Crossmodal integration of emotional information from face and voice in the infant brain

We examined 7-month-old infants' processing of emotionally congruent and incongruent face-voice pairs using ERP measures. Infants watched facial expressions (happy or angry) and, after a delay of 400 ms, heard a word spoken with a prosody that was either emotionally congruent or incongruent with the face being presented. The ERP data revealed that the amplitude of a negative component and a subsequent positive component in infants' ERPs varied as a function of crossmodal emotional congruity. An emotionally incongruent prosody elicited a larger negative component in infants' ERPs than did an emotionally congruent prosody. Conversely, the amplitude of infants' positive component was larger to emotionally congruent than to incongruent prosody. Previous work has shown that an attenuation of the negative component and an enhancement of the later positive component in infants' ERPs reflect the recognition of an item. Thus, the current findings suggest that 7-month-olds integrate emotional information across modalities and recognize common affect in the face and voice.     

A meta-analysis on the correlation between the implicit association test and explicit self-report measures

Theoretically, low correlations between implicit and explicit measures can be due to (a) motivational biases in explicit self reports, (b) lack of introspective access to implicitly assessed representations, (c) factors influencing the retrieval of information from memory, (d) method-related characteristics of the two measures, or (e) complete independence of the underlying constructs. The present study addressed these questions from a meta-analytic perspective, investigating the correlation between the Implicit Association Test (IAT) and explicit self-report measures. Based on a sample of 126 studies, the mean effect size was .24, with approximately half of the variability across correlations attributable to moderator variables. Correlations systematically increased as a function of (a) increasing spontaneity of self-reports and (b) increasing conceptual correspondence between measures. These results suggest that implicit and explicit measures are generally related but that higher order inferences and lack of conceptual correspondence can reduce the influence of automatic associations on explicit self-reports.     

Patriotism,Orthodox religion and education: empirical findings from contemporary Russia

In recent years, an objective of some Russian Orthodox activists and Church leaders has been the introduction of religious education in state schools which was established in Russia in 2012, following a 2009 Presidential Directive. Today, however, there are two different strands in religious education. On the one hand, there is the state’s emphasis on the bonds between Orthodox Christianity and Russian history, culture and identity. Based on this so-called culturological understanding of religion, the Russian state hopes to use Orthodoxy in nation- and institution-building and in the strengthening of patriotism. On the other hand, while the culturological language is also used in the Church’s official discourse, in practice there are many attempts by Orthodox clergymen and activists to use religious education for the purposes of evangelisation.     

The Undepleted Ego: Self-Regulatory Adaptation in Multiple Task Sequences

Working on a task that requires strong self-regulation can deteriorate performance in a subsequent task also involving high self-regulatory demands. Several studies suggest that the consumption of limited self-regulatory resources may account for this effect known as ego depletion. We investigated the influence of expectations about upcoming tasks on self-regulatory performance in two experiments, contrasting tasks with high and low self-regulatory demand. We manipulated expectations by informing participants about the number of tasks to be worked on (Experiment 1) and by varying the number of tasks (Experiment 2). With the expectation of highly demanding tasks no ego-depletion effect occurred. Results show that expecting a continuation of high self-regulatory demand in a sequence of several tasks actually improved performance.     

Performing a secondary executive task with affective stimuli interferes with decision making under risk conditions

Previous studies demonstrated that executive functions are crucial for advantageous decision making under risk and that therefore decision making is disrupted when working memory capacity is demanded while working on a decision task. While some studies also showed that emotions can affect decision making under risk, it is unclear how affective processing and executive functions predict decision-making performance in interaction. The current experimental study used a between-subjects design to examine whether affective pictures (positive and negative pictures compared to neutral pictures), included in a parallel executive task (working memory 2-back task), have an impact on decision making under risk as assessed by the Game of Dice Task (GDT). Moreover, the performance GDT plus 2-back task was compared to the performance in the GDT without any additional task (GDT solely). The results show that the performance in the GDT differed between groups (positive, negative, neutral, and GDT solely). The groups with affective pictures, especially those with positive pictures in the 2-back task, showed more disadvantageous decisions in the GDT than the groups with neutral pictures and the group performing the GDT without any additional task. However, executive functions moderated the effect of the affective pictures. Regardless of affective influence, subjects with good executive functions performed advantageously in the GDT. These findings support the assumption that executive functions and emotional processing interact in predicting decision making under risk.     

Article retracted,but the message lives on

The retraction of an original article aims to ensure that readers are alerted to the fact that the findings are not trustworthy. However, the present research suggests that individuals still believe in the findings of an article even though they were later told that the data were fabricated and that the article was retracted. Participants in a debriefing condition and a no-debriefing condition learned about the scientific finding of an empirical article, whereas participants in a control condition did not. Afterward, participants in the debriefing condition were told that the article had been retracted because of fabricated data. Results showed that participants in the debriefing condition were less likely to believe in the findings than participants in the no-debriefing condition but were more likely to believe in the findings than participants in the control condition, suggesting that individuals do adjust their beliefs in the perceived truth of a scientific finding after debriefing—but insufficiently. Mediational analyses revealed that the availability of generated causal arguments underlies belief perseverance. These results suggest that a retraction note of an empirical article in a scientific journal is not sufficient to ensure that readers of the original article no longer believe in the article’s conclusions.