Contact high: Mania proneness and positive perception of emotional touches

How do extreme degrees of positive emotion—such as those characteristic of mania—influence emotion perception? The present study investigated how mania proneness, assessed using the Hypomanic Personality Scale, influences the perception of emotion via touch. Using a validated dyadic interaction paradigm for communicating emotion through touch (Hertenstein, Keltner, App, Bulleit, & Jaskolka, 2006), participants (N=53) received eight different touches to their forearm from a stranger and then identified the emotion via forced-choice methodology. Mania proneness predicted increased overall accuracy in touch perception, particularly for positive emotion touches, as well as the over-attribution of positive and under-attribution of negative emotions across all touches. These findings highlight the effects of positive emotion extremes on the perception of emotion in social interactions.     

Some boundary conditions for a word superiority effect

A word superiority effect was obtained using a fixed stimulus set, positional certainty of the critical letter, mixed trial type, and instructions to fixate the critical letter. Control experiments established that this effect was not due to lateral masking. Further experiments extended the finding of a fixed-set word superiority effect to other stimulus sets, and to lowercase and mixed-case stimuli. The mixed-case word superiority effect is inconsistent with supraletter feature models of word recognition and, instead, lends support to hierarchical codes models. It was demonstrated that an unusually wide spacing of letters can disrupt the formation of word-level codes, and that wide visual angles are not necessarily disruptive as long as normal spacing is maintained.