Did you wash your hands? Evaluating memory for objects touched by healthy individuals and individuals with contagious and noncontagious diseases

Prior research suggests that individuals recruit a disease‐avoidance system designed to avoid sources of illness through threat detection and memory. Our study evaluated whether disease‐related memory benefits reflect the distinctive/salient nature of a diseased state versus the infectious nature of a disease by comparing memory for objects touched by healthy individuals or those with a contagious or noncontagious disease. Participants studied videos depicting an actor interacting with objects in which the actor was described as diagnosed with influenza, an infectious disease, cancer, a noninfectious disease, or was healthy, followed by free‐recall and source‐recognition tests. Correct recall and source recognition were greater overall for touched versus nontouched items, but source recognition was particularly elevated for items touched by the infectious influenza actor. Further, touched‐item recognition was positively related to participants' assessed germ aversion—supplemental evidence that disease concerns may facilitate source recollections for touched objects.     

Call for papers electronic archiving: Norms,stimuli, and data a special issue of<Emphasis Type="Italic">Behavior Research Methods,Instruments, &; Computers</Emphasis>

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Call for papers electronic archiving: Norms, stimuli, and data a special issue ofBehavior Research Methods, Instruments, & Computers     

Testing Hypotheses Distilled from Four Models of the Effects of Health-Related Social Control

This study distilled and tested hypotheses derived from four models of the effects of social control on affect and health behavior among 401 college students involved in heterosexual dating relationships. Each model received at least some support. Consistent with the dual effects model, social control strategies predicted both health behavior change and negative affect. In accord with the domain-specific model, positive social control was related to positive affect and negative social control was related to negative affect. In partial support of the mediational model, positive social control exerted both a direct and an indirect effect via positive affect on health behavior change and negative social control exerted both a direct and an indirect effect via negative affect on hiding unhealthy behavior. As predicted by the contextual model, quality of dating relationship moderated the influence of positive and negative social control on hiding unhealthy behavior.     

Scaling Satan

The influence on social behavior of beliefs in Satan and the nature of evil has received little empirical study. Elaine Pagels (1995) in her book, The Origin of Satan, argued that Christians' intolerance toward others is due to their belief in an active Satan. In this study, more than 200 college undergraduates completed the Manitoba Prejudice Scale and the Attitudes Toward Homosexuals Scale (B. Altemeyer, 1988), as well as the Belief in an Active Satan Scale, developed by the authors. The Belief in an Active Satan Scale demonstrated good internal consistency and temporal stability. Correlational analyses revealed that for the female participants, belief in an active Satan was directly related to intolerance toward lesbians and gay men and intolerance toward ethnic minorities. For the male participants, belief in an active Satan was directly related to intolerance toward lesbians and gay men but was not significantly related to intolerance toward ethnic minorities. Results of this research showed that it is possible to meaningfully measure belief in an active Satan and that such beliefs may encourage intolerance toward others.     

Tracking multiple objects across abrupt viewpoint changes

The reported experiment tested the effect of abrupt and unpredictable viewpoint changes on the attentional tracking of multiple objects in dynamic 3-D scenes. Observers tracked targets that moved independently among identically looking distractors on a rectangular floor plane. The tracking interval was 11 s. Abrupt rotational viewpoint changes of 10°, 20°, or 30° occurred after 8 s. Accuracy of tracking targets across a 10° viewpoint change was comparable to accuracy in a continuous control condition, whereas viewpoint changes of 20° and 30° impaired tracking performance considerably. This result suggests that tracking is mainly dependant on a low-level process whose performance is saved against small disturbances by the visual system's ability to compensate for small changes of retinocentric coordinates. Tracking across large viewpoint changes succeeds only if allocentric coordinates are remembered to relocate targets after displacements.     

Recognizing dynamic scenes: influence of processing orientation

From face recognition studies, it is known that instructions are able to change processing orientation of stimuli, leading to an impairment of recognition performance. The present study examined instructional influences on the visual recognition of dynamic scenes. A global processing orientation without any instruction was assumed to lead to highest recognition performance, whereas instructions focusing participants' attention on certain characteristics of the event should lead to a local processing orientation with an impairment of visual recognition performance as a direct consequence. Since the pattern of results provided evidence for this hypothesis, theoretical contributions were discussed.     

Do not cross the line: Heuristic spatial updating in dynamic scenes

In two experiments, we examined the spatial integration of two viewpoints onto dynamic scenes. We tested the spatial-alignment hypothesis (which predicts integration by alignment along the shortest path) against the spatial-heuristic hypothesis (which predicts integration by observation of the left?Cright orientation on the screen). The stimuli consisted of film clips comprising two shots, each showing a car driving by. In Experiment 1, the dynamic scenes were ambiguous with regard to their interpretation: The cars could have been driving either in the same or in opposite directions. In line with the spatial-heuristic hypothesis, participants responded with ??same direction?? if the cars shared a screen direction. In Experiment 2, environmental cues disambiguated the dynamic scenes, and the screen direction of the cars was either congruent or incongruent with the depicted environmental cues. As compared with congruent dynamic scenes, incongruent dynamic scenes elicited prolonged reaction times, thus suggesting that heuristic spatial updating was used with congruent stimuli, whereas spatial-alignment processes were used with incongruent stimuli.