Mindfulness predicts less texting while driving among young adults: Examining attention- and emotion-regulation motives as potential mediators

Many young adult drivers read and send text messages while driving despite clear safety risks. Understanding predictors of texting-while-driving may help to indentify relevant targets for interventions to reduce this dangerous behavior. The present study examined whether individual differences in mindfulness are associated with texting-while-driving in a sample of young-adult drivers. Using path analysis, we tested whether this relationship would be mediated by the degree to which individuals use text-messaging as a means of reducing unpleasant emotions (emotion-regulation motives) and the degree to which individuals limit texting in order to focus on present-moment experiences (attention-regulation motives). Individuals lower in mindfulness reported more frequent texting-while-driving and this relationship appeared to be mediated primarily by emotion-regulation motives. Results may help inform the development of mindfulness-based interventions to prevent texting-while-driving.     

Impairment of gaze-directed spatial coding in recent-onset schizophrenia

Patients with schizophrenia show deficits in core cognitive functions as well as in social cognition. The aim of the present study was to test whether deficits in social cognition influence nonsocial, “cold”, cognition. Thirty-five patients with recent-onset schizophrenia (SC) and 30 healthy controls (HC) performed a Simon task with social and simple geometric stimuli. We investigated whether the Simon effect, the slowing of reaction times produced by stimulus incongruities in the task-irrelevant spatial domain, differs between patients and healthy participants as a function of the social nature of the cues. The Simon effect was generated by a schematic drawing of human eyes (social cues) or rectangles (nonsocial cues). Overall, patients had longer reaction times than HC. In the eye-like condition, the Simon effect was significantly stronger for HC than for SC. In HC the Simon effect was significantly stronger in the eye-like than in the rectangle condition. In patients, the Simon effect did not differ significantly between both conditions. Thus, the influence of social cues was greatly reduced in the patient group. Current psychopathology or antipsychotic treatment did not influence results. The present study supports earlier findings of altered processing of schematic social cues in patients with schizophrenia, especially when gaze is task-irrelevant.     

Memory benefits during visual search depend on difficulty

In three experiments we explored whether memory for previous locations of search items influences search efficiency more as the difficulty of exhaustive search increases. Difficulty was manipulated by varying item eccentricity and item similarity (discriminability). Participants searched through items placed at three levels of eccentricity. The search displays were either identical on every trial (repeated condition) or the items were randomly reorganised from trial to trial (random condition), and search items were either relatively easy or difficult to discriminate from each other. Search was both faster and more efficient (i.e., search slopes were shallower) in the repeated condition than in the random condition. More importantly, this advantage for repeated displays was greater (1) for items that were more difficult to discriminate and (2) for eccentric targets when items were easily discriminable. Thus, increasing target eccentricity and reducing item discriminability both increase the influence of memory during search.     

Understanding money's limits: People's beliefs about the income – Happiness correlation

It is claimed that the correlation between income and happiness is considerably weaker than people expect and recent research supports that contention. However, an important lesson from judgment and decision-making research is that judgments are constructed in response to the prevailing context, leaving open the possibility that some elicitation procedures may reveal accurate intuitions about income and happiness. We examined whether this is so. Study 1 participants ranked a set of empirical relationships according to the strength of correlation and we examined whether they ranked the income–happiness link where it actually falls in the set. In Studies 2 and 3, participants estimated the probability that someone with a higher income than another is also the happier of the two. The estimates of the participants were then compared to the actual probability based on the documented income–happiness relationship. Results indicate that, using these elicitation procedures, people have an accurate understanding of the relationship between income and happiness.     

Character strengths and well-being among volunteers and employees: Toward an integrative model

The endorsement and deployment of character strengths in occupational contexts are two promising components for understanding how people create well-being. In this study, a model integrating character strengths, satisfaction with occupational activities, and meaning and well-being was proposed and tested in two samples of volunteers and a sample of working adults. The model fit the data well in all three samples. Results demonstrated that deploying strengths at work provided key links to satisfaction with voluntary and paid occupational activities and to meaning among both young and middle-aged volunteers, and adult working women. Among adult volunteers and paid workers, endorsing strengths was related to meaning, while both endorsing and deploying strengths were related to well-being. Together, these studies provide a model for understanding how strengths may play a role in how both volunteer and paid workers find meaning, well-being, and satisfaction.     

