Effects of Reward and Coercion for Transgression Compliance on Judgments of Responsibility and Recommended Punishment

Previous research ( Greitemeyer & Weiner, 2003 ) has demonstrated that compliance to commit a transgression for an anticipated reward as opposed to an anticipated punishment results in greater inferences of personal responsibility. The present studies extend these findings to a courtroom context in which punishment decisions are made. In Study 1, a nurse who administered a non-approved drug was perceived as more responsible; and more severe punishment decisions were recommended, given compliance for an offered reward relative to a threatened punishment. These findings subsequently were replicated while varying the consequences of the drug administration (Study 2) and employing an antisocial scenario (Study 3). Legal theory, field theory, and prospect theory are discussed as possible explanations for these phenomena.     

Top-down matching singleton cues have no edge over top-down matching nonsingletons in spatial cueing

Psychonomic Bulletin & Review - In the present study, we investigated in a novel version of the peripheral-cueing paradigm whether object salience influences attentional selection at early...     

Why the social sciences are irreducible

Synthese - It is often claimed that the social sciences cannot be reduced to a lower-level individualistic science. The standard argument for this position (usually labelled explanatoryholism) is...     

Active Powers and Passive Powers – Do Causal Interactions Require Both?

Philosophia - Many powers metaphysicians postulate both active and passive powers, understood as distinct kinds of intrinsic causal properties of objects. I argue that the category of passive power...     

Disturbed prefrontal and temporal brain function during emotion and cognition interaction in criminal psychopathy

Impaired emotional responsiveness has been revealed as a hallmark of psychopathy. In spite of an increasing database on emotion processing, studies on cognitive function and in particular on the impact of emotion on cognition in psychopathy are rare. We used pictures from the International Affective Picture Set (IAPS) and a Simon Paradigm to address emotion-cognition interaction while functional and structural imaging data were obtained in 12 healthy controls and 10 psychopaths. We found an impaired emotion-cognition interaction in psychopaths that correlated with a changed prefrontal and temporal brain activation. With regard to the temporal cortex, it is shown that structure and function of the right superior temporal gyrus is disturbed in psychopathy, supporting a neurobiological approach to psychopathy, in which structure and function of the right STG may be important.     

Working memory in wayfinding-a dual task experiment in a virtual city

This study examines the working memory systems involved in human wayfinding. In the learning phase, 24 participants learned two routes in a novel photorealistic virtual environment displayed on a 220° screen while they were disrupted by a visual, a spatial, a verbal, or—in a control group—no secondary task. In the following wayfinding phase, the participants had to find and to "virtually walk" the two routes again. During this wayfinding phase, a number of dependent measures were recorded. This research shows that encoding wayfinding knowledge interfered with the verbal and with the spatial secondary task. These interferences were even stronger than the interference of wayfinding knowledge with the visual secondary task. These findings are consistent with a dual-coding approach of wayfinding knowledge.     

Unemployment and aggression: the moderating role of self-awareness on the effect of unemployment on aggression

In February 2005, the unemployment rate in Germany surpassed the 10% mark. Derived from the revised version of the frustration-aggression hypothesis [Berkowitz, 1989], the present studies investigated the association between unemployment and aggression, as well as the moderating role of the self in this context. Because previous research on unemployment and aggression has been plagued by the cause-and-effect issue, the present research employed both an experimental and a correlational field approach. Three studies revealed that participants who expected to be unemployed after their degree (Studies 1 and 3), or who were currently unemployed (Study 2), reported stronger aggressive inclinations than participants who expected not to be unemployed or who were not unemployed at the time of data collection. However, this aggression-eliciting effect of expected or real unemployment only occurred for participants with low self-awareness. Participants who could actualize their self prior to reporting on aggression were not differently affected by different expectations or states of unemployment.     

The role of moral utility in decision making: An interdisciplinary framework

What decisions should we make? Moral values, rules, and virtues provide standards for morally acceptable decisions, without prescribing how we should reach them. However, moral theories do assume that we are, at least in principle, capable of making the right decisions. Consequently, an empirical investigation of the methods and resources we use for making moral decisions becomes relevant. We consider theoretical parallels of economic decision theory and moral utilitarianism and suggest that moral decision making may tap into mechanisms and processes that have originally evolved for nonmoral decision making. For example, the computation of reward value occurs through the combination of probability and magnitude; similar computation might also be used for determining utilitarian moral value. Both nonmoral and moral decisions may resort to intuitions and heuristics. Learning mechanisms implicated in the assignment of reward value to stimuli, actions, and outcomes may also enable us to determine moral value and assign it to stimuli, actions, and outcomes. In conclusion, we suggest that moral capabilities can employ and benefit from a variety of nonmoral decision-making and learning mechanisms.     

Toward a comprehensive test battery for face cognition: Assessment of the tasks

Despite the importance of face recognition in everyday life and frequent complaints about its failure, there is no comprehensive test battery for this ability. As a first step in constructing such a battery, we present 18 tasks aimed at measuring face perception, face learning, face recognition, and the recognition of facially expressed emotions. A sample of 153 healthy young adults completed all tasks. In general, reaction time measures showed high estimates of internal consistency; tasks focused on performance accuracy yielded reliabilities that were somewhat lower, yet high enough to support their use in a battery of face cognition measures. Some of the tasks allowed computation of established experimental effects in a within-subjects design, such as the part-whole effect. Most of these experimental effects were confirmed in our large sample, and valuable effect size estimates were obtained. However, in many cases these difference measures showed poor estimates of internal consistency.