The empathic brain: how, when and why?

Recent imaging results suggest that individuals automatically share the emotions of others when exposed to their emotions. We question the assumption of the automaticity and propose a contextual approach, suggesting several modulatory factors that might influence empathic brain responses. Contextual appraisal could occur early in emotional cue evaluation, which then might or might not lead to an empathic brain response, or not until after an empathic brain response is automatically elicited. We propose two major roles for empathy; its epistemological role is to provide information about the future actions of other people, and important environmental properties. Its social role is to serve as the origin of the motivation for cooperative and prosocial behavior, as well as help for effective social communication.     

Imitation in shadowing words

Imitation of shadowed words was evaluated using Goldinger's (1998) AXB paradigm. The first experiment was a replication of Goldinger's experiments with different tokens. Experiment 1's AXB tests showed that shadowed words were judged to be better imitations of target words than were baseline (read) counterparts more often than chance (.50). Order of presentation of baseline and shadowed words in the AXB test also significantly influenced judgments. Degree of prior exposure to token words did not significantly influence judgments of imitation. Experiment 2 employed modified target tokens with extended voice onset times (VOTs). In addition to AXB tests, VOTs of response tokens were compared across baseline and shadowing conditions. The AXB tests revealed shadowed words to be better imitations of target tokens than baseline, without an influence of AXB presentation order. Differences between baseline and shadowing VOTs were greater when VOTs were extended. The implications of spontaneous imitation in nonsocial settings are considered.     

Plasticity of memory for new learning in very old age: a story of major loss?

Longitudinal survivors of the Berlin Aging Study (N = 96, mean age = 84 years, range 75-101 years) were instructed and trained in a mnemonic skill to examine plasticity of episodic memory performance in very old age. Performance gains after mnemonic instruction were modest, and most individuals were unable to further enhance their performance during 4 sessions of mnemonic practice. Whereas the proportion of variance explained by measures from the broad fluid-ability domain (e.g., perceptual speed) increased with training, the proportion of variance explained by crystallized-ability domain (e.g., word knowledge) and sociobiographical variables decreased. Furthermore, prior 6-year longitudinal changes (loss) in perceptual speed predicted individual differences in plasticity. Results suggest that aging-induced biological factors are a prominent source of individual differences in cognitive plasticity in very old age.     

Audiovisual investigation of the loudness-effort effect for speech and nonspeech events.

There is some evidence that loudness judgments of speech are more closely related to the degree of vocal effort induced in speech production than to the speech signal's surface-acoustic properties such as intensity. Other researchers have claimed that speech loudness can be rationalized simply by considering the acoustic complexity of the signal. Because vocal effort can be specified optically as well as acoustically, a study to test the effort-loudness hypothesis was conducted that used conflicting audiovisual presentations of a speaker that produced consonant-vowel syllables with different efforts. It was predicted that if loudness judgments are constrained by effort perception rather than by simple acoustic parameters, then judgments ought to be affected by visual as well as auditory information. It is shown that loudness judgments are affected significantly by visual information even when subjects are instructed to base their judgments only on what they hear. A similar (though less pronounced) patterning of results is shown for a nonspeech "clapping" event, which attests to the generality of the loudness-effort effect previously thought to be special to speech. Results are discussed in terms of auditory, fuzzy logical, motor, and ecological theories of speech perception.     

Ask me why,don't tell me why: Asking children for explanations facilitates relational thinking

Identifying abstract relations is essential for commonsense reasoning. Research suggests that even young children can infer relations such as “same” and “different,” but often fail to apply these concepts. Might the process of explaining facilitate the recognition and application of relational concepts? Based on prior work suggesting that explanation can be a powerful tool to promote abstract reasoning, we predicted that children would be more likely to discover and use an abstract relational rule when they were prompted to explain observations instantiating that rule, compared to when they received demonstration alone. Five- and 6-year-olds were given a modified Relational Match to Sample (RMTS) task, with repeated demonstrations of relational (same) matches by an adult. Half of the children were prompted to explain these matches; the other half reported the match they observed. Children who were prompted to explain showed immediate, stable success, while those only asked to report the outcome of the pedagogical demonstration did not. Findings provide evidence that explanation facilitates early abstraction over and above demonstration alone.     

