Behold the voice of wrath: cross-modal modulation of visual attention by anger prosody

Emotionally relevant stimuli are prioritized in human information processing. It has repeatedly been shown that selective spatial attention is modulated by the emotional content of a stimulus. Until now, studies investigating this phenomenon have only examined within-modality effects, most frequently using pictures of emotional stimuli to modulate visual attention. In this study, we used simultaneously presented utterances with emotional and neutral prosody as cues for a visually presented target in a cross-modal dot probe task. Response times towards targets were faster when they appeared at the location of the source of the emotional prosody. Our results show for the first time a cross-modal attentional modulation of visual attention by auditory affective prosody.     

Risk and protective factors for delinquency among male adolescent immigrants at different stages of the acculturation process

This cross-sectional study investigated a model of risk and protective factors of the family, school, and peer environment that predict adolescent delinquent behaviour. Three social groups were compared: newcomer ethnic German adolescent immigrants, experienced ethnic German adolescent immigrants, and native adolescents. Based on theoretical assumptions about processes of acculturation, it was hypothesized that the strength of associations between the variables in the theoretical model would vary between newcomer immigrants and native adolescents and also between newcomer and experienced immigrants, but would be similar for experienced immigrants and native adolescents; these hypotheses were supported. Findings suggest that certain risk factors, such as parental violence and involvement with delinquent peers, are more strongly related to delinquency among newcomer immigrants than among experienced immigrants and native adolescents, whereas certain protective factors, such as parental knowledge and school bonding, seem to be relevant for experienced immigrants and native adolescents only. Results seem to indicate that migration can be seen as phase transition with a stronger impact of risk factors on the development of delinquency among newcomer immigrant adolescents. This has implications for studying acculturation processes in immigrant groups as well as for group-specific intervention programmes.     

The Impact of Perceived Justice on Contingent Value Judgments1

We asked citizens suffering from road traffic about their willingness to pay for the building of a new road bypassing their home village. Opponents of the project were asked what they would consider adequate compensation for accepting the bypass. The perceived fairness of a monetary exchange was the only predictor for the decision in principle to pay or to claim compensation, whereas the exact amount was determined by the expected utility provided by the bypass. Norms of equity or equality introduced in 2 experimental priming conditions biased respondents' willingness to pay. We suggest feeding back the results of contingent valuation surveys into the public debate, instead of interpreting them as a static measure of economic preferences.     

A Comparison of Help Giving to Individuals Versus Humanitarian Organizations1

The theories of social conduct, seriousness of need, and similarity; cost–benefit models; and individual differences in ideology are used to predict self‐reported help giving that is interpersonal or through humanitarian organizations. The results indicate that persons tend to be more helpful interpersonally than through organizations, are more responsive to characteristics of the needy when helping interpersonally than through organizations, and have stronger affective responses toward individuals than toward individuals represented by organizations. For both interpersonal and organization‐mediated assistance, perceived benefit to the donor strongly predicts help giving. Relatively conservative persons report less helpfulness, both interpersonally and through humanitarian organizations. Collectively, these findings offer an integrative approach to help giving and have implications for fundraising in the humanitarian sector.     

Base-rate neglect as a function of base rates in probabilistic contingency learning

When humans predict criterion events based on probabilistic predictors, they often lend excessive weight to the predictor and insufficient weight to the base rate of the criterion event. In an operant analysis, using a matching-to-sample paradigm, Goodie and Fantino (1996) showed that humans exhibit base-rate neglect when predictors are associated with criterion events through physical similarity. In partial replications of their studies, we demonstrated similar effects when the predictors resembled the criterion events in terms of similarly skewed base rates. Participants' predictions were biased toward the more (or less) frequent criterion event following the more (or less) frequent predictor. This finding adds to the growing evidence for pseudocontingencies (Fiedler & Freytag, 2004), a framework that stresses base-rate influences on contingency learning.     

