Belief about immutability of moral character and punitiveness toward criminal offenders

The present research examined the association between belief about immutability of moral character and punitiveness toward criminal offenders. Overall, participants who believed that moral character is immutable (entity theorists) were more punitive than those who believed that it is changeable (incremental theorists). More important, the present research identified two mediational paths: Entity theorists made more internal attribution of criminal behavior and held stronger expectation of offenders' recidivism, both of which in turn led to stronger punitiveness. Also, contrary to some researchers' speculation, entity theorists did not perceive less controllability in criminal behavior. Implications for implicit theory research and criminal justice research are discussed.     

Attention and the subjective expansion of time

During brief, dangerous events, such as car accidents and robberies, many people report that events seem to pass in slow motion, as if time had slowed down. We have measured a similar, although less dramatic, effect in response to unexpected, nonthreatening events. We attribute the subjective expansion of time to the engagement of attention and its influence on the amount of perceptual information processed. We term the effect time's subjective expansion (TSE) and examine here the objective temporal dynamics of these distortions. When a series of stimuli are shown in succession, the low-probability oddball stimulus in the series tends to last subjectively longer than the high-probability stimulus even when they last the same objective duration. In particular, (1) there is a latency of at least 120 msec between stimulus onset and the onset of TSE, which may be preceded by subjective temporal contraction; (2) there is a peak in TSE at which subjective time is particularly distorted at a latency of 225 msec after stimulus onset; and (3) the temporal dynamics of TSE are approximately the same in the visual and the auditory domains. Two control experiments (in which the methods of magnitude estimation and stimulus reproduction were used) replicated the temporal dynamics of TSE revealed by the method of constant stimuli, although the initial peak was not apparent with these methods. In addition, a third, control experiment (in which the method of single stimuli was used) showed that TSE in the visual domain can occur because of semantic novelty, rather than image novelty per se. Overall, the results support the view that attentional orienting underlies distortions in perceived duration.     

Chinese and Americans see opposite apparent motions in a Chinese character

The perceived direction of apparent motion can be influenced by both "top-down" factors, such as expectation, and by "bottom-up" or stimulus-driven factors, such as grouping (Tse, P., Cavanagh, P. & Nakayama, K. (1998). The role of parsing in high-level motion processing. In T. Watanabe, High-level motion processing - computational, neurobiological and psychophysical perspectives. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press). Here we report the results of a single experiment that pitted top-down cues against bottom-up cues in an apparent motion sequence over the successive strokes of a Chinese character. Although each stroke was in fact presented all at once, subjects raised in China tended to see apparent motion over a single stroke in the direction it would have taken when drawn by hand, even though bottom-up cues drive a percept of apparent motion in the opposite direction for observers unfamiliar with the Chinese language. There is therefore a learned component to motion perception arising from top-down expectations capable of overriding bottom-up cues to motion.     

Age differences in facial trustworthiness judgement based on multiple facial cues

Multiple facial cues such as facial expression and face gender simultaneously influence facial trustworthiness judgement in adults. The current work was to examine the effect of multiple facial cues on trustworthiness judgement across age groups. Eight-, 10-year-olds, and adults detect trustworthiness from happy and neutral adult faces (female and male faces) in Experiment 1. Experiment 2 included both adult and child faces wearing happy, angry, and neutral expressions. Nine-, 11-, 13-year-olds, and adults had to rate facial trustworthiness with a 7-point Likert scale. The results of Experiments 1 and 2 revealed that facial expression and face gender independently affected facial trustworthiness judgement in children aged 10 and below but simultaneously affected judgement in children aged 11 and above, adolescents, and adults. There was no own-age bias in children and adults. The results showed that children younger than 10 could not process multiple facial cues in the same manner as in older children and adults when judging trustworthiness. The current findings provide evidence for the stable-feature account, but not for the own-age bias account or the expertise account.     

Contrasting effects of a hot and a cool system in anger regulation on cooperative behaviours

Angry mood and aggression are strongly associated. However, it is not socially acceptable to express strong aggression. Non-cooperative behaviours might be another aspect of aggressive behaviour. The present study examines the expression of non-cooperative behaviours after angry mood induction. Eighty-five university students were randomly assigned to hot or cool focus recall of a past angry event. At baseline, trait aggression and rejection sensitivity were evaluated. Just before the recall task, participants' state of angry mood was measured by the Anger Mood Scale. Then they engaged in either hot or cool focus recall of a past rejection event. Immediately after the mood induction, angry mood was measured again. They were then instructed to play the Mixed Motive game with an unknown person. Participants in both groups became angrier after the mood induction. One-way analysis of covariance, controlling for trait anger and rejection sensitivity, showed that the hot-focus participants gave significantly fewer points to the other person than the cool-focus participants. Participants high on trait aggression sent more verbally aggressive messages. The findings suggest that non-cooperative behaviour is another form of anger related aggression and might be more socially important than overt aggression.     

