Social deviance activates the brain’s error-monitoring system

Social psychologists have long noted the tendency for human behavior to conform to social group norms. This study examined whether feedback indicating that participants had deviated from group norms would elicit a neural signal previously shown to be elicited by errors and monetary losses. While electroencephalograms were recorded, participants (N = 30) rated the attractiveness of 120 faces and received feedback giving the purported average rating made by a group of peers. The feedback was manipulated so that group ratings either were the same as a participant’s rating or deviated by 1, 2, or 3 points. Feedback indicating deviance from the group norm elicited a feedback-related negativity, a brainwave signal known to be elicited by objective performance errors and losses. The results imply that the brain treats deviance from social norms as an error.     

A new look at the vulnerability of puerperal mothers — A clinical study of two inpatient families at the Cassel Hospital

SUMMARY

The paper reviews some previous writings by Dr. Tom Main and Dr. Peter Lomas about the work of the Cassel Hospital with puerperal mothers. It goes on to describe the case histories and treatment of two patients recently treated with their families. The emphasis is on actual material produced in therapy but with reference to other aspects of the much wider treatment structures employed by the Cassel, for example the nursing and the community. Important aspects focussed upon include the essential experience of good mothering in becoming a mother, how closeness to the infantile impulses and urges of a real baby can lead to profound measures of identification and projection, and the effects of motherhood on femininity and sexuality.     

Emotion and memory: A recognition advantage for positive and negative words independent of arousal

Much evidence indicates that emotion enhances memory, but the precise effects of the two primary factors of arousal and valence remain at issue. Moreover, the current knowledge of emotional memory enhancement is based mostly on small samples of extremely emotive stimuli presented in unnaturally high proportions without adequate affective, lexical, and semantic controls. To investigate how emotion affects memory under conditions of natural variation, we tested whether arousal and valence predicted recognition memory for over 2500 words that were not sampled for their emotionality, and we controlled a large variety of lexical and semantic factors. Both negative and positive stimuli were remembered better than neutral stimuli, whether arousing or calming. Arousal failed to predict recognition memory, either independently or interactively with valence. Results support models that posit a facilitative role of valence in memory. This study also highlights the importance of stimulus controls and experimental designs in research on emotional memory.     

There is no coherent evidence for a bilingual advantage in executive processing

Three studies compared bilinguals to monolinguals on 15 indicators of executive processing (EP). Most of the indicators compare a neutral or congruent baseline to a condition that should require EP. For each of the measures there was no main effect of group and a highly significant main effect of condition. The critical marker for a bilingual advantage, the Group × Condition interaction, was significant for only one indicator, but in a pattern indicative of a bilingual disadvantage. Tasks include antisaccade (Study 1), Simon (Studies 1–3), flanker (Study 3), and color-shape switching (Studies 1–3). The two groups performed identically on the Raven’s Advanced Matrices test (Study 3). Analyses on the combined data selecting subsets that are precisely matched on parent’s educational level or that include only highly fluent bilinguals reveal exactly the same pattern of results. A problem reconfirmed by the present study is that effects assumed to be indicators of a specific executive process in one task (e.g., inhibitory control in the flanker task) frequently do not predict individual differences in that same indicator on a related task (e.g., inhibitory control in the Simon task). The absence of consistent cross-task correlations undermines the interpretation that these are valid indicators of domain-general abilities. In a final discussion the underlying rationale for hypothesizing bilingual advantages in executive processing based on the special linguistic demands placed on bilinguals is interrogated.     

Lived Experiences of Men With Dissociative Identity Disorder

Dissociative disorders affect 29% of the clinical population, with women diagnosed 9 times more often than men. For this study, the authors used a phenomenological approach to uncover experiences of 5 men with dissociative identity disorder. Findings revealed 5 themes: history, alters, male gender expectations and identity, challenges, and strengths and support. Implications for practitioners are discussed.     

Listeners learn phonotactic patterns conditioned on suprasegmental cues

Language learners are sensitive to phonotactic patterns from an early age, and can acquire both simple and 2nd-order positional restrictions contingent on segment identity (e.g., /f/ is an onset with /æ/but a coda with /?/). The present study explored the learning of phonototactic patterns conditioned on a suprasegmental cue: lexical stress. Adults first heard non-words in which trochaic and iambic items had different consonant restrictions. In Experiment 1, participants trained with phonotactic patterns involving natural classes of consonants later falsely recognized novel items that were consistent with the training patterns (legal items), demonstrating that they had learned the stress-conditioned phonotactic patterns. However, this was only true for iambic items. In Experiment 2, participants completed a forced-choice test between novel legal and novel illegal items and were again successful only for the iambic items. Experiment 3 demonstrated learning for trochaic items when they were presented alone. Finally, in Experiment 4, in which the training phase was lengthened, participants successfully learned both sets of phonotactic patterns. These experiments provide evidence that learners consider more global phonological properties in the computation of phonotactic patterns, and that learners can acquire multiple sets of patterns simultaneously, even contradictory ones.     

Walking through a virtual environment improves perceived size within and beyond the walked space

Distances tend to be underperceived in virtual environments (VEs) by up to 50%, whereas distances tend to be perceived accurately in the real world. Previous work has shown that allowing participants to interact with the VE while receiving continual visual feedback can reduce this underperception. Judgments of virtual object size have been used to measure whether this improvement is due to the rescaling of perceived space, but there is disagreement within the literature as to whether judgments of object size benefit from interaction with feedback. This study contributes to that discussion by employing a more natural measure of object size. We also examined whether any improvement in virtual distance perception was limited to the space used for interaction (1–5 m) or extended beyond (7–11 m). The results indicated that object size judgments do benefit from interaction with the VE, and that this benefit extends to distances beyond the explored space.     

Is the Market Moral? Protestant Assessments of Market Society

Is the market moral? Do different Protestant traditions have competing views of “market society”? Despite the increasing diffusion of market logics in American society, scholars of religion have little empirical data on these questions. Employing discourse analysis of market-related topics in two prominent Christian periodicals over a twenty-year period, this paper compares evangelical and mainline Protestant evaluations of markets. We find that neither group views markets as redeeming, self-regulating, or value neutral, and both groups argue that markets require constraints. Evangelicals prioritize moral constraints on markets, while mainline Protestants prioritize governmental and democratic constraints. The degree of difference between the groups varies considerably by topic, however, depending on the degree of potential state intervention. We close by discussing our findings in light of recent debates over the relationship between religious conservatism and economic conservatism. We find that economic conservatism among evangelicals is driven at least as much by a commitment to collective voluntarism as by atomized individualism or free market ideology.