Stereotype internalization and women’s math performance: The role of interference in working memory

It has long been argued that stigmatized individuals can ultimately internalize the stereotype alleging their inferiority. The present article investigated whether the internalization of the reputation of math inferiority that targets women can affect their math performance and whether this influence is caused by a disruption of working memory. A first study showed that stereotype endorsement had a significant impact on women’s statistic performance by lowering their self-evaluation of math ability even when controlling for prior achievement. A second study was designed to assess the possibility that the lower math performance displayed by women with low self-evaluation of math ability was due to interference in working memory. Using a dual task paradigm, this study showed that indeed women with low math self-evaluation displayed more errors and spent more time solving additions than women with high math self-evaluation, but mainly on difficult items of the dual task. The findings, which are congruent with an explanation in terms of a temporary disruption of working memory, are discussed.     

Beliefs m Realistic and Unrealistic Control: Assessment and Implications

ABSTRACT Scales were constructed to measure perceived control over controllable events (realistic control) and perceived control over uncontrollable events (unrealistic control). Internal reliability, test-retest reliability, and discriminant validity of both scales were adequate. Study 1 measured perceived personal control over hassles that judges rated on general controllability. For hassles very high in controllability, perceived personal control was related to belief in realistic control but not to belief in unrealistic control; for hassles very low in controllability, perceived personal control was related to belief in unrealistic control but not to belief in realistic control. Study 2 showed that participants high in unrealistic control belief (but not those high in realistic control belief) persevered more on a task that was in part uncontrollable. Study 3 showed that the combination of low realistic control belief and high unrealistic control belief predicted poorer future health, particularly for participants who have reported the experience of many negative events and/or hassles. The conditions under which unrealistic control results in maladaptive outcomes are discussed.     

Using dream interpretation to resolve group developmental impasses

This paper focuses on the use of dream interpretation in psychoanalytic group psychotherapy. One of the goals of the paper is to demonstrate that the kinds of dreams, manifestly about the group, offered at various points in the life history of the group, are influenced by, and, in turn, influence developmental phases in group. Dream interpretation also helps the therapist to identify emerging developmental themes in the group-as-a-whole as well as illuminate developmental impasses and resistances of the group. The second goal of this paper is to demonstrate how interpretations of these dreams can help lessen resistance and help the group to resolve the impasse. The paper first reviews some basic principles and approaches to dream interpretation in a group setting and then elucidates typical phases in group development. Two extended case examples are presented to illustrate how dream interpretation may be utilized to help the group move beyond the impasse.     

Differential response rates correlated with the presence of “neutral” stimuli

Five out of six rats, pressing a lever for food reinforcement, showed differential rates of responding that were correlated with the presence of a buzzer, under conditions where the buzzer might have been assumed to be neutral. The effect was demonstrated when the presence versus absence of the buzzer distinguished the components of Mult FI 2 min FI 2 min, as well as when the buzzer was present throughout entire sessions of simple FI 2 min for n/2 of every n such sessions. The cause of the phenomenon was not determined.     

Goal-relevant situations facilitate memory of neutral faces

Emotional situations are typically better remembered than neutral situations, but the psychological conditions and brain mechanisms underlying this effect remain debated. Stimulus valence and affective arousal have been suggested to explain the major role of emotional stimuli in memory facilitation. However, neither valence nor arousal are sufficient affective dimensions to explain the effect of memory facilitation. Several studies showed that negative and positive details are better remembered than neutral details. However, other studies showed that neutral information encoded and coupled with arousal did not result in a memory advantage compared with neutral information not coupled with arousal. Therefore, we suggest that the fundamental affective dimension responsible for memory facilitation is goal relevance. To test this hypothesis at behavioral and neural levels, we conducted a functional magnetic resonance imaging study and used neutral faces embedded in goal-relevant or goal-irrelevant daily life situations. At the behavioral level, we found that neutral faces encountered in goal-relevant situations were better remembered than those encountered in goal-irrelevant situations. To explain this effect, we studied neural activations involved in goal-relevant processing at encoding and in subsequent neutral face recognition. At encoding, activation of emotional brain regions (anterior cingulate, ventral striatum, ventral tegmental area, and substantia nigra) was greater for processing of goal-relevant situations than for processing of goal-irrelevant situations. At the recognition phase, despite the presentation of neutral faces, brain activation involved in social processing (superior temporal sulcus) to successfully remember identities was greater for previously encountered faces in goal-relevant than in goal-irrelevant situations.     

