Pushing mom away: Embodied cognition and avoidant attachment

The objective of this research was to examine embodied psychological defense—the way in which defensive processes are manifest in basic motor responses. Forty-one participants were instructed to physically push or pull a lever in response to lexical stimuli presented on a computer display. Participants who were relatively avoidant with respect to attachment were faster to push the lever away from themselves when presented with the word “mom.” These results suggest that basic avoidant motives are automatically primed when attachment-related stimuli are processed, and that these tendencies manifest themselves in basic, motor-specific ways.     

Learning of syllable-object relations by preverbal infants: The role of temporal synchrony and syllable distinctiveness

The role of temporal synchrony and syllable distinctiveness in preverbal infants’ learning of word-object relations was investigated. In Experiment 1, 7- and 8-month-olds (N = 64) were habituated under conditions where two similar-sounding syllables, /tah/ and /gah/, were spoken simultaneously with the motions of one of two sets of objects (synchronous) or out of phase with the motions (asynchronous). On test trials, 8-month-olds, but not 7-month-olds, showed learning of the relations in the synchronous condition but not in the asynchronous condition. Furthermore, in Experiment 2, following habituation to one of the synchronous syllable-object pairs, 7-month-olds (n = 8) discriminated the syllables and the objects. In Experiment 3, following habituation to two distinct syllables, /tah/-/gih/ or /gah/-/tih/, paired with identical objects, 7-month-olds (n = 40) showed learning of the relations, again only in the synchronous condition. Thus, synchrony, which mothers naturally provide between words and object motions, facilitated the mapping onto objects of similar-sounding syllables at 8 months of age and distinct syllables at 7 months of age. These findings suggest an interaction between infants’ synchrony and syllable distinctiveness perception during early word mapping development.     

Psychological threat and extrinsic goal striving

Although people generally endorse intrinsic goals for growth, intimacy, and community more than extrinsic goals for money, appearance, and popularity, people sometimes over-emphasize extrinsic goals, to the potential detriment of their well-being. When and why does this occur? Results from three experimental studies show that psychological threat increases the priority that people give to extrinsic compared to intrinsic goals. This was found in the case of existential threat (Study 1), economic threat (Studies 2), and interpersonal threat (Study 3). Discussion focuses on the possible reasons why threat breeds extrinsic orientations.     

Reliability and concurrent validation of the IPIP Big-Five factor markers in China: Consistencies in factor structure between Internet-obtained heterosexual and homosexual samples

Previous studies have suggested the cross-cultural generalizability of a 5-factor structure for personality traits. In this article, we analyzed the utility of 2 versions (100-item and 50-item) of the IPIP Big-Five factor markers in both heterosexual (N = 633) and homosexual (N = 437) samples in China. Factor analysis within versions showed that both versions of these IPIP measures showed clear 5-factor orthogonal structures that were nearly identical to the American structure in both subject samples. The reliabilities of the five factors were quite high except for the 50-item measure of Agreeableness. The part-whole correlations between the 100-item and 50-item factors were high, as were the factor congruence coefficients between the heterosexual and the homosexual samples. Both versions of the IPIP Big-Five factor markers were strongly correlated with the scales from the Big-Five Inventory (BFI: John, Donahue, & Kentle, 1991), thus providing some concurrent validation in a Chinese context.     

College women’s value orientations toward family, career, and graduate school

This study was designed to examine how college women’s valuing of graduate education predicted their intentions to attend graduate school, using a new measure of the valuing of graduate school. A second purpose was to assess relations of college women’s perceptions of the relative importance of family and career to their valuing of graduate education. Two hundred and sixteen college women completed a newly developed survey that assessed these constructs. The items assessing task values were designed to assess components of task value defined by Eccles et al. (1983). Reliability and factor analyses demonstrated that the instrument adequately measured different components of task value. Multiple regression analyses demonstrated that components of task value predicted intentions to attend graduate school. The women were strongly career-oriented, and their orientations to career related positively to their valuing of graduate education.     

Effects of status and outcome on attributions and just-world beliefs: How the social distribution of success and failure may be rationalized

The distribution of success and failure to social groups is supported by lay theories about the characteristics of social groups and the causes of their outcomes, as well as by beliefs about entitlement of groups to succeed or fail. This paper presents a study where a target individual’s socio-economic status (high vs. low) and outcome in a major academic achievement task (success vs. failure) were manipulated in a 2 × 2 experimental design. It was found that high-status success and low-status failure, i.e. the system-consistent outcomes, were attributed relatively more to stable internal causes (ability), whereas high-status failure and low-status success, i.e. the system-inconsistent outcomes, were attributed relatively more to unstable causes (effort). Second, participants’ belief in a just world was higher in high-status success and low-status failure than in high-status failure and low-status success.     

