Temporal memory of emotional experience

The few studies that have investigated judgments of time have suggested that the memory of duration is distorted more for emotional events than for neutral events, while in contrast there is abundant evidence that other aspects of memories of emotional events are more accurate. To reconcile this apparent discrepancy, we used a procedure in which the participants learned a standard duration over several trials under three emotional conditions: a threatening, a nonthreatening, and a neutral control condition. They were then tested either immediately or 24 h after learning. In this test phase, they had to indicate whether presented comparison durations were or were not the same as the previously learned standard duration. We found that durations were recalled better in the emotional than in the neutral condition, and that this occurred to a greater extent in the threatening than in the nonthreatening condition. Arousing emotions thus enhanced temporal memory, just as they enhance memory for other aspects of emotional events.     

Awareness of time distortions and its relation with time judgment: a metacognitive approach

The perception of time cannot be reduced to a simple percept produced by an internal clock. The aim of the present study was therefore to investigate the role of the individual consciousness of time on temporal judgments. In the present study, the participants' awareness of attention-related time distortions was assessed using a metacognitive questionnaire. The participants were also required to verbally judge a series of stimulus durations in a single or a dual task condition. The results revealed that time was underestimated in the dual task compared to the single task. However, the accuracy of time judgments improved in line with the participants' individual awareness of attentional time distortion: The more aware they were of the role of attention in time perception, the lower the time distortions they exhibited. Conscious awareness of time therefore plays a role in the accuracy of the time judgments made by human beings.     

Auditory and visual differences in time perception? An investigation from a developmental perspective with neuropsychological tests

Adults and children (5- and 8-year-olds) performed a temporal bisection task with either auditory or visual signals and either a short (0.5-1.0s) or long (4.0-8.0s) duration range. Their working memory and attentional capacities were assessed by a series of neuropsychological tests administered in both the auditory and visual modalities. Results showed an age-related improvement in the ability to discriminate time regardless of the sensory modality and duration. However, this improvement was seen to occur more quickly for auditory signals than for visual signals and for short durations rather than for long durations. The younger children exhibited the poorest ability to discriminate time for long durations presented in the visual modality. Statistical analyses of the neuropsychological scores revealed that an increase in working memory and attentional capacities in the visuospatial modality was the best predictor of age-related changes in temporal bisection performance for both visual and auditory stimuli. In addition, the poorer time sensitivity for visual stimuli than for auditory stimuli, especially in the younger children, was explained by the fact that the temporal processing of visual stimuli requires more executive attention than that of auditory stimuli.     

Accuracy of National Stereotypes in Central Europe: Outgroups Are Not Better than Ingroup in Considering Personality Traits of Real People

In a study on national stereotypes in central Europe—composed of Austria, the Czech Republic, Germany, Poland and Slovakia—2241 participants rated their autostereotype (a typical representative of their own country) and heterostereotypes (typical representatives of the other countries) by using National Character Survey (NCS). Existing data from 17377 participants including self‐reports or observer ratings on Revised NEO Personality Inventory and NCS were compared with the national autostereotypes and heterostereotypes. Although national autostereotypes converged with personality traits of real people in Poland and an adult subsample in the Czech Republic, national heterostereotypes did not correspond to personality traits of real people in any of the studied countries. National stereotypes were shared within as well as across countries. In heterostereotypes, raters from similar cultural backgrounds speaking similar languages agreed better as compared with raters from more distant cultures. Target country played a role in agreement of raters from different countries, showed in the highest convergence between autostereotypes and heterostereotypes of a typical German. Sharing of national stereotypes is influenced by political and economic significance of the target country. Although national autostereotypes clearly differentiated between typical representatives of central European countries, the comparison of personality profiles of their inhabitants showed remarkable resemblance. Copyright © 2013 European Association of Personality Psychology.     

