Relative contributions of face and body configurations: perceiving emotional state and motion intention

This study addressed the relative reliance on face and body configurations for different types of emotion-related judgements: emotional state and motion intention. Participants viewed images of people with either emotionally congruent (both angry or fearful) or incongruent (angry/fearful; fearful/angry) faces and bodies. Congruent conditions provided baseline responses. Incongruent conditions revealed relative reliance on face and body information for different judgements. Body configurations influenced motion-intention judgements more than facial configurations: incongruent pairs with angry bodies were more frequently perceived as moving forward than those with fearful bodies; pairs with fearful bodies were more frequently perceived as moving away. In contrast, faces influenced emotional-state judgements more, but bodies moderated ratings of face emotion. Thus, both face and body configurations influence emotion perception, but the type of evaluation required influences their relative contributions. These findings highlight the importance of considering both the face and body as important sources of emotion information.     

Retest learning in the absence of item-specific effects: Does it show in the oldest-old?

This study examined whether the nonitem-specific retest learning effects, previously shown with young-old adults primarily in their 60s and 70s, could be extended to oldest-old adults aged 80 and onward. Twenty-one oldest-olds participated in an 8-session retest training program with three ability domains: perceptual speed, inductive reasoning, and visual attention. Their data were compared with the data of 30 young-olds collected in a previous work (Yang, Reed, Russo, & Wilkinson, 2009). The two age groups showed largely equivalent retest learning effects. In addition, only young-olds were able to benefit from item-specific retest learning, specifically in reasoning and perceptual speed tests. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved).     

‘Murder by Milligrams’: Enhancement Technologies and Therapeutic Zeal in Timothy Findley’s Headhunter”

In his 1993 novel Headhunter, Canadian author Timothy Findley describes the tendency of some medical practitioners to put scientific interests above the therapeutic needs of the individual. As the book's title and name of the main character Dr. Kurtz attest, Findley reflects the colonialist teleology found in Heart of Darkness as an analogue for the therapeutic zeal shown by many of the physicians in Headhunter. In the novel, such zeal is especially problematic when it is combined with so-called enhancement technologies, since enhancement, like colonialism, can be based in the prejudices of the practitioner and/or the dominant society, rather than in the needs of the patient. To counter therapeutic zeal, Findley, like Conrad, proposes an ethics of restraint in which the practitioner's empathy outweighs his or her desire for scientific discovery.     

Advancements in Procedural Fidelity Assessment and Intervention: Introduction to the Special Issue

Interest in procedural fidelity has grown rapidly since 1981 as evidenced by the growing numbers of research publications across disciplines on this topic. As a result, the past 30 years of research has yielded a variety of procedures to guide research and practice, which we hope translates into better educational practices and services. Despite our progress, much remains unknown. As an introduction to the special issue on advancements in procedural fidelity, this article will briefly describe the conceptual and definitional issues surrounding this topic, summarize the relevance of procedural fidelity to education and research, and highlight the articles in this issue that address proposed research priorities.     

Top-down influences mediate hand bias in spatial attention

Spatial attention can be biased to locations near the hand. Some studies have found facilitated processing of targets appearing within hand-grasping space. In this study, we investigated how changing top-down task priorities alters hand bias during visual processing. In Experiment 1, we used a covert orienting paradigm with nonpredictive cues and emphasized the location of the hand relative to the target. Hands or visual anchors (boards) were placed next to potential target locations, and responses were made with the contralateral hand. Results indicated a hand-specific processing bias: Hand location, but not board location, speeded responses to targets near the hand. This pattern of results replicated previous studies using covert orienting paradigms with highly predictive cues. In Experiment 2, we used the same basic paradigm but emphasized the location of the response hand. Results now showed speeded responses to targets near response locations. Together these experiments demonstrated that top-down instructional sets (i.e., what is considered to be most relevant to task performance) can change the processing priority of hand location by influencing the strength of top-down, as compared with bottom-up, inputs competing for attention resources.     

Contextual influences of dimension, speed, and direction of motion on subjective time perception

Research has indicated that the direction of motion and the speed of motion can influence the subjective estimates of temporal duration of two-dimensional (2-D) stimuli expanding and contracting within the picture plane. In this study, we investigated whether the contextual cues of stimulus/movement-plane dimensionality (2-D stimuli with implied movement in the picture plane or depth-rendered “3-D” stimuli with implied movement in the depth plane) influence and interact with speed and implied movement direction during interval estimation. Participants viewed a series of standard stimulus durations followed by a test stimulus duration and determined whether the test and standard durations differed. The results indicated that moving stimuli were overestimated relative to stationary stimuli, regardless of the direction of motion or dimensionality. Also, faster-moving stimuli were overestimated relative to slower-moving stimuli. Importantly, an interaction between movement direction and dimensional cues indicated that the loom/recede distinction occurs for 2-D but not for 3-D stimuli. It is possible that the loom/recede distinction for the 2-D condition may be an artifact arising from reduced or from a lack of perceived motion in 2-D “recede” conditions, rather than a specific overestimation for looming stimuli.     

Relative contributions of face and body configurations: Perceiving emotional state and motion intention

This study addressed the relative reliance on face and body configurations for different types of emotion-related judgements: emotional state and motion intention. Participants viewed images of people with either emotionally congruent (both angry or fearful) or incongruent (angry/fearful; fearful/angry) faces and bodies. Congruent conditions provided baseline responses. Incongruent conditions revealed relative reliance on face and body information for different judgements. Body configurations influenced motion-intention judgements more than facial configurations: incongruent pairs with angry bodies were more frequently perceived as moving forward than those with fearful bodies; pairs with fearful bodies were more frequently perceived as moving away. In contrast, faces influenced emotional-state judgements more, but bodies moderated ratings of face emotion. Thus, both face and body configurations influence emotion perception, but the type of evaluation required influences their relative contributions. These findings highlight the importance of considering both the face and body as important sources of emotion information.