Does Age Make a Difference? Age as Moderator in the Association Between Time Perspective and Happiness

A balanced time perspective can help retaining or improving happiness. Research shows shifts in time perspective while ageing. In order to reach a better understanding of the value of time perspective in different age groups, results are reported of a survey (n = 525), which examines the moderating role of age in the association between time perspective and happiness. Time perspective was measured by the Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory (ZTPI) (Zimbardo and Boyd in J Personal Soc Psychol 77:1271–1288, 1999) and to measure happiness, the Subjective Happiness Scale of Lyubomirsky and Lepper (Soc Indic Res 46:137–155, 1999) was used. Regression analysis shows that time perspective is indeed associated with happiness and that, although the assumed shifts in time perspective over time were not found, age does act as a moderator of this association. With ageing, the negative association between a past-negative time perspective and happiness weakens. These results add to our understanding of the theoretical concept of time perspective and shed new light on the value of a balanced time perspective for someone’s wellbeing. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.     

Audiovisual semantic interference and attention: Evidence from the attentional blink paradigm

In the present study we investigate the role of attention in audiovisual semantic interference, by using an attentional blink paradigm. Participants were asked to make an unspeeded response to the identity of a visual target letter. This target letter was preceded at various SOAs by a synchronized audiovisual letter-pair, which was either congruent (e.g. hearing an “F” and viewing an “F”) or incongruent (e.g. hearing an “F” and viewing a “Z”). In Experiment 1, participants were asked to match the members of the audiovisual letter-pair. In Experiment 2, participants were asked to ignore the synchronized audiovisual letter-pairs altogether and only report the visual target. In Experiment 3, participants were asked to identify only one of the audiovisual letters (identify the auditory letter, and ignore the synchronized visual letter, or vice versa). An attentional blink was found in all three experiments indicating that the audiovisual letter-pairs were processed. However, a congruency effect on subsequent target detection was observed in Experiments 1 and 3, but not in Experiment 2. The results indicate that attention to the semantic contents of at least one modality is necessary to establish audiovisual semantic interference.     

“Shake It Baby, Shake It”: Media Preferences, Sexual Attitudes and Gender Stereotypes Among Adolescents

In this study exposure to and preferences for three important youth media (TV, music styles/music TV, internet) were examined in relation to adolescents' permissive sexual attitudes and gender stereotypes (i.e., views of men as sex-driven and tough, and of women as sex objects). Multivariate structural analysis of data from a school-based sample of 480 13 to 16-year-old Dutch students revealed that preferences, rather than exposure were associated with attitudes and stereotypes. For both girls and boys, preferences for hip-hop and hard-house music were associated positively with gender stereotypes and preference for classical music was negatively associated with gender stereotypes. Particularly for boys, using internet to find explicit sexual content emerged as a powerful indicator of all attitudes and stereotypes.     

Emoticons in computer-mediated communication: social motives and social context.

This study investigated the role of emoticons in computer-mediated communication (CMC). The study consisted of an online questionnaire about the social motives for emoticon use and an experimental part in which participants (N = 1,251) had to respond to short Internet chats. In these chats, the interaction partner (friend vs. stranger) and the valence of the context (positive vs. negative) were manipulated. Results showed that emoticons are mostly used to express emotion, to strengthen a message, and to express humor. Furthermore, more emoticons were used in communication with friends than in communication with strangers, and more emoticons were used in a positive context than in a negative context. Participants seem to use emoticons in a way similar to facial behavior in face-to-face communication with respect to social context and interaction partner.     

Judgement bias in pigs is independent of performance in a spatial holeboard task and conditional discrimination learning

Biases in judgement of ambiguous stimuli, as measured in a judgement bias task, have been proposed as a measure of the valence of affective states in animals. We recently suggested a list of criteria for behavioural tests of emotion, one of them stating that responses on the task used to assess emotionality should not be confounded by, among others, differences in learning capacity, i.e. must not simply reflect the cognitive capacity of an animal. We performed three independent studies in which pigs acquired a spatial holeboard task, a free choice maze which simultaneously assesses working memory and reference memory. Next, pigs learned a conditional discrimination between auditory stimuli predicting a large or small reward, a prerequisite for assessment of judgement bias. Once pigs had acquired the conditional discrimination task, optimistic responses to previously unheard ambiguous stimuli were measured in the judgement bias task as choices indicating expectation of the large reward. We found that optimism in the judgement bias task was independent of all three measures of learning and memory indicating that the performance is not dependent on the pig’s cognitive abilities. These results support the use of biases in judgement as proxy indicators of emotional valence in animals.