Mother and infant coordinate heart rhythms through episodes of interaction synchrony

Animal studies demonstrated the powerful impact of maternal-infant social contact on the infant's physiological systems, yet the online effects of social interactions on the human infant's physiology remain poorly understood. Mothers and their 3-month old infants were observed during face-to-face interactions while cardiac output was collected from mother and child. Micro-analysis of the partners’ behavior marked episodes of gaze, affect, and vocal synchrony. Time-series analysis showed that mother and infant coordinate heart rhythms within lags of less than 1 s. Bootstrapping analysis indicated that the concordance between maternal and infant biological rhythms increased significantly during episodes of affect and vocal synchrony compared to non-synchronous moments. Humans, like other mammals, can impact the physiological processes of the attachment partner through the coordination of visuo-affective social signals.     

Nonimmediate language style and inconsistency between private and expressed evaluations

It was hypothesized that certain language style variations would reflect apprehension about affirming the validity of communication content. Wiener and Mehrabian (Language within language: Immediacy, a channel in verbal communication. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts,1968) have identified a cluster of such variations called verbal nonimmediacy, which they describe as indicators of psychological distance between the communicator and his/her communication. Four experiments are reported. Experiments 1 and 2 showed that communication about positive manifestations of disliked traits and negative manifestations of liked traits was more nonimmediate than when positive manifestations of liked traits or negative manifestations of disliked traits were described. This was true both when one's own or another's personality traits were described. In Experiment 3, nonimmediacy was found to increase when communications involved clear fabrications about either one's liked or disliked traits. Experiment 4 showed that when self-regard was experimentally manipulated, low self-regard subjects showed more opinion conformity and nonimmediacy in their disclosures to a confederate than did high self-regard subjects.     

Morningness–eveningness and intelligence: early to bed, early to rise will likely make you anything but wise!

Research examining various psychological correlates of circadian type (also known as diurnal preference) has been, over the years, quite expansive. A notable omission within this research program would appear a systematic exploration of the relation between intelligence and morningness-eveningness. The present study redressed this imbalance. 420 participants performed two self-report inventories assessing circadian type, as well as measures of intelligence from two psychometric batteries: CAM-IV and the ASVAB. The results indicate that, contrary to conventional folk wisdom, evening-types are more likely to have higher intelligence scores. This result is discussed in relation to current theories concerning the nature of human cognitive abilities.     

Recipient mood states and helping behavior

Three studies investigated the effects of perceived recipient mood on helping behavior. Based upon Schwartz' (in Advances in experimental social psychology, Vol. 10, N.Y.: Academic Press, 1977) discussion of need-based helping, it was predicted that donors would perceive greater psychological need and would help more when the recipient's mood was negative than when it was neutral. These predictions were confirmed for females but not for males. The results also confirmed the hypothesis, derived from Schwartz (1977), that a negative recipient mood would elicit greater helping than a neutral recipient mood when this mood is perceived as changeable but not when it is perceived as unchangeable.     

Cerebral asymmetry for American Sign Language: The effects of moving stimuli

Previous studies of cerebral asymmetry for the perception of American Sign Language (ASL) have used only static representations of signs; in this study we present moving signs. Congenitally deaf, native ASL signers identified moving signs, static representations of signs, and English words. The stimuli were presented rapidly by motion picture to each visual hemifield. Normally hearing English speakers also identified the English words. Consistent with previous findings, both the deaf and the hearing subjects showed a left-hemisphere advantage to the English words; likewise, the deaf subjects showed a right hemisphere advantage to the statically presented signs. With the moving signs, the deaf showed no lateral asymmetry. The shift from right dominance to a more balanced hemispheric involvement with the change from static to moving signs is consistent with Kimura's position that the left hemisphere predominates in the analysis of skilled motor sequencing (Kimura 1976). The results also indicate that ASL may be more bilaterally represented than is English and that the spatial component of language stimuli can greatly influence lateral asymmetries.     

