Changing interests: A longitudinal study of intrinsic motivation for personally salient activities

The present longitudinal study extends the findings of earlier cross-sectional studies (Waterman, Schwartz, Green, Miller, & Philip, 2003) on the subjective experience of intrinsic motivation. University students generated lists of personally salient (identity-related) activities at the beginning of an academic semester and were asked to evaluate these activities at three points during the semester. Drawing on theories of intrinsic motivation, three subjective indices of intrinsic motivation (interest, flow experiences, and feelings of personal expressiveness) and three theoretically derived predictor variables (self-determination, the balance of challenges and skills, and self-realization values) were used in the present study. Cross-sectional relationships between the predictors and subjective experience indices at each timepoint replicated those observed in previous research. Hierarchical linear modeling was used to demonstrate that, as hypothesized, increases or decreases in the predictor variables between timepoints were associated with corresponding increases or decreases in the subjective experience indices. Implications for the study of intrinsic motivation are discussed.     

Affect is a form of cognition: A neurobiological analysis

In this paper, we suggest that affect meets the traditional definition of "cognition" such that the affect-cognition distinction is phenomenological, rather than ontological. We review how the affect-cognition distinction is not respected in the human brain, and discuss the neural mechanisms by which affect influences sensory processing. As a result of this sensory modulation, affect performs several basic "cognitive" functions. Affect appears to be necessary for normal conscious experience, language fluency, and memory. Finally, we suggest that understanding the differences between affect and cognition will require systematic study of how the phenomenological distinction characterising the two comes about, and why such a distinction is functional.     

Looking Beyond Darśaṇa: A Philosophical Exploration of the Guru's Pedagogy in the Yoga Vāsishṭha

This paper investigates the concept of the guru within this important work of the Vedantic tradition. I identify some of the apparent problems involved with the very idea of spiritual teaching within the ontological and soteriological parameters of this tradition in general, and the work in particular. First, the emphasis on ‘self-effort’ on the part of the seeker of liberation seems to preclude the idea of a spiritual teacher of liberation. Second, it is difficult to see how teaching even proceeds given what is being taught and the lack of desire on the part of the supposedly enlightened teacher to impart liberation. Finally, there appears to be no meaningful possibility of teaching here, at least in the ordinary sense of the term. I then consider some of the ways of thinking about the concept of the guru in this work that avoid some of these pitfalls.     

Memories affect mood: evidence from covert experimental assignment to positive, neutral, and negative memory recall

Memory recall has been proposed as a common and effective mood regulation strategy. Although several studies have presented results suggesting that recalling valenced memories affects subsequent mood, their designs allow for alternative interpretations of the observed effects. Two such alternatives include the reverse effect (mood effects on memory due to non-experimental assignment to memory recall condition) and demand characteristics of the experiment. We used covert experimental assignment to memory condition, asking subjects (N=314; 56% female) to recall memories that were primarily positive, neutral, or negative. Results showed the expected effect on mood (p<.002), with reported mood worst in the negative memory condition, better in the neutral condition, and best in the positive condition. These results suggest that valenced memory recall does indeed exert an effect on mood, and may do so even without the individual's awareness.     

The role of the amygdala in visual awareness

Pessoa and colleagues recently reported the novel finding that objective awareness of a negative stimulus is associated with coactivation of the amygdala and fusiform gyrus. Based on the neuroanatomical connections of the amygdala, we suggest that the amygdala is acting to increase neural activity in the fusiform gyrus, thereby increasing the likelihood that visual representations that have affective value reach awareness. The psychological consequence is that a person's momentary affective state might help to select the contents of conscious experience.     

Sensation seeking and danger invulnerability: Paths to college student risk-taking

This study examines the roles of sensation seeking and invulnerability as predictors of health compromising behaviors in a multiethnic sample of 1690 emerging adult college students (mean age = 19.8, range 18–25 years) from nine US colleges and universities. Participants completed the Arnett Sensation Seeking Inventory and the Adolescent Invulnerability Scale; and reported how often they had participated in a set of health compromising risk behaviors (i.e., substance use, impaired driving, and sexual behaviors) in the 30 days prior to assessment. Sensation seeking and danger invulnerability scores were moderately correlated (r = .30). Findings from a series of multivariate Poisson regression analyses suggest that when considered simultaneously as predictors, sensation seeking appears to be a general risk factor associated with engagement in a variety of risk behaviors, whereas danger invulnerability is primarily a factor in those risk behaviors that are less common among peers (e.g., hard drug use, casual sex, and driving while intoxicated).     

Physical abuse amplifies attention to threat and increases anxiety in children

Two experiments using event-related potentials (ERPs) examined the extent to which early traumatic experiences affect children's ability to regulate voluntary and involuntary attention to threat. The authors presented physically abused and nonabused comparison children with conflicting auditory and visual emotion cues, posed by children's mothers or a stranger, to examine the effect of emotion, modality, and poser familiarity on attention regulation. Relative to controls, abused children overattended to task-relevant visual and auditory anger cues. They also attended more to task-irrelevant auditory anger cues. Furthermore, the degree of attention allocated to threat statistically mediated the relationship between physical abuse and child-reported anxiety. These findings indicate that extreme emotional experiences may promote vulnerability for anxiety by influencing the development of attention regulation abilities.     

Newborn categorization of vowel‐like sounds

While there are many theories of the development of speech perception, there are few data on speech perception in human newborns. This paper examines the manner in which newborns responded to a set of stimuli that define one surface of the adult vowel space. Experiment 1 used a preferential listening/habituation paradigm to discover how newborns divide that vowel space. Results indicated that there were zones of high preference flanked by zones of low preference. The zones of high preference approximately corresponded to areas where adults readily identify vowels. Experiment 2 presented newborns with pairs of vowels from the zones found in Experiment 1. One member of each pair was the most preferred vowel from a zone, and the other member was the least preferred vowel from the adjacent zone of low preference. The pattern of preference was preserved in Experiment 2. However, a comparison of Experiments 1 and 2 indicated that habituation had occurred in Experiment 1. Experiment 3 tested the hypothesis that the habituation seen in Experiment 1 was due to processes of categorization, by using a familiarization preference paradigm. The results supported the hypothesis that newborns categorized the vowel space in an adult‐like manner, with vowels perceived as relatively good or poor exemplars of a vowel category.