Does placebo response mediate runner's high?

It is proposed that runner's high is mediated by increased endorphin release as induced by placebo responses arising from subjective expectancies and setting.     

Changes in salt taste in dialysis and their relationship to blood constituents

Taste sensitivity for sodium chloride in solution and sensitivity and preference for sodium chloride in bread were measured in 14 male patients undergoing hemodialysis. There was an increase in sensitivity to salt taste following dialysis only when assessed using the bread samples. Patients on a lower sodium diet were more sensitive to salt taste in bread. Although the taste changes were not related to the decreases in serum sodium or to copper, greater increases in sensitivity were related to greater increases in serum zinc during dialysis.     

Perceptions by the aged of crime, criminals, and the criminal justice system

A general fear of crime victimization led to modified activities in the community and feelings of relative safety in their own area for 132 elderly respondents on a 24-item questionnaire. They held sympathetic views of crime perpetrators as disadvantaged victims of society themselves, but came to the unlikely conclusions that more police control and harsher prison sentences are needed.     

Discrepancy detection and vulnerability to misleading postevent information

When people are exposed to misleading details after a witnessed event, they often claim that they saw the misleading details as part of the event. We refer to this as themisinformation effect. In four experiments, involving 570 subjects, we explored the role that discrepancy detection plays in the misinformation effect. Experiment 1 showed that subjects who naturally read a post-event narrative more slowly were more resistant to the effects of misleading information contained in the narrative. In Experiment 2, subjects who naturally read more slowly were more likely to detect a discrepancy between what they were reading and what was stored in their memory. In Experiment 3, subjects who were instructed to read slowly were more likely to detect a discrepancy than were those who were instructed to read quickly. In Experiment 4, subjects who were instructed to read slowly were more resistant to misleading postevent information. Taken together, these results suggest that longer reading times are associated with a greater scrutiny of postevent information. This leads to an increased likelihood that discrepancies will be detected and that the misinformation will be resisted.     

Part-whole relationships in the processing of small visual patterns

Subjects seem to react to a word faster than they react to a letter within a word. One interpretation is that words are processed holistically; another is that all visual stimuli are processed in terms of components, but that more stimulus information is available for use when the targets are words than when they are letters within words. The results of three experiments indicate that the word or pattern-level advantage occurs even when the stimulus information in the two situations is equated, but if the perceptual arrays cannot be unitized (e.g., consonant sequences), a pattern-level advantage does not occur. In addition, the experiments provide substantial evidence to indicate that if letter arrays cannot be unitized, then they are processed on a componentby-component basis, rather than holistically. Finally, the appropriate definition ofholistic processing is considered.     

Locus of inhibition effects in the priming of lexical decisions: pre- or postlexical access?

The lexical decision task has been employed to investigate the effects of semantic context on word recognition. A frequent finding from the task is that “word” responses are slower when the target is preceded by an unrelated word than when it is preceded by a neutral stimulus. This inhibition effect has been interpreted as indicating that the unrelated prime interferes with word-recognition processes operating on the target. In three experiments, the effects of unrelated primes were compared for a lexical decision and word naming task. Although large inhibition effects were found for the lexical decision task in all experiments, no inhibition effects were observed for the naming task. The results are interpreted as demonstrating that inhibition effects in the lexical decision task are not on recognition processes; rather they are located at processes operating after recognition of the target has occurred.