Not all emotions are created equal: the negativity bias in social-emotional development

There is ample empirical evidence for an asymmetry in the way that adults use positive versus negative information to make sense of their world; specifically, across an array of psychological situations and tasks, adults display a negativity bias, or the propensity to attend to, learn from, and use negative information far more than positive information. This bias is argued to serve critical evolutionarily adaptive functions, but its developmental presence and ontogenetic emergence have never been seriously considered. The authors argue for the existence of the negativity bias in early development and that it is evident especially in research on infant social referencing but also in other developmental domains. They discuss ontogenetic mechanisms underlying the emergence of this bias and explore not only its evolutionary but also its developmental functions and consequences. Throughout, the authors suggest ways to further examine the negativity bias in infants and older children, and they make testable predictions that would help clarify the nature of the negativity bias during early development.     

Losing more than gaining from overall stable prices: the differential perception of increasing versus decreasing prices made the Euro look like a price booster

The present research examined whether price trend misperceptions can be explained by the differential perception of increasing versus decreasing prices. We expected price increases (losses to consumers) to be perceived as being more intense than price decreases (gains to consumers) of the same magnitude. This tendency, in turn, should be positively associated with how people perceive the overall price trend. To test this reasoning, participants in the first two studies were asked to compare German Mark (DM) and Euro prices. First, participants received a menu containing 21 dishes with DM prices, and their price trend expectations were assessed. Then, participants indicated for each dish to what extent the price had changed. Finally, participants' overall price trend judgments were assessed. In both studies, results indicate that price trend judgments were biased toward rising prices. In addition, price increases were perceived as rising more than price decreases of the same magnitude were perceived as falling. This tendency was positively associated with overall price trend judgments, even after controlling for expectations. Study 3 was to replicate these findings in a different domain to demonstrate the general nature and impact of the hypothesized effect. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Omissions and semantic errors in aphasic naming: is there a link?

Within a discrete two-stage model of lexicalization, semantic errors and errors of omission are assumed to be independent events. In contrast, cascading and interactive models allow for an influence of word form on lexical selection and thus for an inherent relationship in accounting for both error types. A group of 17 aphasic patients was assessed with a naming test controlling for semantic competition of the target items. Semantic errors were more frequent for targets with many competitors than for targets with few competitors while omissions were more frequent when few competitors were available. However, the overall sums of errors in both item groups were comparable. These results imply a common source of both error types and thus speak against a strictly serial model of naming.     

The appraisal of facial beauty is rapid but not mandatory

Facial attractiveness is an important source of social affective information. Here, we studied the time course and task dependence of evaluating attractive faces from a viewer’s perspective. Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded while participants classified color portraits of unfamiliar persons according to gender and facial attractiveness. During attractiveness classification, enhanced ERP amplitudes for attractive and nonattractive faces relative to faces of intermediate attractiveness were found for an early component around 150 msec and for the late positive complex (LPC). Whereas LPC enhancement conforms to previous studies employing various types of affective stimuli, the finding of an early effect extends earlier research on rapid emotion processing to the dimension of facial attractiveness. Dipole source localization of this early ERP effect revealed a scalp distribution suggesting activation of posterior extrastriate areas. Importantly, attractiveness-related modulations of brain responses were only marginal during the gender decision task, arguing against the automaticity of attractiveness appraisal.     

The Psychometric Costs of Applicants' Faking: Examining Measurement Invariance and Retest Correlations Across Response Conditions

This study examines the stability of the response process and the rank-order of respondents responding to 3 personality scales in 4 different response conditions. Applicants to the University College of Teacher Education Styria (N = 243) completed personality scales as part of their college admission process. Half a year later, they retook the same personality scales in 1 of 3 randomly assigned experimental response conditions: honest, faking-good, or reproduce. Longitudinal means and covariance structure analyses showed that applicants' response processes could be partially reproduced after half a year, and respondents seemed to rely on an honest response behavior as a frame of reference. Additionally, applicants' faking behavior and instructed faking (faking-good) caused differences in the latent retest correlations and consistently affected measurement properties. The varying latent retest correlations indicated that faking can distort respondents' rank-order and thus the fairness of subsequent selection decisions, depending on the kind of faking behavior. Instructed faking (faking-good) even affected weak measurement invariance, whereas applicants' faking behavior did not. Consequently, correlations with personality scales—which can be utilized for predictive validity—may be readily interpreted for applicants. Faking behavior also introduced a uniform bias, implying that the classically observed mean raw score differences may not be readily interpreted.