Anxiety,anticipation and contextual information: A test of attentional control theory

We tested the assumptions of Attentional Control Theory (ACT) by examining the impact of anxiety on anticipation using a dynamic, time-constrained task. Moreover, we examined the involvement of high- and low-level cognitive processes in anticipation and how their importance may interact with anxiety. Skilled and less-skilled tennis players anticipated the shots of opponents under low- and high-anxiety conditions. Participants viewed three types of video stimuli, each depicting different levels of contextual information. Performance effectiveness (response accuracy) and processing efficiency (response accuracy divided by corresponding mental effort) were measured. Skilled players recorded higher levels of response accuracy and processing efficiency compared to less-skilled counterparts. Processing efficiency significantly decreased under high- compared to low-anxiety conditions. No difference in response accuracy was observed. When reviewing directional errors, anxiety was most detrimental to performance in the condition conveying only contextual information, suggesting that anxiety may have a greater impact on high-level (top-down) cognitive processes, potentially due to a shift in attentional control. Our findings provide partial support for ACT; anxiety elicited greater decrements in processing efficiency than performance effectiveness, possibly due to predominance of the stimulus-driven attentional system.     

Self-discrepancies in clinical depression and social phobia: cognitive structures that underlie emotional disorders?

Previous research indicates that self-discrepancies are cognitive structures that can induce emotional discomfort. The present study compared clinically depressed and social phobic subjects (plus controls) to determine whether different self-discrepancies were associated with the two disorders. In Part 1, it was shown that the depressives possessed the greatest discrepancy between their actual and ideal/own self-states, whereas the social phobics possessed the greatest discrepancy between their actual and ought/other self-states. In a later, ostensibly unrelated study, subjects responded verbally to questions about other people while their mood changes, skin conductance responses, and verbalizations were recorded. The questions included attributes from the subject's ideal and ought self-states that were mismatches with attributes from his or her actual self, as well as mismatch attributes from other subjects. Priming with self-referential mismatches induced momentary syndromes of dejection or agitation (depending on the type of mismatch). The depressives and social phobics showed the greatest increases in dejection and agitation, respectively, according to their dominant self-discrepancy. The results suggest that specific cognitive structures may underlie clinical depression and anxiety.     

Effects of shifts in goal origin on goal acceptance and attainment

Current models of goal setting often fail to consider the potential negative effects of goal programs. Control over goal difficulty levels may be an important source of personal control in the workplace and psychological reactance may result from a shift in control over the setting of goals. The present experiment examined the effects of initial goal origin (assigned or self-set) and shifted goal origin (shifted or not shifted) on goal acceptance and attainment over two trial blocks of a verbal task. Several hypotheses based on psychological reactance theory were tested in a laboratory experiment with 160 college undergraduates. Overall analyses revealed significant interactions for goal acceptance and goal attainment over trial blocks. Simple effect analyses isolated this interaction for both dependent variables in a disordinal crossover pattern for the shifted origin groups over trial blocks, as expected. The discussion focuses on fitting these results into the current program guiding goal-setting research and on suggesting future avenues of research. Some implications for the application of goal setting are also discussed.     

Functional classes and equivalence relations

Three adult subjects were taught a set of two-choice simultaneous discriminations, with three positive and three negative stimuli; all possible combinations of positive and negative stimuli yielded nine different pairs. The discriminations were repeatedly reversed and rereversed, the former positive stimuli becoming negative and the former negative stimuli becoming positive. With all subjects, a reversal of the contingencies for one pair of stimuli became sufficient to change their responses to all of the other pairs. The reversals had produced functional stimulus classes. Then, all subjects showed conditional discriminations emerging between members of a functional class; given a sample from one class and comparisons from both classes, they selected the comparison that was in the same class as the sample. Next, 2 of the subjects showed that the within-class conditional relations possessed the symmetric and transitive properties of equivalence relations; after having been taught to relate new stimuli to existing class members, the subjects then matched other class members to the new stimuli. Subsequent tests of two-choice discriminations showed that the conditional discriminations had transferred functional class membership to the new stimuli. The 3rd subject, who did not show equivalence relations among functional class members, was also found to have lost the within-class conditional relations after the equivalence tests.     

