Sequence effects of the involuntary and the voluntary components of symbolic cueing

The orienting of attention has been found to be influenced by the previous cueing status in a spatial-cueing paradigm. The explanation for this sequence effect remains uncertain. This study separated the involuntary and the voluntary components of arrow cueing by manipulating the predicted target locations. For example, a left arrow cue may have indicated that the target was more likely to appear at the up location. Therefore, three trial types were repeated or switched between trials: cued (targets appeared along the direction of the arrows), predicted (targets appeared at the locations predicted by the arrows), and unrelated (targets appeared at the other two locations, neither cued nor predicted). RTs of cued trials were found to be significantly facilitated after a previous cued trial; however, the same effect was not observed for predicted trials. The results suggest that significant sequence effects are induced only in the involuntary component of arrow cueing. The findings support the feature-integration hypothesis for the sequence effect of symbolic cueing.

     

Customer's perceived value of waiting time for service events

The authors address the effects of money gain and loss on individually perceived value as predicted by prospect theory in a time gain‐and‐loss context. Three experiments were conducted. Experiment 1 results support the prospect theory concept of value function. According to Experiment 2 results, the amount of money involved exerted different impacts on individual perceptions—specifically, study participants preferred gaining $1 on one occasion to gaining 50 cents over two occasions and preferred losing $1 one time to losing 50 cents twice. Further, the combined results indicate that the study participants held different perceptions of the value of “short time” versus “little money”—that is, they preferred saving an extra 2 minutes on one occasion to saving 1 minute on two occasions and preferred waiting an extra 1 minute two times to waiting an extra 2 minutes one time. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Smoking involvement during adolescence among African Americans and Puerto Ricans: risks to psychological and physical well-being in young adulthood

The major aim of this study was to examine the longitudinal association between adolescent smoking involvement and self-reported psychological and physical outcomes in young adulthood. Participants included 333 African Americans and 329 Puerto Ricans who were surveyed in 1990 in their New York City schools and interviewed in 1995 and 2000-2001, primarily in their homes. The psychological outcomes included ego integration, symptoms of depression, anxiety, and interpersonal difficulty. The physical health measures included a general health rating, number of illnesses, and symptoms of ill health. Also, three scales measured problems due to alcohol, marijuana, and other illicit drug use. Smoking involvement varied by age, sex, and ethnicity but not by socioeconomic status nor by late adolescent parental status. Analysis showed that the relationships between adolescent smoking involvement and psychological and physical health problems in young adulthood remained significant even with control on demographic factors, earlier levels of the outcome variables, and marijuana use. The relationships between smoking behavior and problems with alcohol, marijuana and other illicit drug use were particularly strong. Thus, adolescent smoking seems to have a wide range of clinical implications for young adulthood.     

For God (or) country: the hydraulic relation between government instability and belief in religious sources of control

It has been recently proposed that people can flexibly rely on sources of control that are both internal and external to the self to satisfy the need to believe that their world is under control (i.e., that events do not unfold randomly or haphazardly). Consistent with this, past research demonstrates that, when personal control is threatened, people defend external systems of control, such as God and government. This theoretical perspective also suggests that belief in God and support for governmental systems, although seemingly disparate, will exhibit a hydraulic relationship with one another. Using both experimental and longitudinal designs in Eastern and Western cultures, the authors demonstrate that experimental manipulations or naturally occurring events (e.g., electoral instability) that lower faith in one of these external systems (e.g., the government) lead to subsequent increases in faith in the other (e.g., God). In addition, mediation and moderation analyses suggest that specific concerns with order and structure underlie these hydraulic effects. Implications for the psychological, sociocultural, and sociopolitical underpinnings of religious faith, as well as system justification theory, are discussed.     

汉字输入中认知技能与动作技能的分离

通过20名大学生在采用目光注视屏幕上的键盘完成汉字输入任务的眼动研究,将汉字输入中的认知技能与动作技能实现分离,从而探究关于键盘布局图式的认知技能的发展.结果发现:(1)在标准键盘显示下,汉字输入技能水平高分组与低分组在完成时间上没有显著差异,而空白键盘显示下高分组的完成时间显著快于低分组;(2)两种键盘显示方式下,低分组的眼动指标都没有显著差异,而高分组在空白键盘显示下的平均注视时间要显著多于标准键盘显示下的.     

