People as intuitive prosecutors: The impact of social-control goals on attributions of responsibility

Three experiments explored determinants of punitive character attributions to norm violators. Experiment 1 showed that ideological conservatism and manipulated threat to society increased anger and attributional punitiveness when there was ambiguity about culpability. Experiment 2 showed that informing observers that norm violations were widespread and rarely punished increased attributional punitiveness by activating anger-charged retributive goals. Experiment 3 showed that liberals and conservatives alike felt justified in assigning greater blame to high-status perpetrators who commit acts of negligence with more severe consequences but that only conservatives felt justified in doing so for low-status perpetrators. Overall, the results reinforce the hypothesis that societal threat activates a prosecutorial mindset identifiable by a correlated cluster of attributions, emotions, punishment goals and punitiveness.     

Protecting people in research: a comparison between biomedical and traffic research

Traffic research shares a fundamental dilemma with other areas of empirical research in which humans are potentially put at risk. Research is justified because it can improve safety in the long run. Nevertheless, people can be harmed in the research situation. Hence, we need to balance short-term risks against long-term safety improvements, much as in other areas of research with human subjects. In this paper we focus on ethical issues that arise when human beings are directly affected in the performance of research by examining how the ethical requirements in biomedical research can inform traffic research. After introducing the basic ethical requirements on biomedical research, each of the major requirements is discussed in relation to traffic research. We identify the main areas where biomedical research and traffic research differ, and where the ethical requirements from the former cannot easily be transferred to the latter. Finally, we argue that there is a need for systematic studies of the ethics of traffic research and point to some of the issues that need to be addressed.     

It's a wonderful life: mentally subtracting positive events improves people's affective states, contrary to their affective forecasts

The authors hypothesized that thinking about the absence of a positive event from one's life would improve affective states more than thinking about the presence of a positive event but that people would not predict this when making affective forecasts. In Studies 1 and 2, college students wrote about the ways in which a positive event might never have happened and was surprising or how it became part of their life and was unsurprising. As predicted, people in the former condition reported more positive affective states. In Study 3, college student forecasters failed to anticipate this effect. In Study 4, Internet respondents and university staff members who wrote about how they might never have met their romantic partner were more satisfied with their relationship than were those who wrote about how they did meet their partner. The authors discuss the implications of these findings for the literatures on gratitude induction and counterfactual reasoning.     

The Effects of Contact with Asians and Asian Americans on White American College Students: Attitudes, Awareness of Racial Discrimination, and Psychological Adjustment

On the basis of acculturation theory, explicating mutual influences between different cultural or ethnic groups coming into contact, this study focused "on the other side of acculturation" theory by examining the effects of intercultural contact with Asians and Asian Americans on the psychosocial experiences of White American college students. Participants (N = 315), undergraduates attending a public university located within the state of Massachusetts, completed a survey that assessed demographic and personal characteristics, acculturation (extent of intercultural contact with Asian people and Asian cultures), attitudes towards Asians and Asian Americans, awareness of institutional discrimination and blatant racial issues, and psychological distress. Results indicated that White American students' intercultural contact with Asians and Asian Americans contributed significant variance to the prediction of their attitudes towards this ethnic group and awareness of discrimination and racial issues, but not to psychological distress. This study provides implications for understanding mutual acculturative influences between different ethnic groups in the United States.     

Relative rate of response and relative magnitude of reinforcement in multiple schedules

Pigeons were trained on a multiple schedule in which the duration of access to grain reinforcement was varied independently in the two components. The relative response rate in one component was an increasing function of the relative duration of reinforcement in that component. The similarity of this interaction to that found in multiple schedules of different reinforcement frequency is discussed. Extinction data were also similar to those obtained after training on multiple schedules of different reinforcement frequency.     

Children's Cognitive Responses to the Somatic Symptoms of Panic

The purpose of this study was to test Nelles and Barlow's (1988) hypothesis that spontaneous panic attacks are rare or nonexistent prior to adolescence as children lack the ability to make the internal, catastrophic attributions (i.e., thoughts of losing control, going crazy, or dying) characteristic of panic according to the cognitive model (Clark, 1986). Conceptions of panic attacks, including the understanding of symptoms and causes, and cognitive interpretations of the somatic symptoms of panic were examined in children from Grades 3, 6, and 9. A significant main effect for grade was found for conceptions of panic attacks, with third graders receiving significantly lower scores than sixth and ninth graders. However, the majority of all children, regardless of age, tended to employ internal (e.g., I'd think I was scared or nervous) rather than external (e.g., I'd think I was feeling that way because of the temperature or the weather) explanations of panic attacks. No significant grade differences were found for the tendency to make internal versus external and catastrophic versus noncatastrophic attributions in response to the somatic symptoms of panic. When presented with panic imagery in a panic induction phase, children, regardless of age, made more internal and noncatastrophic attributions. Finally, internal attributional style in response to negative outcomes and anxiety sensitivity were found to be significant predictors of internal, catastrophic attributions. The challenge that these findings pose to Nelles and Barlow's hypothesis, and their relevance for understanding children's cognitive interpretations of panic symptomatology are discussed.     