Increasing and decreasing intrinsic interest with contingent rewards: A test of cognitive evaluation theory

The study examined Deci's (Deci, E. L. Intrinsic motivation. New York: Plenum Press, 1975) hypotheses regarding the effects of contingent rewards on intrinsic task interest. Seventy-two male university students worked on a series of puzzles and were given either a high value reward ($1.50) or a low value reward ($.45). The money was given either contingent upon the simple execution of the task (task-contingent), contingent upon the ostensible attainment of a performance criterion level (criterion-contingent), or noncontingent and unexpected (control). Compared to the high payment control subjects, subjects who received the task-contingent high reward rated the task as less interesting, while subjects who received the criterion-contingent high reward rated it as more interesting. Also, subjects expressed less interest in the task after receiving the high task-contingent reward than the low task-contingent reward, but indicated greater interest after receiving the high criterion-contingent reward than the low criterion-contingent reward. It was concluded that substantial support was obtained for Deci's (1975) cognitive evaluation theory.     

Persons,animals, and identity

The paper is concerned with how neo-Lockean accounts of personal identity should respond to the challenge of animalist accounts. Neo-Lockean accounts that hold that persons can change bodies via brain transplants or cerebrum transplants are committed to the prima facie counterintuitive denial that a person is an (biologically individuated) animal. This counterintuitiveness can be defused by holding that a person is biological animal (on neo-Lockean views) if the “is” is the “is” of constitution rather than the “is” of identity, and that a person is identical with an animal in a sense of “animal” different from that which requires the persistence conditions of animals to be biological. Another challenge is the “too many minds problem”: if persons and their coincident biological animals share the same physical properties, and mental properties supervene on physical properties, the biological animal will share the mental properties of the person, and so should itself be a person. The response to this invokes a distinction between “thin” properties, which are shared by coincident entities, and “thick” properties which are not so shared. Mental properties, and their physical realizers, are thick, not thin, so are not properties persons share with their bodies or biological animals. The paper rebuts the objection that neo-Lockean accounts cannot explain how persons can have physical properties. To meet a further problem it is argued that the biological properties of persons and those of biological animals are different because of differences in their causal profiles.     

The relative importance of spatial versus temporal structure in the perception of biological motion: an event-related potential study

We investigated how the spatiotemporal structure of animations of biological motion (BM) affects brain activity. We measured event-related potentials (ERPs) during the perception of BM under four conditions: normal spatial and temporal structure; scrambled spatial and normal temporal structure; normal spatial and scrambled temporal structure; and scrambled spatial and temporal structure. As in a previous study, we identified two negative components at both occipitotemporal regions: N210 reflected general motion processing while N280 reflected the processing of BM. We analyzed the averaged ERPs in the 200-300 ms response time window and found that spatial structure had a substantial effect on the magnitude of the averaged response amplitude in both hemispheres. This finding suggests that spatial structure of point-lights elicits a stronger response in the occipitotemporal region than temporal structure for the BM perception.     

Attraction and social coordination: mutual entrainment of vocal activity rhythms

To investigate factors that affect the mutual entrainment of vocal activity rhythms, female general psychology students paired according to attitude similarity questionnaires engaged in 40-minute introductory conversations. Fourier analyses performed on speakers' on-off vocal activity demonstrated periodic oscillations in talkativeness. Although some dyads coordinated their vocal activity rhythms, speech accommodation was not predicted by attitude similarity or attraction and did not affect ratings of conversation quality. These rhythms of dialogue appear resistant to change, their behavioral momentum rooted perhaps in an underlying chronobiology.     

Acute nicotine withdrawal symptoms and anxious responding to bodily sensations: a test of incremental predictive validity among young adult regular smokers

Although previous work has found associations between panic and smoking, little research has investigated potential mechanisms by which smoking may contribute to panic problems. The present investigation evaluated the incremental validity of acute nicotine withdrawal symptoms (elicited by an average of 2 h of nicotine deprivation) relative to negative affectivity, anxiety sensitivity, and nicotine dependence in predicting anxiety responding to 3-min voluntary hyperventilation. The sample consisted of 90 regular smokers (46 females), as defined by smoking 10 cigarettes per day for at least 1 year, recruited through the general community. Consistent with prediction, greater levels of pre-challenge nicotine withdrawal symptoms uniquely predicted post-challenge intensity of panic symptoms and anxiety relative to other established factors. Findings are discussed in the context of how regular smoking may promote panic symptomotology.