Interpreting neutral faces as threatening is a default mode for socially anxious individuals

The authors of the present study used an incidental learning paradigm to investigate the interpretation of neutral facial expressions in socially anxious individuals. Participants were asked to detect the location of a target following the presentation of a facial picture (i.e., cue). Unbeknownst to participants, the target location was contingent on the valence of the cue, and participants thus learned to associate different target locations with either positive or negative facial expressions. The authors subsequently used this learned association to assess interpretive biases. If socially anxious individuals interpret neutral faces in a negative manner, they should be faster to detect a target that appears in the location that is associated with negative face cues when the target is presented after a neutral face cue. The authors also assessed whether the anticipation of a feared situation influenced interpretive biases by comparing participants with and without a speech threat on this task. Results indicate that socially anxious individuals are characterized by an interpretive bias regardless of the threat manipulation. In contrast, nonanxious individuals interpreted neutral faces in a negative manner only when they were in the threat condition.     

A cross-culturally standardized set of pictures for younger and older adults: American and Chinese norms for name agreement, concept agreement, and familiarity.

The present study presents normative measures for 260 line drawings of everyday objects, found in Snodgrass and Vanderwart (1980), viewed by individuals in China and the United States. Within each cultural group, name agreement, concept agreement, and familiarity measures were obtained separately for younger adults and older adults. For a subset of 57 pictures (22%), there was equivalence in both name agreement and concept agreement, and for an additional subset of 29 pictures (11%), there was nonequivalent name agreement but equivalent concept agreement, across all culture-by-age groups. The data indicate substantial differences across culture-by-age groups in name agreement percentages and number of distinct name responses provided. We discovered significant differences between older and younger American adults in both name agreement percentages (67 pictures, or 26%) and concept agreement percentages (44 pictures, or 17%). Written naming responses collected for the entire set of Snodgrass and Vanderwart pictures showed shifts in both naming and concept agreement percentages over the intervening decades: Although correlations in name agreement were strong (r = .71, p < .001) between our younger American samples and those of Snodgrass and Vanderwart, name agreement percentages have changed for a substantial proportion (33%) of the 260 pictures; moreover, 63% of the stimuli for which Snodgrass and Vanderwart reported concept agreement now appear to differ. We provide comprehensive comparison statistics and tests for both the present study and prior ones, finding differences across numerous item-level measures. The corpus of data suggests that substantial differences in all measures can be found across age as well as culture, so that unequivocal conclusions with respect to cross-cultural or age-related differences in cognition can be made only when appropriate stimuli are selected for studies. Data for all 260 pictures, for each of the four groups, and all supporting materials and tests are freely archived at http://agingmind.cns.uiuc.edu/Pict_Norms. The full set of these norms may be downloaded from www.psychonomic.org/archive/.     

Working memory in social anxiety disorder: better manipulation of emotional versus neutral material in working memory

Individuals with social anxiety disorder (SAD) engage in post-event processing, a form of perseverative thinking. Given that deficits in working memory might underlie perseverative thinking, we examined working memory in SAD with a particular focus on the effects of stimulus valence. SAD (n?=?31) and healthy control (n?=?20) participants either maintained (forward trials) or reversed (backward trials) in working memory the order of four emotional or four neutral pictures, and we examined sorting costs, which reflect the extent to which performance deteriorated on the backward trials compared to the forward trials. Emotionality of stimuli affected performance of the two groups differently. Whereas control participants exhibited higher sorting costs for emotional stimuli compared to neutral stimuli, SAD participants exhibited the opposite pattern. Greater attention to emotional stimuli in SAD might facilitate the processing of emotional (vs. neutral) stimuli in working memory.     

The role of negative publicity in consumer evaluations of sports stars and their sponsors

This paper aims to specify and test empirically the impact that two types of negative information (immorality and incompetence) about a sports star have on consumers' perceptions of the sports star and the sponsor. The moderating role of game relevance (game‐related and non‐game‐related) and fan identification with a sports star (high identification and low identification) are also investigated. Using a sample of South Korean consumers (n = 249), we found in the experiment that the type of negative information affects participants' attitudes toward the sports star and the sponsor. This result implies that a sports star's involvement in negative events not only damages the star's reputation but also detracts from the value of the sponsor company. The results also show that the two factors moderate the main effects of negative publicity on consumers' perception of the sports star and his or her sponsor. First, the negative publicity about the sports star's functional issues (e.g., a career‐threatening injury) negatively affects consumer attitude toward the sports star and the sponsor more in the out‐of‐game context than in the in‐game situation. Second, bad sports star publicity has a greater negative effect on consumer perception of sponsors for lowly identified than highly identified sports stars, while the moderating effect on consumer perception of the sports star is not significant. Detailed practical implications and academic contributions are discussed. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

How does context affect assessments of facial emotion? The role of culture and age

People from Asian cultures are more influenced by context in their visual processing than people from Western cultures. In this study, we examined how these cultural differences in context processing affect how people interpret facial emotions. We found that younger Koreans were more influenced than younger Americans by emotional background pictures when rating the emotion of a central face, especially those younger Koreans with low self-rated stress. In contrast, among older adults, neither Koreans nor Americans showed significant influences of context in their face emotion ratings. These findings suggest that cultural differences in reliance on context to interpret others' emotions depend on perceptual integration processes that decline with age, leading to fewer cultural differences in perception among older adults than among younger adults. Furthermore, when asked to recall the background pictures, younger participants recalled more negative pictures than positive pictures, whereas older participants recalled similar numbers of positive and negative pictures. These age differences in the valence of memory were consistent across culture.     

