Integrating personality,context, relationship,and emotion type into a model of display rules

This research sets out to examine individual variations in perceptions of display rules. Based upon Mischel and Shoda’s [Mischel, W., & Shoda, Y. (1995). A cognitive-affective system theory of personality: Reconceptualizing situations, dispositions, dynamics, and invariance in personality structure. Psychological Review, 102, 246–268.] model of the Cognitive-Affective Personality System (CAPS), we proposed that extraversion and neuroticism would serve to explain within-cultural individual differences and within-individual differences in endorsement of display rules. To test this hypothesis, participants reported the expressivity level of the display rule they endorsed by responding to the revised version of the Display Rule Assessment Inventory. Multi-level analyses showed that compared to those of introverts, the display rules of extraverts tended to be more suppressive when the relationship was distant rather than close. Extraversion also enhanced a neurotic’s degree of suppression in public compared to private situations. Processes describing how personality interacts with situations in personalizing display rules were offered in light of the CAPS model to account for these interactions between personality and situation in the operation of display rules for emotional expression.     

Eye movements when reading transposed text: the importance of word-beginning letters

Participants' eye movements were recorded as they read sentences with words containing transposed adjacent letters. Transpositions were either external (e.g., problme, rpoblem) or internal (e.g., porblem, probelm) and at either the beginning (e.g., rpoblem, porblem) or end (e.g., problme, probelm) of words. The results showed disruption for words with transposed letters compared to the normal baseline condition, and the greatest disruption was observed for word-initial transpositions. In Experiment 1, transpositions within low frequency words led to longer reading times than when letters were transposed within high frequency words. Experiment 2 demonstrated that the position of word-initial letters is most critical even when parafoveal preview of words to the right of fixation is unavailable. The findings have important implications for the roles of different letter positions in word recognition and the effects of parafoveal preview on word recognition processes.     

The transience of constructed preferences

A large body of research suggests that preferences are constructed rather than merely accessed in the course of making decisions. The current research examines the stability of constructed preferences over time. Preferences for various factors relevant to a job choice were measured prior to presentation of the job‐choice task, at the point of decision, and again following a delay. It was found that relative to baseline pre‐decision levels, preferences shifted to provide stronger support for the emerging decision. Preference changes proved to be transient, receding to baseline after 1 week (Experiment 1), and even within 15 minutes (Experiment 2). These findings, which can be interpreted in terms of decision‐making by constraint satisfaction, suggest that preferences are constructed to serve the decision at hand, without constraining the decision maker in future decisions. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The ABC of cardinal and ordinal number representations

Numerical cognition encompasses the concepts of quantity ('how many?') and serial order ('which position?'). Yet, although numbers can convey different meanings, a recent imaging study by Fias and coworkers showed that ranking letters in the alphabet is subserved by a cortical network highly similar to that involved in judging magnitudes. In terms of neural processing, quantity and rank might just be two sides of the same coin.     

The ‘Scandal’ of the Lubavitch Rebbe: Messianism as a Response to Failed Prophecy

In June 1994, the Lubavitch Rebbe, believed to be the Mosiach (the Messiah) died. Counter-intuitively, this failure of prophecy gave birth to an extreme messianic movement within the group, dividing it into two antagonistic factions (messianists and anti-messianists). This article examines the Beis Menachem, a messianic group whose members believe that the Rebbe is not dead; some even believe that he is God. We argue that this strong messianic response was predictable, given the influence of four factors that prior analyses suggest are important in determining whether a group will survive the failure of a significant prophecy: (1) the ways in which the prophetic milieu is prepared, (2) the nature and extent of the preparatory activities people engaged in, (3) the nature, speed, and thoroughness of the response of group leaders to a failed prophecy, and (4) the level of social support available for those who remain faithful to a prophecy. Emphasis in this study is given to the first and fourth factor; it is argued that the diachronic study of groups like the Lubavitch provides new insights into the ideological, organisational, and situational conditions that facilitate the successful management of dissonance and thus the persistence of unusual beliefs.     

Are ants sensitive to the geometry of tunnel bifurcation?