Learning words’ sounds before learning how words sound: 9-Month-olds use distinct objects as cues to categorize speech information

One of the central themes in the study of language acquisition is the gap between the linguistic knowledge that learners demonstrate, and the apparent inadequacy of linguistic input to support induction of this knowledge. One of the first linguistic abilities in the course of development to exemplify this problem is in speech perception: specifically, learning the sound system of one’s native language. Native-language sound systems are defined by meaningful contrasts among words in a language, yet infants learn these sound patterns before any significant numbers of words are acquired. Previous approaches to this learning problem have suggested that infants can learn phonetic categories from statistical analysis of auditory input, without regard to word referents. Experimental evidence presented here suggests instead that young infants can use visual cues present in word-labeling situations to categorize phonetic information. In Experiment 1, 9-month-old English-learning infants failed to discriminate two non-native phonetic categories, establishing baseline performance in a perceptual discrimination task. In Experiment 2, these infants succeeded at discrimination after watching contrasting visual cues (i.e., videos of two novel objects) paired consistently with the two non-native phonetic categories. In Experiment 3, these infants failed at discrimination after watching the same visual cues, but paired inconsistently with the two phonetic categories. At an age before which memory of word labels is demonstrated in the laboratory, 9-month-old infants use contrastive pairings between objects and sounds to influence their phonetic sensitivity. Phonetic learning may have a more functional basis than previous statistical learning mechanisms assume: infants may use cross-modal associations inherent in social contexts to learn native-language phonetic categories.     

Sexually dimorphic effect of an acute smoking manipulation on skin resistance but not on heart-rate during a cognitive verbal task

In a two-day, two-session experiment where smokers male and female college-student subjects worked on a cognitive verbal task during either the first or second day, and on a cognitive spatial task on the second or first day, smoking was manipulated as an acute independent variable by requiring 10+ hours of pre-experimental abstention, and providing a cigarette during the 15-minute rest period between the two sessions. Non-smoker female and male subjects underwent the same experiment, and hence served as controls for the effects of this acute-smoking manipulation. Overall adaptation (decreased arousal) to the experiment was manifested in a significant increase in skin resistance level (SRL) in all subjects, but when this adaptation effect was statistically controlled, there was a significant smokers by sex interaction during the verbal task only, such that SRL was increased by the cigarette in males, but decreased in females. In contrast, the same analysis indicated only a marked increase in heart-rate (HR) due to smoking, which was unaffected either by sex or by whether the task was the verbal or the (easier) spatial one. We interpret the SRL results as reflecting a sex difference in the direction of transient psychological arousal, and discuss it in relation to evidence in the literature based on self reports, and to evidence (based on HR in this study and on blood pressure in other studies) on physiological (cardiovascular) arousal.     

Protection of animal research subjects

The use of experimental animals, mostly rodents, in biomedical research and especially in oncology and immunology should be acknowledged with respect, recognizing the contribution of animal experimentation in the fascinating scientific progress in these disciplines of research. It is an obligation of the investigator to justify the scientific and ethical aspects of each study requiring the use of animals. The international guiding principles for using animals in biomedical research are well defined and have been distributed worldwide by the International Council for Laboratory Animal Science (ICLAS) since 1956, when this Organization was founded. In Poland the ICLAS philosophy and principles are highly respected and were implemented firstly by the members of the Commission on Biology of Experimental Animals appointed in 1962 by the Department of Medical Science of the Polish Academy of Science in Warsaw. Animal Protection Acts, first proclaimed in 1928 were gradually modified and improved. Actual legislation (enacted in 1997, 2003 and 2005) is consistent with EU Directives (86/609/EEC) and follows the internationally recommended principles that include ICLAS guidelines concerning animal welfare and care condition in biomedical research. The problem of “alternative methods” is briefly discussed. Dr. Donald Boisvert, CCAC — Canadian Council on Animal Care A lecture on the subject of this paper was presented at the 6th International Bioethics Conference entitled ‘The Responsible Conduct of Basic and Clinical Research’, held in Warsaw, Poland, 3–4 June 2005. The author is the National Representative of Polish Academy of Science to the International Council for Laboratory Animal Science (ICLAS) and a Member of the ICLAS Governing Board.