Neuroanatomy of childhood disruptive behavior disorders

Our aims were to (1) examine possible neuroanatomical abnormalities associated with the Disruptive Behavior Disorders (DBDs) as a group and (2) assess neuroanatomical anomalies specific to each DBD (i.e., conduct disorder [CD] and oppositional defiant disorder). Cortical thickness analysis and voxel-based morphometry were analyzed in 47 8-year-old boys (22 DBDs with and without CD and/or ODD and 25 healthy controls) from Magnetic Resonance Imaging brain scans. DBD symptoms were assessed using the Dominic-R. In DBD subjects relative to controls, we found (1) a decreased overall mean cortical thickness; (2) thinning of the cingulate, prefrontal and insular cortices; and (3) decreased gray matter density (GMd) in the same brain regions. We also found that scores on the Dominic-R were negatively correlated with GMd in the prefrontal and precuneus/superior temporal regions. There was a subdiagnostic main effect for CD, related to thinning of the middle/medial frontal, and for ODD in the left rectal/orbitofrontal. Findings suggest that thinning and decreased GMd of the insula disorganizes prefrontal circuits, diminishing the inhibitory influence of the prefrontal cortex on anger, aggression, cruelty, and impulsivity, and increasing a person's likelihood of aggressive behavior. These findings have implications for pathophysiologic models of the DBDs, their diagnostic classification system, and for designing more effective intervention programs.     

The effect of a career development programme based on the Hope-Action Theory: Hope to Work for refugees in British Columbia

The purpose of this study was to assess the proximal and distal outcomes of a career development training programme for refugees that was developed based on the Hope-Action Theory (HAT). Adopting an experimental design, proximal outcomes such as self-efficacy, hope-action competencies, job search clarity, and career adaptability were assessed three times; and distal outcomes including employment status, job-seeking activities, career growth, hopeful career state, work engagement, and job satisfaction were assessed once at nine months. We used a two-way mixed effects analysis of covariance and a serial mediation analysis. The programme was effective in developing hope-action competencies, general self-efficacy, and job search clarity. The experimental group participants exhibited higher hopeful career state and work engagement. A serial mediation model of the HAT-based intervention predicting job satisfaction was found. Limitations and future directions are discussed.     

Category norms as a function of culture and age: comparisons of item responses to 105 categories by american and chinese adults

Understanding how aging influences cognition across different cultures has been hindered by a lack of standardized, cross-referenced verbal stimuli. This study introduces a database of such item-level stimuli for both younger and older adults, in China and the United States, and makes 3 distinct contributions. First, the authors specify which item categories generalize across age and/or cultural groups, rigorously quantifying differences among them. Second, they introduce novel, powerful methods to measure between-group differences in freely generated ranked data, the rank-ordered logit model and Hellinger Affinity. Finally, a broad archive of tested, cross-linguistic stimuli is now freely available to researchers: data, similarity measures, and all stimulus materials for 105 categories and 4 culture-by-age groups, comprising over 10,000 fully translated unique item responses.     

Compound fracture: the role of semantic transparency and morphological headedness

This paper explores the role of semantic transparency in the representation and processing of English compounds. We focus on the question of whether semantic transparency is best viewed as a property of the entire multimorphemic string or as a property of constituent morphemes. Accordingly, we investigated the processing of English compound nouns that were categorized in terms of the semantic transparency of each of their constituents. Fully transparent such as bedroom are those in which the meanings of each of the constituents are transparently represented in the meaning of the compound as a whole. These compounds were contrasted with compounds such as strawberry, in which only the second constituent is semantically transparent, jailbird, in which only the first constituent is transparent, and hogwash, in which neither constituent is semantically transparent. We propose that significant insights can be achieved through such analysis of the transparency of individual morphemes. The two experiments that we report present evidence that both semantically transparent compounds and semantically opaque compounds show morphological constituency. The semantic transparency of the morphological head (the second constituent in a morphologically right-headed language such as English) was found to play a significant role in overall lexical decision latencies, in patterns of decomposition, and in the effects of stimulus repetition within the experiment.     

Referential Form and Memory for the Discourse History

The way we refer to things in the world is shaped by the immediate physical context as well as the discourse history. But what part of the discourse history is relevant to language use in the present? In four experiments, we combine the study of task-based conversation with measures of recognition memory to examine the role of physical contextual cues that shape what speakers perceive to be a part of the relevant discourse history. Our studies leverage the differentiation effect, a phenomenon in which speakers are more likely to use a modified expression to refer to an object (e.g., dotted sock) if they had previously described a similar object (e.g., striped sock) than when they had not described a similar object. Two physical cues—the background that framed the to-be-described pictures and the position of the pictures in the display—were manipulated to alter perceptions about the relevant discourse context. We measured the rate with which speakers modify referring expressions to differentiate current from past referents. Recognition memory measures following the conversation probed what was and was not remembered about past discourse referents and contexts. Analysis of modification rates indicated that these contextual grouping cues shaped perceptions about the relevant discourse context. The contextual cues did not affect memory for the referents, but the memory for past referents was better for speakers than for listeners. Our findings show that perceptions about the relevant discourse history are a key determinant of how language is used in the moment but also that conversational partners form asymmetric representations of the discourse history.