Hand Position and Response Assignment Modulate the Activation of the Valence‐Space Conceptual Metaphor

Conceptual metaphor is ubiquitous in language and thought, as we usually reason and talk about abstract concepts in terms of more concrete ones via metaphorical mappings that are hypothesized to arise from our embodied experience. One pervasive example is the conceptual projection of valence onto space, which flexibly recruits the vertical and lateral spatial frames to gain structure (e.g., good is up ‐bad is down and good is right ‐bad is left ). In the current study, we used a valence judgment task to explore the role that exogenous bodily cues (namely response hand positions) play in the allocation of spatial attention and the modulation of conceptual congruency effects. Experiment 1 showed that congruency effects along the vertical axis are weakened when task conditions (i.e., the use of vertical visual cues, on the one hand, and the horizontal alignment of responses, on the other) draw attention to both the vertical and lateral axes making them simultaneously salient. Experiment 2 evidenced that the vertical alignment of participants’ hands while responding to the task—regardless of the location of their dominant hand—facilitates the judgment of positive and negative‐valence words, as long as participants respond in a metaphor–congruent manner (i.e., up responses are good and down responses are bad). Overall, these results support the claim that source domain representations are dynamically activated in response to the context and that bodily states are an integral part of that context.     

Facing temptation: The neural correlates of gambling availability during sports picture exposure

Nowadays, sports betting has become increasingly available and easy to engage in. Here we examined the neural responses to stimuli that represent sporting events available for betting as compared to sporting events without a gambling opportunity. We used a cue exposure task in which football (soccer) fans (N = 42) viewed cues depicting scheduled football games that would occur shortly after the scanning session. In the “betting” condition, participants were instructed to choose, at the end of each block, the game (and the team) they wanted to bet on. In the “watching” condition, participants chose the game they would prefer to watch. After the scanning session, participants completed posttask rating questionnaires assessing, for each cue, their level of confidence about the team they believed would win and how much they would enjoy watching the game. We found that stimuli representing sport events available for betting elicited higher fronto-striatal activation, as well as higher insular cortex activity and functional connectivity, than sport events without a gambling opportunity. Moreover, games rated with more confidence towards the winning team resulted in greater brain activations within regions involved in affective decision-making (ventromedial prefrontal cortex), cognitive inhibitory control (medial and superior frontal gyri) and reward processing (ventral and dorsal striatum). Altogether, these novel findings offer a sensible simulation of how the high availability of sports betting in today’s environment impacts on the reward and cognitive control systems. Future studies are needed to extend the present findings to a sample of football fans that includes a samilar proportion of female and male participants.     

Media exposure to terrorism and people's risk perception: The role of environmental sensitivity and psychophysiological response to stress

Terrorist attacks have a destabilizing impact on the general population, causing distress and fear. However, not all individuals are equally susceptible to the effects of terror threat. This study aimed to examine whether exposure to terrorism-related pictures interacted with individual differences in environmental sensitivity and psychophysiological response to stress to explain people's risk perception, operationalized as perceived likelihood of a terrorist attack and willingness to trade off one's privacy to increase national security. Ninety-five university students were randomly assigned to one of two conditions (terrorism-related vs. neutral pictures). After watching the pictures, they answered questions concerning risk perception and completed questionnaires. Stress was induced by the Mannheim Multicomponent Stress Test, during which heart rate was recorded. Results showed that the perceived likelihood of future attacks was affected by the interaction between exposure to terrorism pictures and psychophysiological reactivity to stress, whereas willingness to trade off one's privacy to improve national security was influenced by the interaction between exposure to terrorism pictures and environmental sensitivity. The study suggests that individuals high in sensitivity and psychophysiological stress reactivity are particularly affected by terrorism-related pictures. Psychologists should direct their efforts to raise general awareness of the negative effects, especially for some people, of such media coverage.