The ability to orient and navigate in space is essential for all animals whose home range is organized around a central point. Because of their small home range compared to vertebrates, central place foraging insects such as ants have for a long time provided a choice model for the study of orientation mechanisms. In many ant species, the movement of individuals on their colony home range is achieved essentially collectively, on the chemical trails laid down by their nest mates. In the initial stage of food recruitment, these trails can cross each other and thus form a network of interconnected paths in which ants have to orient. Previous simulation studies have shown that ants can find the shortest path between their nest and a food source in such a network only if there is a bias in the branch they choose when they reach an asymmetrical bifurcation. In this paper, we studied the choice of ants when facing either a symmetrical or an asymmetrical bifurcation between two tunnels. Ants were tested either on their way to a food source or when coming back to their nest, and either in the presence or in the absence of a chemical trail. Overall, our results show that the choice of an ant at a tunnel bifurcation depends more on the presence/absence of a trail pheromone than on the geometry of the bifurcation itself.     

Exemplar by feature applicability matrices and other Dutch normative data for semantic concepts

Features are at the core of many empirical and modeling endeavors in the study of semantic concepts. This article is concerned with the delineation of features that are important in natural language concepts and the use of these features in the study of semantic concept representation. The results of a feature generation task in which the exemplars and labels of 15 semantic categories served as cues are described. The importance of the generated features was assessed by tallying the frequency with which they were generated and by obtaining judgments of their relevance. The generated attributes also featured in extensive exemplar by feature applicability matrices covering the 15 different categories, as well as two large semantic domains (that of animals and artifacts). For all exemplars of the 15 semantic categories, typicality ratings, goodness ratings, goodness rank order, generation frequency, exemplar associative strength, category associative strength, estimated age of acquisition, word frequency, familiarity ratings, imageability ratings, and pairwise similarity ratings are described as well. By making these data easily available to other researchers in the field, we hope to provide ample opportunities for continued investigations into the nature of semantic concept representation. These data may be downloaded from the Psychonomic Society’s Archive of Norms, Stimuli, and Data, www.psychonomic.org/archive.     

Competition during the processing of quantifier scope ambiguities: evidence from eye movements during reading

We investigated the processing of sentences containing a quantifier scope ambiguity, such as Kelly showed a photo to each critic, which is ambiguous between the indefinite phrase (a photo) having one or many referents. Ambiguity resolution requires the computation of relative quantifier scope, with either a photo or each critic taking wide scope, thereby determining the number of referents. Using eye tracking, we established that multiple factors, including the grammatical function and surface linear order of quantified phrases, along with their lexical characteristics, interact during the processing of relative quantifier scope, with conflict between factors incurring a processing cost. We discuss the results in terms of theoretical accounts attributing sentence-processing difficulty to either reanalysis (e.g., Fodor, 1982) or competition between rival analyses (e.g., Kurtzman & MacDonald, 1993).     

Dutch norm data for 13 semantic categories and 338 exemplars.

A data set is described that includes eight variables gathered for 13 common superordinate natural language categories and a representative set of 338 exemplars in Dutch. The category set contains 6 animal categories (reptiles, amphibians, mammals, birds, fish, and insects), 3 artifact categories (musical instruments, tools, and vehicles), 2 borderline artifact-natural-kind categories (vegetables and fruit), and 2 activity categories (sports and professions). In an exemplar and a feature generation task for the category nouns, frequency data were collected. For each of the 13 categories, a representative sample of 5-30 exemplars was selected. For all exemplars, feature generation frequencies, typicality ratings, pairwise similarity ratings, age-of-acquisition ratings, word frequencies, and word associations were gathered. Reliability estimates and some additional measures are presented. The full set of these norms is available in Excel format at the Psychonomic Society Web archive, www.psychonomic.org/archive/.     

Die stationäre Behandlung von Zwangsstörungen mit multimodaler Verhaltenstherapie

The results of a 1-year-follow-up study concerning the treatment of 30 in-patients suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) are presented. This prospective study was carried out at the Psychosomatic Hospital Windach. Beside a multimodal setting the central treatment component was flooding and response prevention. Group analysis showed significant improvements in all measures (BDI, STAI-X1, Y-BOCS and self-ratings). The results of the follow-up indicate, that more than 70% of the patients maintained their positive treatment response over 1 year (symptom improvement >30%). The average reduction of symptoms was 42%. Average treatment duration was 12 weeks. A high initial depression score (BDI >18) predicted a worse outcome.