Social categorization as a function of priming

The present study investigates the effect of priming on the use of social categorizations. Using sex and race as stimulus categorizations, previous studies failed to confirm the hypothesis that priming one of the two available categorizations would enhance the use of the primed categorization relation to the not-primed categorization. As suggested by Stangor, Lynch, Duan and Glass (1992). a momentary increase in accessibility may be insufficient to further enhance the use of highly accessible categorizations like race and sex, but it may be expected that priming will increase the use of categorizations which are less habitually used in daily life. The results of the present experiment support the hypothesis that, when the stimulus categorizations are weakly accessible (university major, university town), the relative use of the previously primed categorizations does indeed increase, compared to the alternative, not-primed, categorization.     

Grasp-Based Functional Coupling Between Reach- and Grasp-Related Components of Forelimb Muscle Activity

How are appropriate combinations of forelimb muscles selected during reach-to-grasp movements in the presence of neuromotor redundancy and important task-related constraints? The authors tested whether grasp type or target location preferentially influence the selection and synergistic coupling between forelimb muscles during reach-to-grasp movements. Factor analysis applied to 14–20 forelimb electromyograms recorded from monkeys performing reach-to-grasp tasks revealed 4–6 muscle components that showed transport/preshape- or grasp-related features. Weighting coefficients of transport/preshape-related components demonstrated strongest similarities for reaches that shared the same grasp type rather than the same target location. Scaling coefficients of transport/preshape- and grasp-related components showed invariant temporal coupling. Thus, grasp type influenced strongly both transport/preshape- and grasp-related muscle components, giving rise to grasp-based functional coupling between forelimb muscles.     

Facing a Disruptive Face: Embodiment in the Everyday Experiences of “Disfigured” Individuals

In recent years, facial difference is increasingly on the public and academic agenda. This is evidenced by the growing public presence of individuals with an atypical face, and the simultaneous emergence of research investigating the issues associated with facial variance. The scholarship on facial difference approaches this topic either through a medical and rehabilitation perspective, or a psycho-social one. However, having a different face also encompasses an embodied dimension. In this paper, we explore this embodied dimension by interpreting the stories of individuals with facial limb absence against the background of phenomenological theories of the body, illness and disability. Our findings suggest that the atypical face disrupts these individuals’ engagement with everyday projects when it gives rise to disruptive perceptions, sensations, and observations. The face then ceases to be the absent background to perception, and becomes foregrounded in awareness. The disruptions evoked by facial difference call for adjustments: as they come to terms with their altered face, the participants in our study gradually develop various new bodily habits that re-establish their face’s absence, or relate to its disruptive presence. It is through these emergent habits that facial difference comes to be embodied. By analyzing the everyday experiences of individuals with facial limb absence, this article provides a much-needed exploration of the embodied aspects of facial difference. It also exemplifies how a phenomenological account of illness and disability can do justice both to the impairments and appearance issues associated with atypical embodiment.     

The Influence of Control on Belief in Conspiracy Theories: Conceptual and Applied Extensions

Threats to control have been found to increase belief in conspiracy theories. We argue, however, that previous research observing this effect was limited in two ways. First, previous research did not exclude the possibility that affirming control might reduce conspiracy beliefs. Second, because of artificial lab procedures, previous findings provide little information about the external validity of the control threat–conspiracy belief relationship. In Study 1, we address the first limitation and find that affirming control indeed reduces belief in conspiracy theories as compared with a neutral baseline condition. In Study 2, we address the second limitation of the literature. In a large‐scale US sample, we find that a societal threat to control, that citizens actually experienced, predicts belief in a range of common conspiracy theories. Taken together, these findings increase insight in the fundamental relationship between the human need for control and the tendency to believe in conspiracy theories. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Motivational Basis of Personality Traits: A Meta‐Analysis of Value‐Personality Correlations