Negative Relations Between Pacifier Use and Emotional Competence

Research in psychology and neuroscience suggests that facial mimicry plays a causal role in understanding facial expression of emotion. Accurate understanding of facial emotion, in turn, grounds emotional development. Are pacifiers, which disrupt facial mimicry in the user, associated with compromised emotional development? We examined facial mimicry in children and found that duration of pacifier use was associated with reduced facial mimicry in boys. In two questionnaire studies of young adults, pacifier use also predicted lower perspective taking and emotional intelligence in males. Pacifier use did not predict these emotion processing skills in girls. Future confirmatory studies are proposed.     

Logic and Metaphor

In this work, attention is drawn to the abundant use of metaphor and analogy in works of logic. I argue that pervasiveness of figurative language is to be counted among the features that characterize logic and distinguish it from other sciences. This characteristic feature reflects the creativity that is inherent in logic and indeed has been demonstrated to be a necessary part of logic. The goal of this paper, in short, is to provide specific examples of figurative language used in logic that yield insights into the nature of the subject. I encourage the reader to take metaphors seriously, and to accept that they are not mere embellishments but key elements in our understanding of logic.     

Making heads or tails of probability: An experiment with random generators

Background. The equiprobability bias is a tendency for individuals to think of probabilistic events as ‘equiprobable’ by nature, and to judge outcomes that occur with different probabilities as equally likely. The equiprobability bias has been repeatedly found to be related to formal education in statistics, and it is claimed to be based on a misunderstanding of the concept of randomness. Aims. The aim of the present study was to examine whether experimenting with random generators would decrease the equiprobability bias. Sample. The participants were 108 psychology students whose performance was measured either immediately after taking part in a training session (n= 55), or without doing any training exercises (n= 53). Method. The training session consisted of four activities. These included generating random sequences of events, and learning about the law of large numbers. Subsequently, the participants were tested on a series of equiprobability problems, and a number of other problems with similar structure and content. Results. The results indicated that the training successfully decreased the equiprobability bias. However, this effect was moderated by participants’ cognitive ability (i.e., higher ability participants benefitted from the training more than participants with lower cognitive ability). Finally, the training session had the unexpected side effect of increasing students’ susceptibility to the representativeness heuristic. Conclusions. Experimenting with random generators has a positive effect on students’ general understanding of probability, but the same time it might increase their susceptibility to certain biases (especially, to the representativeness heuristic). These findings have important implications for using training methods to improve probabilistic reasoning performance.     

The Factor Structure of the Narcissistic Personality Inventory

Seventy-seven female and 86 male psychologist practitioners filled out the Bem Sex Rote Inventory to describe either a healthy adult male, healthy adult female, or healthy adult, sex unspecified. Analyzing the data according to Bem's classification of masculinity, femininity, and androgyny produced a significant Scale X Condition interaction with male and female practitioners ascribing significantly more masculine than feminine traits to healthy adult men, yet displaying no comparable differences when rating healthy adult women. Analyzing the data according to Spence's classification of masculine, feminine, androgynous, and undifferentiated produced a Group X Condition interaction with practitioners ascribing significantly more masculine traits to healthy adult men and significantly more feminine traits to healthy adult women. Reanalyses omitting "masculine" and "feminine" from Bem's fist of sex-typed traits produced nonsignificant results. The relationship of this to recent criticisms of the construct validity of the BSRI and to the validity of earlier results of therapist sex-role bias was discussed.     

On the atomic structure of an asymmetrical near Σ = 27 grain boundary in copper

The atomic structure of an asymmetrical near Σ = 27 {525} tilt grain boundary (GB) in copper is determined by coupling high-resolution transmission electron microscopy and molecular dynamics simulation. The average GB plane is parallel to {414} in crystal (1) and {343} in crystal (2). The detailed GB structure shows that it is composed of facets always parallel to {101} and {111} in crystals (1) and (2), respectively. The atomic structure of one facet is described using the structural units model. Each facet is displaced with respect to its neighbours by a pure step, giving rise to the asymmetry of the GB plane orientation. The energy of this asymmetrical GB is significantly lower than that of both the {525} symmetrical and the {11,1,11}/{111} asymmetrical Σ = 27 GBs. One GB region displays another atomic structure with a dislocation that accounts for the misfit between interatomic distances in the {414} and {343} GB planes.