Effects of displacing aggression by annoyed and nonannoyed subjects

Low hostility-guilt subjects were either annoyed or not annoyed by an experimental confederate and given the opportunity to (a) displace aggression against a second confederate in a memory task, (b) go through a similar task but not aggress, or (c) sit quietly for a comparable period of time. All subjects were subsequently allowed to aggress against their annoyer in a “creativity” task. While displacement following annoyance did not reduce physiological arousal, it did reduce the amount of subsequent aggression against the annoyer. Conversely, the expression of aggression in subjects who were not annoyed resulted in an increase in physiological arousal, but not in subsequent aggression. No significant relationships were found between physiological arousal and subsequent aggression.     

Hemispheric asymmetry for alphabetic identification: Scaling analyses

In a test of the analytic-holistic theory of hemispheric asymmetry, 20 subjects saw brief presentations of upper-case letters in either the left or right visual half-field. A right half-field advantage was found for both accuracy of identification and vocal latency of erroneous responses. Multidimensional scaling, hierarchical clustering, and correlation analyses of the error patterns indicated similarities of processing between the hemispheres. The results were discussed in terms of loss of information from storage prior to processing.     

Bilateral tachistoscopic perception, handedness, and laterality.

Right-handed, familial left-handed, and nonfamilial left-handed males and females reported high- or low-imagery words which were located to the left and right of fixation in bilateral tachistoscopic displays. On each trial, an arrowhead appeared in the center of the display. The arrowhead pointed to either the left or the right half-field, indicating the order of report. Right-handers reported more accurately from the right half-field, and familial left-handers reported more accurately from the left half-field. The order of report results showed that right-handers were similar to nonfamilial left-handers; for left half-field presentation, both groups were more accurate when the arrowhead pointed to the left than when it pointed to the right (i.e., first report was more accurate than second report). There was a main effect of word imagery, but this factor did not interact with visual half-field. Thus, there was no evidence that representations of high-imagery words are lateralized differently than representations of low-imagery words. The results are discussed with respect to lateralization of memory for verbal material.     

MINDSCAPES AND LANDSCAPES: EXPLORING THE EXTENDED MIND

This brief article introduces a symposium discussing the extended mind thesis and its suggestive relation to religious thought. Essays by Mark Rowlands, Lynne Rudder Baker, Teed Rockwell, Joel Krueger, Leonard Angel, and Matthew Day present a variety of perspectives.     

Infant responses of ocular fixation to moving visual stimuli

Infants of 1, 2, and 3 months of age were presented with two checkerboard patterns, one stationary and the other moving in a horizontal oscillatory motion at one of eight rates. An observer who could see only the infant's head and eyes recorded, for each 30-sec trial, (a) the position of first fixation, (b) position of fixation at the end of each 5-sec interval, and (c) a final forced-choice judgment of the position of the moving stimulus. Results showed reliable differences in ocular behavior as a function of rate of stimulus motion for all three groups of infants.     

Literal meaning and psychological theory

This paper evaluates the psychological status of literal meaning. Most linguistic and philosophical theories assume that sentences have well-specified literal meanings which represent the meaning of a sentence independent of context. Recent debate on this issue has centered on whether literal meaning can be equated with context-free meaning, or whether a sentence's literal meaning is determined only given a set of background assumptions. Neither of these positions meet the demands of a psychological theory of language understanding. Sentences do not have well-defined literal meanings, regardless of whether these are determined in light of a set of background assumptions. Moreover, the putative literal meanings of sentences do not contribute in systematic ways toward the understanding of speakers' utterance meanings. These observations suggest that the distinctions between literal and metaphoric meanings, and between semantics and pragmatics, have little psychological validity.