The impact of emotional expressions on children’s trust judgments

Research on the development of selective trust has shown that young children do not indiscriminately trust all potential informants. They are likely to seek and endorse information from individuals who have proven competent or benign in the past. However, research on trust among adults raises the possibility that children might also be influenced by the emotions expressed by potential informants. In particular, they might trust individuals expressing more positive emotion. Indeed, young children’s trust in particular informants based on their past behaviour might be undermined by their currently expressed emotions. To examine this possibility, we tested the selective trust of fifty 4- and 5-year-olds in two steps. We first confirmed that children are likely to invest more trust in individuals expressing more positive emotion. We then showed that even if children have already formed an impression of two potential informants based on their behavioural record, their choices about whose claims to trust are markedly influenced by the degree of positive emotion currently expressed by the two informants. By implication, the facial emotions expressed by potential informants can undermine young children’s selective trust based on the behavioural record of those informants.     

自我主观标准决定执行任务和观察任务中的结果评价

为了解结果的自我相关性对执行任务和观察任务中内侧额叶负波的影响, 研究使用事件相关电位技术观测男女被试在两种任务中, 知觉自己结果和他人结果时的神经活动。结果发现执行任务中内侧额叶负波波幅大于观察任务; 在执行任务中, 男性的内侧额叶负波相对于他人结果, 观察自己结果时的波幅更大; 在观察任务中, 女性的内侧额叶负波相对于自己结果, 观察他人结果时的波幅更大, 这些结果说明内侧额叶负波反映了个体按照主观标准对结果的情绪动机意义进行监测, 男女对社会信息的奖赏评价具有不同的方向性。     

The advantage of mentally rotating clockwise

The time taken to decide whether a character is shown in its mirror or normal version has been shown to increase approximately linearly with the angular departure from an up-right position. Additionally, in some studies, decisions took longer for clockwise tilted characters than for counterclockwise tilted ones. Other studies do not report the latter effect. We argue that inconsistencies across studies are caused by variance in participants' strategies. The task employed here was specifically designed to bring these strategies and thereby the direction of rotation under experimental control. From the EEG recorded during the rotation period, we extracted an event-related slow potential whose amplitude is sensitive to the amount of mental rotation. In both strategy conditions, the slow potential's amplitude was lower for clockwise than for counterclockwise rotations. We take this as evidence that mental rotation of alphanumeric characters is easier in a clockwise than in a counterclockwise direction.     

Word order in sentence processing: an experimental study of verb placement in German

We examine the question of whether the human comprehension device exhibits word-order preferences during on-line sentence comprehension. The focus is on the positioning of finite verbs and auxiliaries relative to subjects and objects in German. Results from three experiments (using self-paced reading and event-related brain potentials) show that native speakers of German prefer to process finite verbs in second position (i.e., immediately after the subject and before the object). We will account for this order preference in terms of the relative processing costs associated with SV_fO and SOV_f. Our finding that word-order preferences play an important role in the on-line comprehension of German sentences is compatible with results from previous studies on English and other languages.     

Why are negative behaviours likely to be immediately invoked traits? The effects of valence and frequency on spontaneous trait inferences

People make trait inferences immediately when observing others’ behaviours. Previous studies reported that this spontaneous trait inference (STI) occurs more strongly from negative behaviours than from positive behaviours. However, what is responsible for this negativity bias in STI is unclear. In this study, two experiments investigated the effects of valence (an event's affective positivity or negativity) and frequency (how frequently the behaviour is observed in everyday life) on the occurrence of STI using an adapted version of a savings‐in‐relearning paradigm. Experiment 1 revealed that only valence affected the frequent occurrence of STI. In addition, the instructions to suppress impression formation or to focus attention on an actor's face made no difference to the results. In Experiment 2, the negativity bias in STIs was shown a week after exposure to the behavioural stimuli. These results suggest that the negativity bias in STIs occurs robustly, and the negative valence of observed behaviour is mostly responsible for the negativity bias in STI. The importance of immediate categorization of negative stimuli is discussed in terms of ecological priority.     

Is auditory awareness negativity confounded by performance?

Research suggests that the electrophysiological correlates of consciousness are similar in hearing as in vision: the auditory awareness negativity (AAN) and the late positivity (LP). However, from a recently proposed signal-detection perspective, these correlates may be confounded by performance, as the strength of the internal responses differs between aware and unaware trials. Here, we tried to apply this signal-detection approach to correct for performance in an auditory discrimination and detection task (N = 28). A large proportion of subjects had to be excluded because even a small response bias distorted the correction. For the remaining subjects, the correction mainly increased noise in the measurement. Furthermore, the signal-detection approach is theoretically problematic because it may isolate post-perceptual processes and eliminate awareness-related activity. Therefore, we conclude that AAN and LP are not confounded by performance and that the contrastive analysis identifies both as correlates of awareness.