Strategy selection and aging: impact of item concreteness in paired-associate task

The aim of this study was to examine the effect of aging on strategy selection in a paired-associate word task. Twenty-eight younger adults (mean age = 20.68 years) and 28 older adults (mean age = 68.46 years) studied 39 pairs of concrete, middle and abstract words. The concreteness level was manipulated in order to modify the benefit of imagery and sentence strategies in relation to task characteristics. The results showed an age difference in strategy selection in relation to concreteness level. Older adults showed less adaptive strategy selection for the imagery strategy but not for the sentence strategy. Change in strategy selection did not seem to be explained by better efficiency of sentence than imagery, so this study suggests a partial reduction of strategy adaptivity during aging.     

How French Speaking Children Understand Promises: The Role of the Future Tense

The purpose of this study was to gain insight into one of the textual characteristics of promises: the future tense as a temporal marker of utterances. More specifically, our aim was to determine the role of the future tense in the comprehension of promises by native French-speaking children between the ages of 3 and 9. In line with speech act theory, a promise is defined here as a commitment on the part of a speaker to perform a future act. Promise comprehension is assumed to be dependent upon textual characteristics (the linguistic form of the utterance, temporal markers in the utterance, etc.) as well as contextual characteristics (listener's desire, social implications of the promise, etc.). Children performed a story-completion task from two-character stories presented in comic strip form. The stories varied in two ways: the verb tense (immediate future, simple future, or past) and the utterance production context (specific or neutral). The main results can be summarized as follows: (1) The 3- and 6-year-olds based their interpretation of the promises primarily on the contextual characteristics of the communication situation; (2) after the age of 6, the children began to rely on temporal markers in the utterances whenever the immediate future tense was used and promise-specific contextual information was lacking; and (3) the 9-year-olds always based their interpretation of the promises on temporal cues in the utterance. The results are discussed in the framework of interactionist theories of development and models of language functioning.     

Collective guilt,moral outrage,and support for helping the poor: A matter of system versus in‐group responsibility framing

We examined how the framing of responsibility for reducing socio‐economic inequality affects individuals' emotional reactions towards the poor and the willingness to engage in prosocial actions. Attribution of responsibility to either the system (government and institutions), the less deprived in‐group, or the disadvantaged out‐group (poor) was measured (Study 1) and manipulated (Study 2). Consistent with our hypotheses, moral outrage was higher than collective guilt when system responsibility for inequalities was put forth, but collective guilt arose to reach the level of moral outrage when in‐group responsibility was emphasized. Moreover, distinguishing between collective guilt for action and for inaction, we found guilt for inaction more difficult and thus less likely to arise, unless responsibility was put on the in‐group. Collective emotions were also found to be negatively linked to system justification motivation illustrating the palliative function of legitimization processes. Finally, moral outrage predicted the willingness to act upon socio‐economic inequalities both when the system's and in‐group's responsibility was emphasized, whereas collective guilt for action (but not for inaction) predicted support for prosocial actions only when the in‐group's responsibility was engaged. These findings suggest that the specific group‐based emotions in response to poverty depend on whether the system or the in‐group is held responsible and differentially predict individuals' commitment to act.     

Simultaneous and independent acquisition of multisensory and unisensory associations

Although humans are almost constantly exposed to stimuli from multiple sensory modalities during daily life, the processes by which we learn to integrate information from multiple senses to acquire knowledge of multisensory objects are not well understood. Here, we present results of a novel audio-visual statistical learning procedure where participants are passively exposed to a rapid serial presentation of arbitrary audio-visual pairings (comprised of artificial/ synthetic audio and visual stimuli). Following this exposure, participants were tested with a two-interval forced-choice procedure in which their degree of familiarity with the experienced audio-visual pairings was evaluated against novel audio-visual combinations drawn from the same stimulus set. Our results show that subjects acquire knowledge of visual-visual, audio-audio, and audio-visual stimulus associations and that the learning of these types of associations occurs in an independent manner.     

Visual experience influences the interactions between fingers and numbers

Though a clear interaction between finger and number representations has been demonstrated, what drives the development of this intertwining remains unclear. Here we tested early blind, late blind and sighted control participants in two counting tasks, each performed under three different conditions: a resting condition, a condition requiring hands movements and a condition requiring feet movements. In the resting condition, every sighted and late blind spontaneously used their fingers, while the majority of early blind did not. Sighted controls and late blind were moreover selectively disrupted by the interfering hand condition, while the early blind who did not use the finger-counting strategy remained unaffected by the interference conditions. These results therefore demonstrate that visual experience plays an important role in implementing the sensori-motor habits that drive the development of finger–number interactions.