The effects of vicarious experience and stimulus intensity on pain termination and work avoidance

The purpose of the present investigation was to evaluate the role of vicarious experience in the acquisition of pain termination and work avoidance. Fifty-six experimental subjects were randomly assigned to view a film of a model who either terminated exposure to a pain stimulus and work task after 10 sec (high-avoidant) or 70 sec (low-avoidant). Following the film presentation, subjects were exposed to the pain stimulus and work task. Half of the subjects were randomly chosen to perform the task with a low-intensity pain stimulus (LP) and the other half performed the task while exposed to a high-intensity pain stimulus (HP). The results indicated that subjects in the high-avoidant model conditions (HA) did significantly less work and tolerated the pain stimulus for significantly fewer seconds compared to the low-avoidant model groups (LA). Subjects in the LP groups tolerated the pain stimulus significantly longer and did significantly more work compared to subjects in the HP groups. No significant interaction was observed. The results provide support for the hypothesis that behavioral reactions to pain can be acquired by vicarious experience. Implications for future research are discussed.     

Imaginative suggestibility and hypnotizability: an empirical analysis.

Hypnotic and nonhypnotic suggestibility were investigated in 2 experiments. In Experiment 1, nonhypnotic suggestibility was suppressed when measured after hypnotic suggestibility, whereas hypnotic suggestibility was not affected by the order of assessment. Experiment 2 confirmed a small but significant effect of hypnosis on suggestibility when nonhypnotic suggestibility was measured first. Nonhypnotic suggestibility was correlated with absorption, fantasy proneness, motivation, and response expectancy, but only expectancy predicted suggestibility when the other variables were controlled. Behavioral response to hypnosis was predicted by nonhypnotic suggestibility, motivation, and expectancy in a model accounting for 53% of the variance. Experiential response to hypnotic suggestion was predicted only by nonhypnotic suggestibility. Unexpectedly, hypnosis was found to decrease suggestibility for a substantial minority of participants.     

A linguistic deficit resulting from right-hemisphere damage

The ability of right-brain-damaged (RBD) subjects to correctly insert a word into a well-formed stimulus sentence was tested. Subjects also performed three evaluative tasks designed to establish their degree of general cognitive impairment. The performance of RBD subjects on these tasks was compared to that of left-brain-damaged (LBD) and non-brain-damaged (NBD) subjects. Although RBD subjects outperformed LBD subjects on the language-related evaluative tasks, the RBD group was significantly more impaired on a subset of the insertion task. This subset included items which required reassignment of the syntactic status of elements in the stimulus sentence in order for the insertion to be carried out. The results of this study permit refinement of the common characterization of RBD individuals as rigid in their interpretation of meaning and indicate right-hemisphere involvement in aspects of the grammar previously thought to be inaccessible to it.     

Sinuosity and the Affect Grid: a method for adjusting repeated mood scores

Sinuosity is a measure of how much a travelled pathway deviates from a straight line. In this paper, sinuosity is applied to the measurement of mood. The Affect Grid is a mood scale that requires participants to place a mark on a 9 x 9 grid to indicate their current mood. The grid has two dimensions: pleasure-displeasure (horizontal) and arousal-sleepiness (vertical). In studies where repeated measurements are required, some participants may exaggerate their mood shifts due to faulty interpretation of the scale or a feeling of social obligation to the experimenter. A new equation is proposed, based on the sinuosity measure in hydrology, a measure of the meandering of rivers. The equation takes into account an individual's presumed tendency to exaggerate and meander to correct the score and reduce outliers. The usefulness of the equation is demonstrated by applying it to Affect Grid data from another study.     

Eye movements reveal sustained implicit processing of others' mental states

The ability to attribute mental states to others is crucial for social competency. To assess mentalizing abilities, in false-belief tasks participants attempt to identify an actor's belief about an object's location as opposed to the object's actual location. Passing this test on explicit measures is typically achieved by 4 years of age, but recent eye movement studies reveal registration of others' beliefs by 7 to 15 months. Consequently, a 2-path mentalizing system has been proposed, consisting of a late developing, cognitively demanding component and an early developing, implicit/automatic component. To date, investigations on the implicit system have been based on single-trial experiments only or have not examined how it operates across time. In addition, no study has examined the extent to which participants are conscious of the belief states of others during these tasks. Thus, the existence of a distinct implicit mentalizing system is yet to be demonstrated definitively. Here we show that adults engaged in a primary unrelated task display eye movement patterns consistent with mental state attributions across a sustained temporal period. Debriefing supported the hypothesis that this mentalizing was implicit. It appears there indeed exists a distinct implicit mental state attribution system.     

A Community Psychology of Men and Masculinity: Historical and Conceptual Review

This paper introduces the special section by presenting a historical and conceptual review of theory and research on the psychology of men and masculinity and then introducing the section’s papers. Men have power because of their gender, but differ in access to power based on other individual characteristics such as social class, income, education, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or physical strength. Men typically have been studied as generic rather than gendered beings in psychology. In contrast, a gendered analysis of men highlights the ways in which men’s experience, masculinity, and behavior contribute to health and social problems and to resources commonly addressed by community psychologists. Our gendered analysis suggests ways of working with men in group, organizational, and community settings to create positive individual and social change. Crucial to this analysis is the paradox that enacting masculinity both privileges and damages men. A second paradox stems from men having power as a group over women while individual men feel powerless or victimized by women as a group. The papers in this volume illustrate key themes of our historical and conceptual review through studies of adolescent and adult men as fathers, patients, partner abusers, support group participants and community members, and through examination of the impact of their gendered identities and behavior on health, well being, and justice.     

Economic inequality is linked to biased self-perception

People's self-perception biases often lead them to see themselves as better than the average person (a phenomenon known as self-enhancement). This bias varies across cultures, and variations are typically explained using cultural variables, such as individualism versus collectivism. We propose that socioeconomic differences among societies--specifically, relative levels of economic inequality--play an important but unrecognized role in how people evaluate themselves. Evidence for self-enhancement was found in 15 diverse nations, but the magnitude of the bias varied. Greater self-enhancement was found in societies with more income inequality, and income inequality predicted cross-cultural differences in self-enhancement better than did individualism/collectivism. These results indicate that macrosocial differences in the distribution of economic goods are linked to microsocial processes of perceiving the self.     

Enhanced occipital and anterior cingulate activation in men but not in women during exposure to angry and fearful male faces

Blood-oxygenation-level-dependent signal was measured with functional magnetic resonance imaging in 24 healthy young subjects (12 men and 12 women) during viewing of angry, fearful, and neutral male and female face pictures. Exposure to angry male as opposed to angry female faces activated the visual cortex and the anterior cingulate gyrus significantly more in men than in women. A similar sex-differential brain activation pattern was present during exposure to fearful but not neutral faces. Previous behavioral studies indicate enhanced physiological arousal in men but not in women during exposure to angry male as opposed to female faces, and brain imaging studies have shown that the occipital cortex and the anterior cingulate gyrus are influenced by activity in the autonomic nervous system as well as by visual attention. Hence, we suggest that the elevated occipital and anterior cingulate activation in men during confrontation with other angry and fearful males may reflect enhanced vigilance in a potentially dangerous situation.