Experience in integrative negotiations: What needs to be learned?

In this research we focus on the roles of experience and understanding in fostering integrative negotiation performance. We report on two experiments in which we distinguish between understanding opponents’ general priorities among issues versus understanding their specific gains for particular offers. Although experience enhanced integrative performance even in the absence of understanding, we found that understanding the specific gains had an incremental effect on performance. We conclude that while generally acknowledging opponents’ interests is not sufficient, the additional inferential step of assessing their specific gains throughout the negotiation process is advantageous.     

Swagger, sway, and sexuality: Judging sexual orientation from body motion and morphology

People can accurately judge the sexual orientation of others, but the cues they use have remained elusive. In 3 studies, the authors examined how body shape and motion affect perceived sexual orientation. In 2 studies, participants judged the sexual orientation of computer-generated animations in which body shape and motion were manipulated. Gender-typical combinations (e.g., tubular body moving with shoulder swagger or hourglass body moving with hip sway) were perceived generally to be heterosexual; gender-atypical combinations were perceived generally to be homosexual. These effects were stronger for male targets. Body shape affected perceived sexual orientation of women, but motion affected perceived sexual orientation of both men and women. Study 3 replicated and extended these findings. Participants judged dynamic outlines of real people (men and women, both gay and straight) in which body shape and motion were measured. Again, gender-atypical body motion affected perceived sexual orientation and, importantly, affected accuracy as well.     

Retrospective construction of the judgement of free choice

The problem of free will lies at the heart of modern scientific studies of consciousness. Some authors propose that actions are unconsciously initiated and awareness of intention is referred retrospectively to the action after it has been performed [e.g. Aarts, H., Custers, R., & Wegner, D. M. (2005). On the inference of personal authorship: Enhancing experienced agency by priming effect information. Consciousness & Cognition, 14, 439-458]. This contrasts with the common impression that our intentions cause those actions. By combining a stop signal paradigm and an intentional action paradigm we show that participants sometimes indicate to have intentionally initiated an action while reaction time data strongly suggest that they in fact failed to stop the action. In a second experiment we demonstrate that the number of trials in which participants misattributed their awareness of intention varied with the intentional involvement during action planning. Our data support the retrospective account of intentional action. Furthermore, we introduce an experimental approach that objectifies introspective judgments of awareness of intention.     

Intentionally remembering or forgetting own- and other-race faces: Evidence from directed forgetting

People are better at remembering faces of their own relative to another ethnic group. This so-called own-race bias (ORB) has been explained in terms of differential perceptual expertise for own- and other-race faces or, alternatively, as resulting from socio-cognitive factors. To test predictions derived from the latter account, we examined item-method directed forgetting (DF), a paradigm sensitive to an intentional modulation of memory, for faces belonging to different ethnic and social groups. In a series of five experiments, participants during learning received cues following each face to either remember or forget the item, but at test were required to recognize all items irrespective of instruction. In Experiments 1 and 5, Caucasian participants showed DF for own-race faces only while, in Experiment 2, East Asian participants with considerable expertise for Caucasian faces demonstrated DF for own- and other-race faces. Experiments 3 and 4 found clear DF for social in- and outgroup faces. These results suggest that a modulation of face memory by motivational processes is limited to faces with which we have acquired perceptual expertise. Thus, motivation alone is not sufficient to modulate memory for other-race faces and cannot fully explain the ORB.     

PHILOSOPHY AS A FEMINIST SPIRITUALITY AND CRITICAL PRACTICE FOR MARY ASTELL

The question of how gender might inflect and affect philosophy as a way of life has been somewhat neglected, as has the role of philosophical modes of living for historical female philosophers. This essay draws on Michel Foucault’s multifaceted, Hadot-inspired conception of philosophy to show how transformative philosophical practices of the self function as feminist praxis in the work of the early modern feminist philosopher Mary Astell. Philosophy in Astell’s texts, the essay argues, is a spiritual practice of the self that at the same time functions as a feminist critique both of sexist social structures and of the self that undertakes the practice. It facilitates women in achieving internal freedom. Finally, the essay discusses potential feminist concerns about Astell’s proposed philosophical way of living, before suggesting that it may have value for women today.     

Increased levels of conditioned fear and avoidance behavior coincide with changes in phosphorylation of the protein kinase B (AKT) within the amygdala in a mouse model of extremes in trait anxiety

Patients diagnosed for anxiety disorders often display faster acquisition and slower extinction of learned fear. To gain further insights into the mechanisms underlying these phenomenona, we studied conditioned fear in mice originating form a bi-directional selective breeding approach, which is based on elevated plus-maze behavior and results in CD1-derived high (HAB), normal (NAB), and low (LAB) anxiety-related behavior mice. HAB mice displayed pronounced cued-conditioned fear compared to NAB/CD1 and LAB mice that coincided with increased phosphorylation of the protein kinase B (AKT) in the basolateral amygdala 45 min after conditioning. No similar changes were observed after non-associative immediate shock presentations. Fear extinction of recent but not older fear memories was preserved. However, HAB mice were more prone to relapse of conditioned fear with the passage of time. HAB mice also displayed higher levels of contextual fear compared to NAB and LAB mice and exaggerated avoidance following step-down avoidance training. Interestingly, HAB mice showed lower and LAB mice higher levels of acoustic startle responses compared to NAB controls. The increase in arousal observed in LAB mice coincided with the general absence of conditioned freezing. Taken together, our results suggest that the genetic predisposition to high anxiety-related behavior may increase the risk of forming traumatic memories, phobic-like fear and avoidance behavior following aversive encounters, with a clear bias towards passive coping styles. In contrast, genetic predisposition to low anxiety-related and high risk-taking behavior seems to be associated with an increase in active coping styles. Our data imply changes in AKT phosphorylation as a therapeutic target for the prevention of exaggerated fear memories.     

Perhaps There Is Accounting for Taste: Evaluating the Creativity of Products

Ratings on a creativity rating scale of students' designs of a hands-free mobile phone holder were compared for 2 sets of raters: experts (professional art teachers) and novices (visual art students). Reliabilities of total creativity scores were high for both groups, and interjudge consistency on total creativity scores, as well as on grades, was high among novices, but not as high among experts. Correlations between grades and total functional creativity scores within and across groups of raters (experts and novices) were highly significant. Scores on the scale resembled those yielded by assessments using grades and the scale did not yield better consistency among judges than conventional grades. Nonetheless, it provided a differentiated assessment of products that made it possible to explain the basis of experts' opinions and the reasons for disagreement, and to discuss the strengths and weaknesses of students' designs in a systematic and differentiated way.     

Dimensional overlap between time and space

Several pieces of evidence suggest that our mental representations of time and space are linked. However, the extent of this linkage between the two domains has not yet been assessed. We present the results of two experiments that draw on the predictions of the dimensional overlap model (Kornblum, Hasbroucq, & Osman, Psychological Review 97:253–270, 1990). The stimulus and response sets in these reaction time experiments were related to either time or space. The obtained stimulus–response congruency effects were of about the same size for identical stimulus–response sets (time–time or space–space) and for different stimulus–response sets (time–space or space–time). These results support the view that our representations of time and space are strongly linked.