“'Cause You Can't Play This by Yourself”: Athletes' Perceptions of Team Influence on Their Precompetitive Psychological States

Although correlational studies indicate that team attributes are related to athletes' precompetitive psychological states, it is unknown how team members experience these relationships. The present study's purpose was to investigate athletes' perceptions of precompetitive team influence. Consequently, we worked from a constructivist realist position and used qualitative methods (interviews with competitive team-sport athletes). An inductive content analysis revealed that athletes perceived established and novel team characteristics and processes to influence their precompetitive psychological states. Athletes perceived these influences as both adaptive and maladaptive, and it appeared that they were qualified by contextual factors as well as intuitive regulatory attempts.     

Emotional capture by fearful expressions varies with psychopathic traits

Task-irrelevant emotional expressions are known to capture attention, with the extent of “emotional capture” varying with psychopathic traits in antisocial samples. We investigated whether this variation extends throughout the continuum of psychopathic traits (and co-occurring trait anxiety) in a community sample. Participants (N?=?85) searched for a target face among facial distractors. As predicted, angry and fearful faces interfered with search, indicated by slower reaction times relative to neutral faces. When fear appeared as either target or distractor, diminished emotional capture was seen with increasing affective-interpersonal psychopathic traits. However, moderation analyses revealed that this was only when lifestyle-antisocial psychopathic traits were low, consistent with evidence suggesting that these two facets of psychopathic traits display opposing relationships with emotional reactivity. Anxiety did not show the predicted relationships with emotional capture effects. Findings show that normative variation in high-level individual differences in psychopathic traits influence automatic bias to emotional stimuli.     

Pure optic ataxia and visual hemiagnosia – extending the dual visual hypothesis

Goodale and Milner's two visual system hypothesis is an influential model for the understanding of the primate visual system. Lesions of either the ventral (occipito‐temporal) or the dorsal (occipito‐parietal) stream produce distinct and dissociated syndromes in humans: visual agnosia is typical for ventral damage, whereas optic ataxia (OA) for dorsal damage. We studied the case of a 59‐year‐old left‐handed woman with a circumscribed lesion around the left posterior occipital sulcus, extending to the underlying white matter. Initially, she presented with a central visual field OA, which regressed to an OA to the right visual hemifield during the 3 months observation period. In addition, tachistoscopic experiments showed visual hemiagnosia to the right visual hemifield. In line with the findings of the neuropsychological experiments, the analysis of the structural MR data by means of a trackwise hodologic probabilistic approach revealed damage to the left superior longitudinal fasciculus and to the left inferior longitudinal fasciculus, indicating an impairment of both the dorsal and the ventral stream. The combination of OA and visual hemiagnosia in the same patient has never been previously described. The present case study thus provides further insights for the understanding of visual processing.     

Processing order in dual-task situations: The “first-come,first-served” principle and the impact of task order instructions

When two overlapping tasks are processed, they hit a bottleneck at a central processing stage that prevents simultaneous processing of the two tasks. Thus far, however, the factors determining the processing order of the tasks at the bottleneck are unknown. The present study was designed to (re)investigate whether the arrival times of the two tasks at the central bottleneck are a key determinant of the processing order (cf. Sigman & Dehaene, 2006). To this end, we implemented a visual–auditory dual task with a random stimulus order, in which we manipulated arrival time by prolonging the initial, perceptual processing stage (stimulus analysis) of the visual task and compared the effects of this manipulation with those of one impacting the central bottleneck stage of the visual task. Additionally, we implemented two instruction conditions: Participants were told to respond either in the order of stimulus presentation or in the order they preferred. The manipulation of the visual perception stage led to an increase in task response reversals (i.e., the response order was different from the order of stimulus presentation), whereas there was no such increase when the bottleneck stage was manipulated. This pattern provides conclusive evidence that the processing order at the bottleneck is (at least in part) determined by the arrival times of the tasks at that point. Reaction time differences between the two instruction conditions indicated that additional control processes are engaged in determining task processing order when the participants are expressly told to respond in the order of stimulus presentation.     

On the molecular genetics of flexibility: The case of task-switching,inhibitory control and genetic variants

The adjustment of behavior to changing goals and environmental constraints requires the flexible switching between different task sets. Cognitive flexibility is an endophenotype of executive functioning and is highly heritable, as indicated by twin studies. Individual differences in global flexibility as assessed by reaction-time measurement in a task-switching paradigm were recently related to a single nucleotide polymorphism in the vicinity of the dopamine d2 receptor gene DRD2. In the present study, we assessed whether the DRD2 gene is related to backward inhibition, a control mechanism that contributes to cognitive flexibility by reducing proactive interference by no longer relevant task sets. We found that carriers of the DRD2 A1+ variant who have a lower striatal dopamine d2 receptor density than A1– carriers show a larger backward inhibition effect. This is in line with previous results demonstrating increased behavioral flexibility in carriers of this genetic variant. The discussion relates the present finding to those of previous studies assessing the neurogenetic foundations of inhibitory control.     

The multinomial model of prospective memory: validity of ongoing-task parameters

The objective of this research was to provide additional experimental validation of the multinomial processing tree (MPT) model of event-based prospective memory (Smith & Bayen, 2004). In particular, the parameters that measure trial-type detection in the ongoing task were examined. In three experiments with different response instructions, event-based prospective memory tasks were embedded in ongoing color-matching tasks. The results support the validity of the MPT model, that is, manipulations of ongoing-task difficulty affected the ongoing-task parameters of the MPT model, while leaving the estimates for the prospective and the retrospective components of prospective memory unaffected.     

Husserl's phenomenological discovery of the natural attitude

In this paper I will give a systematic account of Husserl's notion of the natural attitude in the development from its first presentation in Ideas I (1913) until Husserl's last years. The problem of the natural attitude has to be dealt with on two levels. On the thematic level, it is constituted by the correlation of attitude and horizon, both stemming from Husserl's theory of intentionality. On the methodic level, the natural attitude is constituted by three factors: naturalness, naivety and normality. I shall conclude by sketching out a possible motivation for leaving the natural attitude and thus for entering the sphere of phenomenology.     

Immediate and delayed effects of victim suffering on the attacker's aggression

On the first day of a two-day experiment, male undergraduates were either angered or not, and they were given either high, low, or no metered pain feedback after each shock they supposedly delivered to their previous evaluator for his errors on a learning task. After the learning task the subjects made a number of ratings, including how much they had enjoyed this first session. On the second day, all subjects were simply required to administer shocks to a different person for his mistakes on the same learning task. The angered subjects were more punitive on both days toward both learners than the nonangered men. On the first day the angered men also increased the intensity of the shocks they delivered over trial blocks. Most interestingly, the angered men showed more enjoyment of the first session of the experiment as their victim's pain increased, and this enjoyment rating was related to the angered subjects' level of aggression on the second day of the experiment when they punished an “innocent” victim. The results were interpreted as consistent with the hypothesized reinforcement process which essentially states that signs and/or knowledge of the victim's suffering can reinforce impulsive or angry aggressive behavior.