Evidence of the Psychometric Integrity of the Creative Personality Scale using Item Response Theory Models

Gough’s Creative Personality Scale (CPS) has been very widely used to assess creative personality characteristics, and many researchers have argued that it is associated with strong reliability and validity evidence. However, findings vary considerably across the samples used in each study, suggesting that an analysis using the item response theory framework would provide more useful evidence of the instrument’s psychometric integrity. Results suggest that the CPS is multidimensional, and some items have low discrimination indices. Additionally, significant correlations between participants’ trait estimates (i.e., estimated creative personality) and their engagement in a range of creative activities indicate that the CPS is associated with convincing evidence of criterion-related validity.     

Gaze cueing as a function of perceived gaze direction

Previous studies have found that attention is automatically oriented in the direction of other people's gaze. This study directly investigated whether the perceiving gaze direction modulates the orienting of observers' attention. Gaze perception was manipulated by changing the face context (head orientation) of the gaze cue: the perceived gaze angle was increased (or decreased) when the head and gaze are congruent (or incongruent), while the local‐feature information of the eye region was preserved for all stimuli. The results showed that gaze‐cueing effects were enhanced when the perceived gaze direction was averted more toward left or right, and reduced when the perceived gaze direction was closer to direct gaze. The results suggest that gaze‐cueing effects are based on mechanisms specialized for gaze perception, and the magnitude of gaze‐cueing effects was probably a function of the perceived gaze direction.     

Conflict-driven adaptive control is enhanced by integral negative emotion on a short time scale*

ABSTRACT

Negative emotion influences cognitive control, and more specifically conflict adaptation. However, discrepant results have often been reported in the literature. In this study, we broke down negative emotion into integral and incidental components using a modern motivation-based framework, and assessed whether the former could change conflict adaptation. In the first experiment, we manipulated the duration of the inter-trial-interval (ITI) to assess the actual time-scale of this effect. Integral negative emotion was induced by using loss-related feedback contingent on task performance, and measured at the subjective and physiological levels. Results showed that conflict-driven adaptive control was enhanced when integral negative emotion was elicited, compared to a control condition without changes in defensive motivation. Importantly, this effect was only found when a short, as opposed to long ITI was used, suggesting that it had a short time scale. In the second experiment, we controlled for effects of feature repetition and contingency learning, and replicated an enhanced conflict adaptation effect when integral negative emotion was elicited and a short ITI was used. We interpret these new results against a standard cognitive control framework assuming that integral negative emotion amplifies specific control signals transiently, and in turn enhances conflict adaptation.     

Aggregating and Testing Intra-Individual Correlations: Methods and Comparisons

From a longitudinal study, we have repeatedly measured data from multiple individuals at multiple occasions. For each individual, the relation between 2 variables can be measured by the Pearson’s correlation. The question is how to aggregate the multiple correlations and conduct statistical inference on the aggregated intra-individual correlation. Several methods are proposed to aggregate and test intra-individual correlations: (a) a meta-analysis method based on Fisher’s Z transformed correlations, (b) a meta-analysis method based on the Pearson’s correlations, and (c) a multilevel modeling method using data standardized within each individual. The performance of the methods after bias corrections was compared using simulations with considering factors including numbers of individuals, numbers of time points, population effect sizes, and their distribution forms (homogeneous vs heterogeneous). The results from the simulation studies show that estimation biases were found using the meta-analytic methods and suggestions on when and how to correct biases were provided based on the simulation results. Furthermore, the performance of the 3 methods after necessary bias corrections was found to be comparable and reasonably good, indicating that all 3 methods worked for aggregating and testing intra-individual correlations. An empirical daily diary data set was then used to illustrate the applications of the 3 methods. The assumptions, advantages and disadvantages, and possible extensions of the 3 methods were discussed.