The boundary conditions for Bohr’s law: when is reacting faster than acting?

In gunfights in Western movies, the hero typically wins, even though the villain draws first. Niels Bohr (Gamow, The great physicists from Galileo to Einstein. Chapter: The law of quantum, 1988) suggested that this reflected a psychophysical law, rather than a dramatic conceit. He hypothesized that reacting is faster than acting. Welchman, Stanley, Schomers, Miall, and Bülthoff (Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B: Biological Sciences, 277, 1667-1674, 2010) provided empirical evidence supporting "Bohr's law," showing that the time to complete simple manual actions was shorter when reacting than when initiating an action. Here we probe the limits of this effect. In three experiments, participants performed a simple manual action, which could either be self-initiated or executed following an external visual trigger. Inter-button time was reliably faster when the action was externally triggered. However, the effect disappeared for the second step in a two-step action. Furthermore, the effect reversed when a choice between two actions had to be made. Reacting is faster than acting, but only for simple, ballistic actions.     

Positive emotional context eliminates the framing effect in decision-making

Dual-process theories have suggested that emotion plays a key role in the framing effect in decision-making. However, little is known about the potential impact of a specific positive or negative emotional context on this bias. We investigated this question with adult participants using an emotional priming paradigm. First, participants were presented with positive or negative affective pictures (i.e., pleasant vs. unpleasant photographs). Afterward, participants had to perform a financial decision-making task that was unrelated to the pictures previously presented. The results revealed that the presentation framed in terms of gain or loss no longer affected subjects' decision-making following specific exposure to emotionally pleasant pictures. Interestingly, a positive emotional context did not globally influence risk-taking behavior but specifically decreased the risk propensity in the loss frame. This finding confirmed that a positive emotional context can reduce loss aversion, and it strongly reinforced the dual-process view that the framing effect stems from an affective heuristic belonging to intuitive System 1. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved).     

Physical self-concept and disturbed eating attitudes and behaviors in French athlete and non-athlete adolescent girls: direct and indirect relations

This study aims to investigate the direct and indirect associations between physical self-subdomains, physical self-worth, global self-worth, and disturbed eating attitudes and behaviors among French non-elite athlete and non-athlete adolescent girls. A sample of adolescent girls including 50 ballet dancers, 41 basketball players, and 47 non-athletes was used in this study. Data obtained from the ballet dancer and basketball player subsamples revealed significant, sample-specific as well as common, direct relations between global and physical self-perceptions and disturbed eating attitudes and behaviors, as well as significant indirect relations (via global self-worth and physical self-worth) between specific physical self-perceptions and disturbed eating attitudes and behaviors. In contrast, no association was found between global and physical self-perceptions in the sample of non-athlete adolescent girls.     

Visual adaptation to a spatial contrast enhances visual evoked potentials

The effects of adaptation to the visual contrast of a counterphase grating were studied with visual evoked potentials (VEPs). The spatial frequency of the grating was 4 cpd, and its temporal frequency was 4 or 12 Hz. Steady-state VEPs were analyzed through an FFT (fast Fourier transform) algorithm. In the first experiment, contrast thresholds rose strongly just after the end of adaptation and declined regularly over time. The VEPs recorded in the medio-occipital lead showed an initial decrease in amplitude after adaptation, followed by an enhancement well above the preadaptation level and then a return to that level. The paradoxical enhancement of the VEP was found at both high and low contrast in both the medio-occipital lead and the right temporal lead of a right-handed subject. The left temporal leads showed a VEP enhancement at high contrast and a decline at a low value.     

