This time it’s personal: the memory benefit of hearing oneself

The production effect is the memory advantage of saying words aloud over simply reading them silently. It has been hypothesised that this advantage stems from production featuring distinctive information that stands out at study relative to reading silently. MacLeod (2011) (I said, you said: The production effect gets personal. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 18, 1197–1202. doi:10.3758/s13423-011-0168-8) found superior memory for reading aloud oneself vs. hearing another person read aloud, which suggests that motor information (speaking), self-referential information (i.e., “I said it”), or both contribute to the production effect. In the present experiment, we dissociated the influence on memory of these two components by including a study condition in which participants heard themselves read words aloud (recorded earlier) – a first for production effect research – along with the more typical study conditions of reading aloud, hearing someone else speak, and reading silently. There was a gradient of memory across these four conditions, with hearing oneself lying between speaking and hearing someone else speak. These results imply that oral production is beneficial because it entails two distinctive components: a motor (speech) act and a unique, self-referential auditory input.     

The Effect of Masculinity on Community Reintegration Following TBI in Military Veterans

The present study examined the effect of level of traditional masculine gender role norms as well as the moderating effect of cognitive flexibility on community reintegration outcomes in a sample of 60 male military veterans who had sustained a traumatic brain injury during deployment. Data were collected through self-report measures and cognitive tests. Results suggested that greater endorsement of traditional masculine gender role beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors was significantly inversely related to the community integration domains of relationships and living skills and not significantly related to work and leisure. The effect of masculinity on healthy living skills was moderated by cognitive flexibility; the protective effect of low masculinity on living skills was only present if the veteran also had high cognitive flexibility skills. Results are discussed in the context of gender role strain, potential limiting aspects of stereotypy on recovery and reintegration, and the importance of cognitive flexibility in the recovery/reintegration process.     

Summation,Variety, and Indeterminate Value

In this paper, I consider two sorts of objections to summative theories of value. The first objection concerns “indeterminate” value. The second concerns the importance of variety. I argue that both objections pose serious problems for the summative approach. I also argue that if we accept certain plausible views about the value of variety, we should reject certain forms of argument concerning what sorts of states have intrinsic value.     

The Effects of Multisensory Imagery in Conjunction with Physical Movement Rehearsal on Golf Putting Performance

A multiple-baseline design was used to evaluate the effects of a pre-shot putting routine on the putting performance of four NCAA Division I golfers. The routine involved a combination of multisensory imagery and simulated putting movements. Results suggested that the intervention was effective for some participants. Discussion focuses on directions for future research and the use of single-subject design procedures in sport psychology and related disciplines.

Temporal aspects of stimulus-driven attending in dynamic arrays

Auditory sequences of tones were used to examine a form of stimulus-driven attending that involves temporal expectancies and is influenced by stimulus rhythm. Three experiments examined the influence of sequence timing on comparative pitch judgments of two tones (standard, comparison) separated by interpolated pitches. In two of the experiments, interpolated tones were regularly timed, with onset times of comparison tones varied relative to this rhythm. Listeners were most accurate judging the pitch of rhythmically expected tones and least accurate with very unexpected ones. This effect persisted over time, but disappeared when the rhythm of interpolated tones was either missing or irregular.     

Do Orientations to Happiness Mediate the Associations Between Personality Traits and Subjective Well-Being?

Personality traits have frequently been observed to be associated with subjective well-being. It has been suggested that personality traits may lead individuals to experience life in certain ways which, in turn, influences their subjective well-being. However, the exact mechanisms underlying this relationship remain unknown. The present study hypothesized that the ways in which individuals endorse strategies for achieving happiness (i.e., orientations to happiness: through a life of pleasure, through a life of engagement, or through a life of meaning) mediates the associations that personality traits have with subjective well-being (i.e., satisfaction with life, positive affect, and negative affect). Our results indicated that an orientation to meaning in life partially mediated the relationship between extraversion and life satisfaction. In addition, all three orientations to happiness (i.e., pleasure, engagement, and meaning) partially mediated the relationship between extraversion and positive affect. Discussion focuses on the implications of these results for understanding the connection between personality traits and subjective well-being.     

A Computational Model of Linguistic Humor in Puns

Humor plays an essential role in human interactions. Precisely what makes something funny, however, remains elusive. While research on natural language understanding has made significant advancements in recent years, there has been little direct integration of humor research with computational models of language understanding. In this paper, we propose two information‐theoretic measures—ambiguity and distinctiveness—derived from a simple model of sentence processing. We test these measures on a set of puns and regular sentences and show that they correlate significantly with human judgments of funniness. Moreover, within a set of puns, the distinctiveness measure distinguishes exceptionally funny puns from mediocre ones. Our work is the first, to our knowledge, to integrate a computational model of general language understanding and humor theory to quantitatively predict humor at a fine‐grained level. We present it as an example of a framework for applying models of language processing to understand higher level linguistic and cognitive phenomena.