INTIMACY RATINGS IN FIVE COUNTRIES

Estimation de l'intimité psycbologuque dans cinq pays. — On fait passer à des étudiants américains, anglais, hollandais, suédois et pakistanais, un questionnaire qui a été conçu pour mesurer l'impression d'intimité que donnent diverses dispositions spatiales. On retrouve la même ordination dans tous les échantillons : être assis côte-à-côte donne la plus forte impression d'intimité; viennent ensuite, dans l'ordre, voisiner de chaque côté d'un coin, être face-à-face, être à distance ou en diagonale. Les estimations faites par les Américains, les Suédois et les Anglais sont très semblables; mais les Hollandais jugent la position en coin moins intime que ne le font les autres sujets; de même, les Pakistanais, pour le face-à-face. l'A. suggère une utilisation éventuelle des dispositions spatiales comme methode non-verbale de mesure de Pintimité psychologique dans une culture.     

Short- and Long-Term Effects of Video Game Violence on Interpersonal Trust

Two studies investigate the psychological processes underlying short- and long-term effects of video game violence on interpersonal trust. Study 1 demonstrates that interacting with physically aggressive virtual agents decreases players' trust in subsequent interactions. This effect was stronger for players who were dispositionally sensitive to victimization. In Study 2, long-term effects of adolescents' frequent exposure to video game violence on interpersonal trust and victim sensitivity were investigated. Cross-lagged path analyses show that the reported frequency of playing violent video games reduced interpersonal trust over a period of 12 months, particularly among victim-sensitive players. These findings are in line with the sensitivity to mean intentions (SeMI) model, and they suggest that interpersonal mistrust is a relevant long-term outcome of frequent exposure to video game violence.     

The changing face of aggression: the effect of personalized avatars in a violent video game on levels of aggressive behavior

Video game developments allow players to design their own personalized avatars. Previous research has shown that this capability increases levels of aggression within socially acceptable forms of violence. Using the general aggression model (GAM), the current study examined the effect of avatar personalization on behavioral aggression within a violent video game. Participants who played a violent video game and designed their own avatars were significantly more aggressive than those who played the same violent video game with a generic avatar, and were also more aggressive than those who played the nonviolent video game, regardless of whether or not they designed their own personalized characters. Limitations and directions for future research are discussed.     

Neglected Factors Bearing on Reaction Time in Language Production

The input to phonological reasoning are alternations, that is, variations in the pronunciation of related words, such as in electri[k] - electri[s]-ity. But phonologists cannot agree what counts as a relevant alternation: the issue is highly contentious despite a research record of over 50 years. We believe that the experimental setup presented may contribute to this debate based on a kind of evidence that was not brought to bear to date. Our experiment was thus designed to distinguish between alternations where phonological computation plays no role, and those where it has contributed to language production. The design manipulates two factors that to date have not been considered in experimental studies of language production: linguistic complexity and alternation specificity. The former is understood as extra processing demands issued by two types of linguistic activity, morphosyntactic and phonological. Our results show that reaction time latencies are longer when participants are burdened with both morphosyntactic and phonological tasks than when they carry out just a morphosyntactic task, and they are still shorter in absence of both types of demands. These results allowed us to address alternation specificity, that is, the fact that different alternations (within a language or across languages) may be driven by different production routines (an idea that is consensual among linguists but underdeveloped in the psycholinguistic literature). Our study shows that four different alternations in French produce alternation-specific signatures in reaction time latencies. These findings may thus redound to the advantage of psycholinguistic studies by identifying two new factors, as well as produce results that speak to the linguistic quarrels.     

A Predictive Approach to Nonparametric Inference for Adaptive Sequential Sampling of Psychophysical Experiments

We present a predictive account on adaptive sequential sampling of stimulus-response relations in psychophysical experiments. Our discussion applies to experimental situations with ordinal stimuli when there is only weak structural knowledge available such that parametric modeling is no option. By introducing a certain form of partial exchangeability, we successively develop a hierarchical Bayesian model based on a mixture of Pólya urn processes. Suitable utility measures permit us to optimize the overall experimental sampling process. We provide several measures that are either based on simple count statistics or more elaborate information theoretic quantities. The actual computation of information theoretic utilities often turns out to be infeasible. This is not the case with our sampling method, which relies on an efficient algorithm to compute exact solutions of our posterior predictions and utility measures. Finally, we demonstrate the advantages of our framework on a hypothetical sampling problem.     

"I help because I want to, not because you tell me to": empathy increases autonomously motivated helping

Empathetic arousal has been found to be a strong predictor of helping behavior. However, research has neglected the motivational mechanisms whereby empathetic concern elicits help giving. Three studies examined the extent to which autonomous and controlled motives for helping mediated the relationship between empathy and helping. Study 1 found that state empathy predicted willingness to offer time and money to help a person in need, with this relationship mediated by autonomous motivation for helping. Study 2 demonstrated that dispositional, empathetic concern predicted prosocial intentions and behavior via the mediation of autonomous motivation. Study 3 revealed that participants who focused on the emotions of another person in distress reported greater willingness to help than did participants who remained emotionally detached, with this effect mediated by autonomous motivation to help. Controlled motivation had no positive effects on helping in any of the studies. The results suggest that empathy encourages prosocial behavior by increasing autonomous motivation to help.     

Victim sensitivity and the accuracy of social judgments

Recent theorizing on the relation between victim sensitivity and unethical behavior predicts that victim sensitivity is related to an asymmetrical focus on cues associated with untrustworthiness compared to cues associated with trustworthiness. This hypothesis and its consequences for the accuracy of social predictions are investigated in this article. In Study 1, participants rated the trustworthiness of 35 computer-animated faces that differed in their emotional expression. People high in victim sensitivity rated neutral and hostile faces more untrustworthy than people low in victim sensitivity, whereas no such effect was found for friendly faces. In Study 2, participants predicted the cooperativeness of 56 targets on the basis of minimal information. The accuracy of predictions was negatively related to victim sensitivity, and people high in victim sensitivity systematically underestimated targets' cooperativeness. Thus, the asymmetrical focus on untrustworthiness cues among victim-sensitive individuals seems to impair rather than improve their social judgments.     

The effect of exposure duration on visual character identification in single, whole, and partial report

The psychometric function of single-letter identification is typically described as a function of stimulus intensity. However, the effect of stimulus exposure duration on letter identification remains poorly described. This is surprising because the effect of exposure duration has played a central role in modeling performance in whole and partial report (Shibuya & Bundesen, 1988). Therefore, we experimentally investigated visual letter identification as a function of exposure duration. We compared the exponential, the gamma, and the Weibull psychometric functions, all with a temporal offset included, as well as the ex-Gaussian, the log-logistic, and finally the squared-logistic, which is a psychometric function that to our knowledge has not been described before. The log-logistic and the squared-logistic psychometric function fit well to experimental data. Also, we conducted an experiment to test the ability of the psychometric functions to fit single-letter identification data, at different stimulus contrast levels; also here the same psychometric functions prevailed. Finally, after insertion into Bundesen's Theory of Visual Attention (Bundesen, 1990), the same psychometric functions enable closer fits to data from a previous whole and partial report experiment.