We investigated the relationships between personality traits and basic value dimensions. Furthermore, we developed novel country‐level hypotheses predicting that contextual threat moderates value‐personality trait relationships. We conducted a three‐level v‐known meta‐analysis of correlations between Big Five traits and Schwartz's (1992) 10 values involving 9,935 participants from 14 countries. Variations in contextual threat (measured as resource threat, ecological threat, and restrictive social institutions) were used as country‐level moderator variables. We found systematic relationships between Big Five traits and human values that varied across contexts. Overall, correlations between Openness traits and the Conservation value dimension and Agreeableness traits and the Transcendence value dimension were strongest across all samples. Correlations between values and all personality traits (except Extraversion) were weaker in contexts with greater financial, ecological, and social threats. In contrast, stronger personality‐value links are typically found in contexts with low financial and ecological threats and more democratic institutions and permissive social context. These effects explained on average more than 10% of the variability in value‐personality correlations. Our results provide strong support for systematic linkages between personality and broad value dimensions, but they also point out that these relations are shaped by contextual factors.     

A clinician survey of speech and non-speech characteristics of neurogenic stuttering

This study presents survey data on 58 Dutch-speaking patients with neurogenic stuttering following various neurological injuries. Stroke was the most prevalent cause of stuttering in our patients, followed by traumatic brain injury, neurodegenerative diseases, and other causes. Speech and non-speech characteristics were analyzed separately for these four etiology groups. Results suggested possible group differences, including site of lesion and influence of speech conditions on stuttering. Other characteristics, such as within-word localization of disfluencies and presence of secondary behaviors were comparable across the etiology groups. The implications of our results for the diagnosis of neurogenic stuttering will be discussed.

Educational objectives: After reading this article, the reader will be able to: (1) provide a concise overview of the main literature on neurogenic stuttering; (2) discuss the speech and non-speech characteristics of neurogenic stuttering; (3) provide an overview of current clinical practices for intervention with neurogenic stuttering patients and their perceived outcome.     

Development and validation of a Dutch translation of the Big Five Inventory (BFI)

In this article, we describe the translation and validation of the Dutch Big Five Inventory (BFI; John & Srivastava, 1999), a short instrument designed to measure the Big Five factors of personality. We obtained evidence of the instrument's good psychometric properties in terms of factorial equivalence to the English original and other BFI translations and the relative independence and internal consistency of the five scales. The findings suggest that the instrument can be used in diverse age groups without substantial changes in factor structure. The Dutch BFI scales showed similar demographic correlates as the English original, with higher Agreeableness and Conscientiousness and lower Neuroticism values in older participants, higher Neuroticism values in women, and higher Openness and Conscientiousness values in better educated participants. Use of the Dutch BFI will allow researchers to integrate their findings with the extant Big Five research literature. The brevity of the instrument will be appealing to researchers who are concerned about taxing the time and motivation of their participants.     

Interference Control in Children with Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder

The view that Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is associated with a diminished ability to control interfference is controversial and based exclusively on results of (verbal)-visual interference tasks, primarily the Stroop Color Word task. The present study compares medication-naïve children with ADHD (n?=?35 and n?=?51 in Experiments 1 and 2, respectively) with normal controls (n?=?26 and n?=?32, respectively) on two interference tasks to assess interference control in both the auditory and the visual modality: an Auditory Stroop task and a Simon task. Both groups showed reliable but equal degrees of interference on both tasks, suggesting that children with ADHD do not differ from normal controls in their ability to control interference in either modality.     

Motivated information processing and group decision-making: Effects of process accountability on information processing and decision quality

Integrating dual-process models [Chaiken, S., & Trope, Y. (Eds.). (1999). Dual-process theories in social psychology. NewYork: Guilford Press] with work on information sharing and group decision-making [Stasser, G., & Titus, W. (1985). Pooling of unshared information in group decision making: biased information sampling during discussion. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 48, 1467-1478.], we predicted that groups with high epistemic motivation engage in more information-driven and less preference-driven interaction, and achieve better decisions. An experiment manipulating process accountability showed that groups under process accountability experienced greater need for more information, repeated unshared information more often, and more often chose the correct decision alternative. Mediation analysis established that epistemic motivation produced high quality decisions because it stimulated systematic information processing. Results also revealed that preference heterogeneity stimulated information-driven interaction and led to higher decision quality.