The disruption of STM: A response to our commentators

We welcome the discussion prompted by our data (Larsen & Baddeley, this issue 2003). In the case of Macken and Jones (this issue 2003), we note that much of it concerns inconsistency between their findings and those of ourselves and/or others, emphasizing the need for further replication. We welcome the emphasis that Neath, Farley, and Surprenant (this issue 2003) place on the importance of strategy. This is likely to be an issue of increasing importance in the field, although we have doubts about the correlational approach adopted by Neath et al. Finally, we welcome the demonstration by Page and Norris (this issue 2003) that their primacy model is able to give a computationally explicit account of the irrelevant speech effect within a broad phonological loop framework.     

Facilitating the Furrowed Brow: An Unobtrusive Test of the Facial Feedback Hypothesis Applied to Unpleasant Affect

Abstract

We examined the hypothesis that muscle contractions in the face influence subjective emotional experience. Previously, researchers have been critical of experiments designed to test this facial feedback hypothesis, particularly in terms of methodological problems that may lead to demand characteristics. In an effort to surmount these methodological problems Strack, Martin, and Stepper (1988) developed an experimental procedure whereby subjects were induced to contract facial muscles involved in the production of an emotional pattern, without being asked to actually simulate an emotion. Specifically, subjects were required to hold a pen in their teeth, which unobtrusively creates a contraction of the zygomaticus major muscles, the muscles involved in the production of a human smile. This manipulation minimises the likelihood that subjects are able to interpret their zygomaticus contractions as representing a particular emotion, thereby preventing subjects from determining the purpose of the experiment. Strack et al. (1988) found support for the facial feedback hypothesis applied to pleasant affect, in that subjects in the pen-in-teeth condition rated humorous cartoons as being funnier than subjects in the control condition (in which zygomaticus contractions were inhibited). The present study represents an extension of this nonobtrusive methodology to an investigation of the facial feedback of unpleasant affect. Consistent with the Strack et al. procedure, we wanted to have subjects furrow their brow without actually instructing them to do so and without asking them to produce any emotional facial pattern at all. This was achieved by attaching two golf tees to the subject's brow region (just above the inside comer of each eye) and then instructing them to touch the tips of the golf tees together as part of a “divided-attention” experiment. Touching the tips of the golf tees together could only be achieved by a contraction of the corrugator supercilii muscles, the muscles involved in the production of a sad emotional facial pattern. Subjects reported significantly more sadness in response to aversive photographs while touching the tips of the golf tees together than under conditions which inhibited corrugator contractions. These results provide evidence, using a new and unobtrusive manipulation, that facial feedback operates for unpleasant affect to a degree similar to that previously found for pleasant affect.     

The Generalizability of Personality Effects in Politics

A burgeoning line of research examining the relation between personality traits and political variables relies extensively on convenience samples. However, our understanding of the extent to which using convenience samples challenges the generalizability of these findings to target populations remains limited. We address this question by testing whether associations between personality and political characteristics observed in representative samples diverged from those observed in the sub‐populations most commonly studied in convenience samples, namely, students and Internet users. We leverage 10 high‐quality representative datasets to compare the representative samples with the two subsamples. We did not find any systematic differences in the relationship between personality traits and a broad range of political variables. Instead, results from the subsamples generalized well to those observed in the broader and more diverse representative sample.     

Disruption of verbal STM by irrelevant speech, articulatory suppression, and manual tapping: Do they have a common source?

Under appropriate conditions, immediate serial verbal recall is impaired by irrelevant speech, articulatory suppression, and syncopated tapping. Interpretation of these variables in terms of the phonological loop component of working memory assumes separate phonological storage and articulatory rehearsal processes. In contrast, the Object-Oriented Episodic Record (O-OER) of Jones and the feature theory of Neath interpret these and other phenomena in terms of a unitary multimodal system. Three experiments investigate these disrupting tasks, with each experiment emphasizing one parameter. In each case, recall of phonologically similar and dissimilar letter sequences is compared as a marker of the presence or absence of phonological coding. In Experiment 1, subjects heard or articulated a single item, or tapped a single key at equal intervals. Only articulatory suppression impaired performance; it also abolished the effects of phonological similarity. Experiment 2 was identical, except that items were heard, or generated in a syncopated rhythm. Both suppression and tapping impaired performance to an equivalent extent and obliterated the effect of phonological similarity. Syncopated irrelevant speech caused a modest but significant impairment in performance. Experiment 3 was identical to Experiment 1, except that six tokens were used. Irrelevant speech and tapping had a clear impact on recall, but neither removed the phonological similarity effect. Again articulatory suppression had a major impact on performance and removed the effect of phonological similarity. We conclude that the pattern of results readily fits the phonological loop hypothesis, provided one accepts Saito's proposal that generating syncopated sequences uses common processes with speech production. It is not clear how the results can be explained by either the O-OER or the feature hypothesis.