Location- and object-based inhibition of return are affected by different kinds of working memory

Castel, Pratt, and Craik (2003) have shown that inhibition of return (IOR, the delayed response to a recently cued item) is disrupted by a secondary task that involves spatial working memory (WM), and they suggest that IOR is mediated by spatial WM. However, they did not specify what kind of IOR was involved. We used a dual-task paradigm to examine whether the two kinds of IOR (location- and object-based IOR) are affected by two kinds of secondary task that involve spatial and nonspatial WM, respectively. The results show that location-based IOR was disrupted by a spatial secondary task while the object-based IOR was disrupted by a nonspatial secondary task. The present study further elaborates the conclusion of Castel et al. (2003) by differentiating the effect of the two kinds of WM (spatial vs. nonspatial) on the two kinds of IOR (location based vs. object based).     

Subjective social status and intergroup attitudes among ethnic majority and minority children in Portugal

A measure of subjective social status (SSS) was examined among high (White), and low (Black and Roma) ethnic status children in Portugal within a developmental design including 6–8‐year‐old and 9–12‐year‐old children. White children favoured their in‐group over the Black and Roma out‐groups on the SSS measure, social preferences and positive as well as negative trait attributions. Generally, the Black and Roma showed equal SSS, preferences and trait attribution for their in‐group and the high status White out‐group, but not the other low‐status out‐group. With age White children generally demonstrated higher SSS for Black and Roma, preferred them more and attributed more positive traits. For low‐status groups, an age effect was found only for Black children who preferred the Roma more with age and attributed more positive traits. Changes on preferences and trait attribution depending on age‐group were mediated by SSS. It is concluded that minority group's SSS does not parallel the objective status hierarchy but, rather, is a dynamic reorganisation of group's relative positions serving strategies to cope with their minority condition.     

Central inhibition ability modulates attention-induced motion blindness

Impaired motion perception can be induced in normal observers in a rapid serial visual presentation task. Essential for this effect is the presence of motion distractors prior to the motion target, and we proposed that this attention-induced motion blindness results from high-level inhibition produced by the distractors. To investigate this, we compared the extent of the attention-induced motion blindness effect with performance on central inhibition tasks: Stroop colour naming and negative priming. A negative correlation between Stroop interference and motion performance reflected that low Stroop scores, indicative of strong inhibition ability, was associated with more severe impairments in motion perception. This association could not be explained by individual differences in fluid intelligence, task switching or response speed. Negative priming was not specifically associated with attention-induced motion blindness. The results confirm that attention can modulate motion perception and suggest that the processes involved may be shared with high-level cognitive abilities.     

互联网对大学生社会性发展的影响

本研究对110名本科大学生的上网情况和他们在对他人的信任感、主观幸福感及社会疏离感三方面的社会性发展进行了测评,结果表明,对互联网的依赖显著影响了大学生的主观幸福感与社会疏离感,上网时间与对网络的依赖程度呈显著正相关。     

The effects of conversation on attention and peripheral detection: Is talking with a passenger and talking on the cell phone different?

In this study conversation with a remote person (hands-free phone), an in-vehicle person (passenger), and a no conversation (baseline) condition were compared on measures of attention and peripheral detection. We held conversation pace constant so that any difference found in attention or peripheral detection could be attributed to the distinctive feature of the type of conversation (remote, in-vehicle). The difficulty level of the verbal task was included as a second independent variable. Forty-eight undergraduate students participated in all conditions of a within-subjects design. The results revealed that conversation resulted in slower reactions and fewer correct responses on both attention and Peripheral Detection tasks compared to no conversation, while conversation type (remote/in-person) did not make a significant difference. Difficulty of the verbal task affected performance on the Peripheral Detection task but not on the attention task. These findings imply that conversation has a negative effect on attention and peripheral detection which are important components of driving. This effect may be greater with difficult conversations.