitigated accuracy in younger and older adults, whereas it enhanced response speed in younger adults.     

The Uses of Hierarchy: Autonomy and Valuing

Abstract

Autonomy and valuing are two significant practical phenomena that have been analysed in terms of higher-order wanting. I argue that reference to higher-order capacities is indeed required to make sense of both concepts, but also that such analyses need a more differentiated understanding of “wanting to want” than has hitherto been proposed. Central for autonomy is the instantiation of four types of optative relationship by an accountable agent under conditions of rationality. Valuing requires the disposition to instantiate only one of the relevant structures. Clarity on this allows an analysis of the precise relationships between the two phenomena     

Sinnott-Armstrong,Walter, ed., Moral Psychology,Volume 1. The Evolution of Morality: Adaptations and Innateness,Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 2008, pp. xix + 583, US$30.00/£17.95 (paper)

In the opening section of this paper we spell out an account of our naïve view of bodily sensations that is of historical and philosophical significance. This account of our shared view of bodily sensations captures common ground between Descartes, who endorses an error theory regarding our everyday thinking about bodily sensations, and Berkeley, who is more sympathetic with common sense. In the second part of the paper we develop an alternative to this account and discuss what is at stake in deciding between these two ways of understanding our everyday view. In the third and final part of the paper we offer an argument in favour of our alternative.