Customer experience in coffee stores: A multidisciplinary Neuromarketing approach

Companies in the service retailing industry are constantly looking for strategies to provide a customer experience that improves brand perception and increases customer loyalty. This study provides a deeper understanding of customer experience in two coffee stores in Vietnam by providing a multidisciplinary approach, including a quantitative and a neuromarketing approach. Two-hundred participants participated in the study, combining mystery shopping visits with the Brand Association Reaction Time Test (BARTT). Results from the mystery shopping visits confirm the holistic concept of customer experience. Store atmosphere, employee service, drink quality, price, and previous visits significantly impact customer experience. Empirical results also confirm the impact of customer experience on loyalty. Furthermore, the BARTT analysis shows that in-store customer experience can influence customers' short-term brand perceptions. The national brand is associated with friendly, expensive, globalized, and unique, whereas the local brand revealed significant associations with clean, smells good, welcoming, and unique. From the mystery shopping results and the BARTT, we can infer that customer experience needs multi-methodological capturing of its multifaceted aspects. Our findings are relevant to researchers and practitioners seeking to understand and bolster customer experiences, justifying a multidisciplinary approach and the application of new insightful tools.     

Computers, criminals, an eccentric billionaire, and APA: a brief autobiography

In this invited autobiographical account, I sum up what life has been like for me personally and professionally. For most of the first 50 years of my life, I lived in Alabama. During my years at the University of Alabama, my professional activities included developing a computer-based system to interpret the MMPI (Hathaway & McKinley, 1943), managing a national and international continuing education program for psychologists, involvement in a class action suit that resulted in the deinstitutionalization of Alabama's mental hospitals, organizing a team of professionals to reclassify all of the inmates of Alabama's prison system, and conducting a psychological autopsy on Howard Hughes. I was the American Psychological Association (APA) president in 1988 and served from 1989 to 2003 as APA Chief Executive Officer. Since my time at APA, I have been engaged in work with international psychological organizations.     

Compensation for coarticulation reflects gesture perception, not spectral contrast

This article reports three experiments designed to explore the basis for speech perceivers' apparent compensations for coarticulation. In the first experiment, the stimuli were members of three /da/-to-/ga/ continua hybridized from natural speech. The monosyllables had originally been produced in disyllables /ada/ and /aga/ to make Continuum 1, /alda/ and /alga/ (Continuum 2), and /arda/ and /arga/ (Continuum 3). Members of the second and third continua were influenced by carryover coarticulation from the preceding /l/ or /r/ context. Listeners showed compensation for this carryover coarticulation in the absence of the precursor /al/ or /ar/ syllables. This rules out an account in which compensation for coarticulation reflects a spectral contrast effect exerted by a precursor syllable, as previously has been proposed by Lotto, Holt, and colleagues (e.g., Lotto, Kluender, & Holt, 1997; Lotto & Kluender, 1998). The second experiment showed an enhancing effect of the endpoint monosyllables in Experiment 1 on identifications of preceding natural hybrids along an /al/-to-/ar/ continuum. That is, coarticulatory /l/ and /r/ information in /da/ and /ga/ syllables led to increased judgments of /l/ and /r/, respectively, in the precursor /al/-to-/ar/ continuum members. This was opposite to the effect, in Experiment 3, of /da/ and /ga/ syllables on preceding tones synthesized to range in frequency from approximately the ending F3 of /ar/ to the ending F3 of /al/. The enhancing, not contrastive, effect in Experiment 2, juxtaposed to the contrastive effect in Experiment 3, further disconfirms the spectral contrast account of compensation for coarticulation. A review of the literature buttresses that conclusion and provides strong support for an account that invokes listeners' attention to information in speech for the occurrence of gestural overlap.