Phonological and semantic priming: Evidence for task-independent effects

The questions asked in the present experiments concern the generality of semantic and phonological priming effects: Do these effects arise automatically regardless of target task, or are these effects restricted to target tasks that specifically require the retrieval of the primed information? In Experiment 1, subjects produced faster color matching times on targets preceded by a masked rhyming prime than on targets preceded by an orthographic control or an unrelated prime. This result suggests that automatic priming effects on the basis of phonological similarity can be obtained even when the target task does not make use of phonological information. This claim was reinforced in Experiment 2 in which a rhyme priming effect and a semantic priming effect were found in a semantic categorization task. In Experiment 3, the target task was phonological (rhyme detection), and, again, both phonological and semantic priming effects were observed. Finally, in Experiments 4 and 5, in a replication and an extension of Experiment 1, phonological and semantic priming effects were found in a color matching task, a task involving neither phonological nor semantic processing. These results are most straightforwardly interpreted by assuming that both semantic and phonological priming effects are, at least in part, due to automatic activation of memorial representations.     

An exploration of the moderating effect of trait emotional intelligence on memory and attention in neutral and stressful conditions

Trait emotional intelligence (trait EI) refers to individual differences in the experience, perception, regulation, and utilization of emotions. Research has shown that trait EI moderated subjective and endocrine responses to both natural and laboratory stressors. This study explores, the cognitive processes underlying this effect, under the hypothesis that trait EI moderates the impact of stress on memory and/or attention. Results supported the hypothesis, but solely for the ‘regulation’ EI‐dimension (named self‐control or SC). In neutral conditions, high SC was characterized by an attentional focus to neutral material and a facilitated memory for positive events, whereas low SC was characterized by an attentional focus to emotional material (regardless of valence) and a facilitated memory for negative events. In stressful conditions, high SC individuals engaged attention to emotional material (regardless of valence) and recalled more negative events, while low SC individuals disengaged attention from emotional material and recalled more positive events.     

De la prévention à la promotion de la santé : intérêt de l’approche communautaire

Psychological research and practice shows increasing interest for prevention and health promotion in France. Current-scientific literature recommends the implementation of targeted actions, directed towards populations expressing specific needs. The community-based approach offers a framework corresponding to the flexibility, which is necessary to the effectiveness of this type of intervention. It includes the mobilization and the participation of the citizens in the development of each unique project, in the renewal of the project according to the needs, in finding possible solutions, and in assessing the actions carried out. This article aims at presenting the importance of a community-based approach in the field of health promotion; a field which would benefit from being better known in France in order to develop intervention programs adapted to each population.     

Hemispheric differences in the time-course of semantic priming processes: evidence from event-related potentials (ERPs)

To investigate hemispheric differences in the timing of word priming, the modulation of event-related potentials by semantic word relationships was examined in each cerebral hemisphere. Primes and targets, either categorically (silk-wool) or associatively (needle-sewing) related, were presented to the left or right visual field in a go/no-go lexical decision task. The results revealed significant reaction-time and physiological differences in both visual fields only for associatively related word pairs, but an electrophysiological difference also tended to reach significance for categorically related words when presented in the left visual field. ERP waveforms showed a different time-course of associative priming effects according to the field of presentation. In the right visual field/left hemisphere, both N400 and Late Positive Component (LPC/P600) were modulated by semantic relatedness, while only a late effect was present in the left visual field/ right hemisphere.     

Physical activity and sedentary lifestyle in children as time-limited functions: Usefulness of the principal component analysis method

This study was designed to examine the hourly variation in and the interplay between physical activity and sedentary behavior (SB) in order to highlight key time periods for physical activity interventions for children. Data for physical activity and SB obtained with ActiGraph in 56 boys and 47 girls aged from 8 to 11 years. These data were divided into sixty minute-time samples for moderate-to-vigorous physical activity (MVPA) and SB, and analyzed using a principal component analysis (PCA) and correlation statistics. The PCA provides 10 factors which account for 80.4% of the inertia. Only two of these factors did not display competition between MVPA and SB. Contrary to some reports, a coefficient of correlation of -.68 (p < 10(-4)) was found between daily time spent at MVPA and SB. Some salient traits of children's behaviors were shown through PCA. The results suggested that efficacy of interventions targeting the morning hours (07:00 AM-11:59 AM) and the afternoon period (02:00 PM-05:59 PM) warrants attention.