Second-order conditioning of the rabbit's nictitating membrane response. Interstimulus interval and frequency of CS-CS pairings.

Second-order conditioning of the rabbit's nictitating membrane response (NMR) was investigated when second-order trials (CS1-CS2) were intermixed with first-order trials (CS2-US) from the outset of training. Experiment 1 showed that CR acquisition to CS1 was inversely related to the CS1-CS2 interval but nevertheless extended to an interval of 8,400 ms. Experiment 2 revealed that CR acquisition of CS1 was an inverted-U function of the number of CS1-CS2 trials relative to a fixed number of CS2-US trials. Experiment 3 directly contrasted second-order conditioning with a reinforced serial compound procedure (CS1-CS2-US) and a mixed procedure in which second-order trials were intermixed with the reinforced serial compound. Second-order conditioning was about half the strength of either the reinforced serial compound or the mixed procedure, which were similar. The present results are discussed with respect to the relative strength of excitatory and inhibitory processes in second-order conditioning.     

Conditional withholding of proboscis extension in honeybees (Apis mellifera) during discriminative punishment.

Proboscis extension conditioning of honeybee workers was used to test the ability of bees to respond to appetitive and aversive stimuli while restrained in a harness that allows subjects to move their antennae and mouthparts (Kuwabara, 1957; Menzel, Erber, & Masuhr, 1974). Subjects were conditioned to discriminate between two odors, one associated with sucrose feeding and the other associated with a 10 V AC shock if they responded to the sucrose unconditioned stimulus (US) in the context of that odor. Most Ss readily learned to respond to the odor followed by sucrose feeding and not to the odor associated with sucrose stimulation plus shock. Furthermore, in the context of the odor associated with shock, significantly more subjects withheld or delayed proboscis extension on stimulation with the sucrose US than they did in the context of the odor associated with feeding. Thus, restrained honeybees can readily learn to avoid shock according to an odor context by withholding proboscis extension to a normally powerful releaser. Analysis of individual learning curves revealed that subjects differed markedly in performance on this task. Some learn the discrimination quickly, whereas others show different kinds of response patterns.     

Strategy changes in human contingency judgments as a function of contingency tables.

Judgment strategies of 169 undergraduate students on problems to judge the contingency between two binary events were identified by the method of rule-based analysis to clarify whether or not the strategies the subjects used would be affected by the concrete nature of the contingency table. Problems were constructed along two factors: total cell frequency and width of range of objective contingencies. Although the factor of total cell frequency had no effect on subjects' strategies, the number of subjects who changed strategies corresponding with problem instances increased when the objective contingencies were set closer to zero or when problems became more difficult. These results are discussed in the context of previous studies of this issue in the literature.     

Effects of oral cortisol treatment in healthy young women on memory retrieval of negative and neutral words

Studies in rodents have demonstrated that glucocorticoids enhance memory consolidation but impair delayed memory retrieval. Similar findings have been reported in humans. Emotional items are better remembered than neutral items. However, it is unknown if emotional valence influences the effects of cortisol on retrieval. In this double-blind crossover study, 16 healthy women learned a wordlist containing 15 neutral and 15 negative words. Delayed recall was tested 5h later. Cortisol administered before recall testing significantly reduced retrieval (p<.01). Exploratory follow-up analysis revealed that cortisol significantly impaired retrieval of negative words (p<.01), while having no significant effect on neutral words (p=.47). The current findings could suggest that emotional material is especially sensitive to the memory modulating effects of stress hormones.     

Unique temporal change is the key to attentional capture

Abstract— Attentional capture refers to the observation that some events break through and attract one's attention even when one is engaged in a task for which these events are irrelevant. Previous research, focusing primarily on spatial factors, has shown that a new object is more salient in this regard than an abrupt change in an object's features. Here we show that feature changes can be as effective as new objects in capturing attention, provided that they occur during a period of temporal calm. Conversely, both feature changes and new objects are far less effective in capturing attention when they occur simultaneously with other display changes, such as coincident with the initial onset of the display or with small visual transients that occur during a display transition. These results highlight the importance of considering both space and time in studies of attentional capture; the most effective stimulus is unique in both dimensions.