Children's utilization of emotion expectancies in moral decision‐making

This study investigated the relevance of emotion expectancies for children's moral decision‐making. The sample included 131 participants from three different grade levels (M = 8.39 years, SD = 2.45, range 4.58–12.42). Participants were presented a set of scenarios that described various emotional outcomes of (im)moral actions and asked to decide what they would do if they were in the protagonists' shoes. Overall, it was found that the anticipation of moral emotions predicted an increased likelihood of moral choices in antisocial and prosocial contexts. In younger children, anticipated moral emotions predicted moral choice for prosocial actions, but not for antisocial actions. Older children showed evidence for the utilization of anticipated emotions in both prosocial and antisocial behaviours. Moreover, for older children, the decision to act prosocially was less likely in the presence of non‐moral emotions. Findings suggest that the impact of emotion expectancies on children's moral decision‐making increases with age. Contrary to happy victimizer research, the study does not support the notion that young children use moral emotion expectancies for moral decision‐making in the context of antisocial actions.     

The contagious impact of playing violent video games on aggression: Longitudinal evidence

Meta-analyses have shown that violent video game play increases aggression in the player. The present research suggests that violent video game play also affects individuals with whom the player is connected. A longitudinal study (N = 980) asked participants to report on their amount of violent video game play and level of aggression as well as how they perceive their friends and examined the association between the participant's aggression and their friends’ amount of violent video game play. As hypothesized, friends’ amount of violent video game play at Time 1 was associated with the participant's aggression at Time 2 even when controlling for the impact of the participant's aggression at Time 1. Mediation analyses showed that friends’ aggression at Time 1 accounted for the impact of friends’ amount of violent video game play at Time 1 on the participant's aggression at Time 2. These findings suggest that increased aggression in video game players has an impact on the player's social network.     

Brain responses reveal that infants' face discrimination is guided by statistical learning from distributional information

Infants' perception of faces becomes attuned to the environment during the first year of life. However, the mechanisms that underpin perceptual narrowing for faces are only poorly understood. Considering the developmental similarities seen in perceptual narrowing for faces and speech and the role that statistical learning has been shown to play for speech, the current study examined whether and how learning from distributional information impacts face identity discrimination. We familiarized 6.5‐month‐old infants with exemplars of female faces taken from a morphed continuum going from one identity to another. Using event‐related brain potentials (ERPs), we show that only infants who were familiarized with a bimodal frequency distribution, but not infants familiarized with a unimodal frequency distribution, discriminated between identities. These results are the first to demonstrate the influence of probabilistic information on infants' face identity discrimination, suggesting that statistical learning contributes to perceptual attunement for both faces and language.     

Pseudocontingencies in Consumer Choice: Preference for Prevalent Product Categories Decreases with Decreasing Set Quality

Building on theorizing about contingency inferences, the present research deals with the impact of product category prevalence on consumer choice. We argue that a category's prevalence in the choice set can signal high quality, but the validity depends on the aggregate quality of the choice set. With ever more low‐quality products in the set, high prevalence should increasingly signal poor rather than high quality. When choosing from a poor‐quality set, choices should thus favor products from the rare category. In four experiments, we show that poor‐quality sets increase the proportion of consumers choosing products from a rare category. Furthermore, we show that these effects increase when base rates of a category and quality become more extreme. Finally, Experiment 4 shows that contingency inferences partly mediate the effect of set quality on choice. The results extend previous research on contingency inferences, indicating the adaptive use of base‐rate information in consumer decision making. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The direction of hemispheric asymmetries for object categorization at different levels of abstraction depends on the task

In this study hemispheric asymmetries for categorizing objects at the basic versus subordinate level of abstraction were investigated. As predictions derived from different theoretical approaches are contradictory and experimental evidence is inconclusive in this regard, we conducted two categorization experiments, where we contrasted two experimental paradigms. In the first experiment, subjects had to verify whether a word and a laterally presented picture matched or not. In the second experiment, subjects had to identify laterally presented pictures of animals either at the basic or subordinate level by pressing a corresponding response key. Whereas the first experiment revealed an advantage of the left hemisphere (LH) for categorizing objects at the basic level and of the right hemisphere (RH) for categorizing at the subordinate level, just the opposite brain asymmetry was found in the second experiment. As the stimuli were identical in both experiments, hemispheric asymmetries seem to be strongly task dependent.     

Asymmetrical consequences of behavioral change through reward and punishment

Previous research (Greitemeyer & Weiner, 2003 ) has demonstrated that compliance, because of an anticipated reward is attributed more to the person than compliance because of an anticipated punishment. The present research extended these findings to an educational context. Three studies revealed that parents who ask their children to change inappropriate behaviors are more likely to ascribe their children's improvement to the child, if the child was promised a reward, rather than threatened, to receive a punishment if the child did not improve. Moreover, because a child's improved behavior is more likely to be ascribed to the child given a reward as compared to a punishment, parents expect that rewards (as opposed to punishments) are more likely to sustain improved behavior, when the incentive is no longer offered. Finally, participants report to be more likely to induce behavioral change through reward rather than punishment. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Associative symmetry of the memory for object-location associations as revealed by the testing effect

The nature of episodic associations has been subject to a long standing debate, where the two opposing positions postulate associations as either a holistic representation of the constituent elements or as independently modifiable pointers between them. In spite of a history of inconsistent findings, evidence in favour of the theory of symmetric associations has accumulated, yet only for verbal memory [Caplan, J. B., Glaholt, M. G., & McIntosh, A. R. (2006). Linking associative and serial list memory: Pairs versus triples. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 32(6), 1244-1265; Kahana, M. J. (2002). Associative symmetry and memory theory. Memory and Cognition, 30(6), 823-840]. Although object-location associations differ in several fundamental characteristics from verbal paired-associates, we recently found associative symmetry in the memory for this class of associations as well [Sommer, T., Rose, M., & Büchel, C. (2007). Associative symmetry vs. independent associations in the memory for object-location associations. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 33(1), 90-106]. Due to the inconsistencies in the verbal literature, we felt it to be pertinent to confirm this finding using another experimental approach. Based on recent advances in understanding the effects of successive testing, we were able to make use of this knowledge and introduce this effect as an experimental manipulation in the study of associative symmetry. In particular, we investigated whether the influence of a prior memory test on a subsequent memory test differs when the same or opposite constituent element of an object-location paired-associate cues the retrieval on each test. We observed an identical testing effect for both conditions, which was exclusively driven by reminiscence, the recovery of previously inaccessible information. This finding lends strong support in favour of holistically or symmetrically represented object-location associations and suggests, given the verbal memory literature, a general principle of associative symmetry [Asch, S. E., & Ebenholtz, S. M. (1962). The principle of associative symmetry. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 106, 135-163].     

Asymmetrical effects of reward and punishment on attributions of morality

The authors found that 3 experiments revealed that compliance with a pro-social request for an anticipated reward as opposed to a threatened punishment resulted in greater inferences of personal morality. In Experiment 1, participants received information about a teaching assistant (TA) who was either promised a reward or threatened with a punishment when asked for compliance. The participants perceived the TA as more moral for complying given the positive incentive as opposed to the negative incentive. Experiment 2 replicated this finding in a different culture, using different vignettes and incentives. Last, in Experiment 3, the results revealed that a perceived actor's real intentions mediated the effect of incentive valence on dispositional causation. That is, given a reward relative to a punishment, participants were more likely to assume that the agent would have helped even if no incentive had been offered.