Pop-out for illusory rather than veridical trajectories with double-drift stimuli

Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics - If a patch of texture drifts in one direction while its internal texture drifts in the orthogonal direction, the perceived direction of this...     

Fichte’s critique of physicalism – towards an idealist alternative

ABSTRACT

Though the perennial problem of consciousness has outlasted the idealists, the reductivist turn in contemporary naturalistic philosophy of mind and the non-reductivist reactions to it provoke us to re-think post-Kantian idealism. Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre makes for a classical case of non-reductivist (and probably even non-naturalist) approach to mind and his critique of ‘dogmatism’ is all the more relevant in this context. This article contains four sections. The first section is an introduction that explains why post-Kantian idealism is relevant to contemporary philosophy of mind. The second section pinpoints the placement issue that confronts not only current philosophers but also partially motivated Fichte's own philosophy. The third section is a short but essential remark about the normative and practical valence of ‘knowledge’ and ‘science’ in Fichte's traditional understanding of them. In the fourth section, I provide a reconstructive analysis of Fichte's understanding and critique of physicalism. Fichte's argument can be analyzed into two horns with each targeting reductivism and epiphenomenalism respectively. The final section is a brief but positive exposition on a necessary feature, namely reflexivity, of mind and the first-person perspective. Fichte's appropriation of intellectual intuition exemplifies a non-representationalist picture that connects content transparency with the active nature of mind.     

Teamwork and flow proneness mitigate the negative effect of excess challenge on flow state

Flow theory postulates that flow experience is the most intense under high-challenge/high-skill conditions, whereas an excess of challenge is aversive. This study explores potential moderators that may offset the negative impact of overly high challenge on flow state. The literature suggests that a situational factor, teamwork, and a dispositional factor, flow proneness, may moderate the relationship between challenge and flow state. We tested these moderators with Hong Kong Chinese students whose optimal condition for experiencing flow was biased toward low-challenge/high-skill. A total of 128 participants played puzzles in three challenge levels both alone and in pairs. Although challenge level was negatively associated with flow state, dyadic (team) game (compared with solitary game) and flow proneness mitigated the negative relationship between challenge and flow state. These findings shed light on factors that promote enjoyment in challenging activities even among people in cultures that are prudent about challenges.     

Other-race categorisation advantage in a binary- vs. ternary-response race categorisation task*

When categorising a face based on race, people respond faster to other-race faces than own-race faces [Other-Race Categorisation Advantage (ORCA)]. Five experiments were conducted to examine the ORCA in Chinese participants in race categorisation tasks. Participants classified a face either as Chinese vs. non-Chinese (binary response) or as Caucasian, Indian, or Chinese (ternary response). Experiments 1A and 1B replicated the ORCA with Chinese vs. Caucasian and Chinese vs. Indian faces, respectively, in a binary-response task. Experiments 2A/2B and 3 presented faces of all three races in the ternary- and binary-response tasks. Task type was manipulated between and within participants in Experiments 2A/2B and 3, respectively. The typical ORCA occurred in the binary-response task, but did not consistently so in the ternary-response task. These results indicate that neither the race-feature hypothesis [Levin, D. T. 1996. Classifying faces by race: The structure of face categories. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 22(6), 1364–1382] nor the differential processing hypothesis [Zhao, L., & Bentin, S. 2011. The role of features and configural processing in face-race classification. Vision Research, 51(23-24), 2462–2470] could fully account for the ORCA observed in the ternary-response task.     

Complete mergeability and amodal completion.

When image fragments are taken to correspond to the visible portions of a single occluded object, the object is said to 'amodally complete' behind the occluder. Kellman and Shipley (Kellman, P. J., & Shipley, T. F. (1991). A theory of visual interpolation in objective perception. Cognitive Psychology, 23, 144-221) argued that when the virtual contour extensions of such image fragments subtend an obtuse or right angle, the contours are 'relatable' and therefore complete. However, edge and surface relatability are neither necessary nor sufficient for completion to be perceived (Tse, P. U. (1999) Volume completion. Cognitive Psychology). Evidence is offered that completion is not driven directly by image cues such as contour relatability, but is driven, rather, by intermediate representations, such as volumes that are inferred from global image cue relationships. Evidence suggests that several factors, none of which is necessary for amodal completion to occur, contribute to the perceived strength of amodal completion, including similarity of pattern or substance, proximity, and good volume continuation or complete mergeability. Two partially occluded volumes are completely mergeable when they can be extended into occluded space along the trajectory defined by their visible surfaces such that they merge entirely with each other. Mergeability is not measurable in the image because it describes an inferred relationship among volumes that must themselves be inferred from the image.