Expected consequences of anger‐related behaviours

In a study with 140 participants (66 men, 74 women), we investigated behaviour outcome expectancies (cognitive, affective and relational) regarding a broad group of anger‐related behaviours (e.g. hit someone, run away). Results of a three‐mode component analysis indicated that behaviour outcome expectancies vary considerably, depending on the behaviour (aggressive versus nonaggressive ones), the consequence (consequences related to the self versus consequences for the anger) and the individual. The findings are discussed in the context of catharsis theory, emotion regulation and functionalistic accounts of emotion‐related behaviour. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Salvaging and secularizing the semantic contents of religion: the limitations of Habermas’s postmetaphysical proposal

The article considers Jürgen Habermas’s views on the relationship between postmetaphysical philosophy and religion. It outlines Habermas’s shift from his earlier, apparently dismissive attitude towards religion to his presently more receptive stance. This more receptive stance is evident in his recent emphasis on critical engagement with the semantic contents of religion and may be characterized by two interrelated theses: (a) the view that religious contributions should be included in political deliberations in the informally organized public spheres of contemporary democracies, though translated into a secular language for the purposes of legislation and formal decision making and (b) the view that postmetaphysical philosophy should seek to salvage the semantic contents of religious traditions in order to supply the evocative images, exemplary figures, and inspirational narratives it needs for its social and political projects. With regard to (a), it argues that the translation requirement impairs the political autonomy of religious believers and other metaphysically inclined citizens, suggesting that this difficulty could be alleviated by making a distinction between epistemologically authoritarian and non-authoritarian religious beliefs. With regard to (b), it argues that the salvaging operation is not as straightforward as Habermas seems to suppose and that social and political philosophy may not be able to tap the semantic power of religious traditions without relying on metaphysical assumptions; it concludes that, here, too, a distinction between authoritarian and non-authoritarian approaches to knowledge and validity may be useful.     

Semantic boost on episodic associations: an empirically-based computational model

Words become associated following repeated co-occurrence episodes. This process might be further determined by the semantic characteristics of the words. The present study focused on how semantic and episodic factors interact in incidental formation of word associations. First, we found that human participants associate semantically related words more easily than unrelated words; this advantage increased linearly with repeated co-occurrence. Second, we developed a computational model, SEMANT, suggesting a possible mechanism for this semantic-episodic interaction. In SEMANT, episodic associations are implemented through lateral connections between nodes in a pre-existent self-organized map of word semantics. These connections are strengthened at each instance of concomitant activation, proportionally with the amount of the overlapping activity waves of activated nodes. In computer simulations SEMANT replicated the dynamics of associative learning in humans and led to testable predictions concerning normal associative learning as well as impaired learning in a diffuse semantic system like that characteristic of schizophrenia.     

Generalized expectancies for negative mood regulation predict change in anxiety and depression among college students

Negative mood regulation (NMR) expectancies, or the beliefs held by individuals that, when faced with various manifestations of stress and negative affect, they can successfully cope with such mood states, have proven to be a most useful construct in the context of better understanding self-regulatory processes. In the present prospective study, we examined the predictive utility of NMR expectancies with respect to its ability to predict residual change in both depressive and anxiety symptoms over an 8-week timeframe in a sample of 322 college students. Initial correlational analyses revealed that, as anticipated, NMR expectancies were negatively correlated with depressive and anxiety symptomatology, as well as with maladaptive coping style. Conversely, NMR expectancies were positively associated with self-reported adaptive coping. A series of hierarchical regression analyses revealed that, even when controlling for age, sex, baseline levels of affective distress (depression or anxiety), and coping styles, NMR expectancies predicted change in both depressive and anxiety symptomatology. Implications of the findings pertinent to theory building and testing are discussed.     

Implicit associations between smoking and social consequences among smokers in cessation treatment

Explicit expectations of the negative and positive social consequences of smoking are likely to have substantial influence on decisions regarding smoking. However, among smokers trying to quit, success in smoking cessation may be related not only to the content of expectancies about smoking's social effects but also to the ease with which these cognitive contents come to mind when confronted with smoking stimuli. To examine this possibility, we used the implicit association test (IAT) [Greenwald, A. G., McGhee, D. E., & Schwartz, J. L. K. (1998). Measuring individual differences in implicit cognition: The implicit association test. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74, 1464-1480] to assess implicit cognitive associations between smoking and negative vs. positive social consequences among 67 heavy social drinkers seeking smoking cessation treatment in a randomized clinical trial. Results showed that the relative strength of implicit, negative, social associations with smoking at baseline predicted higher odds of smoking abstinence during treatment over and above the effects of relevant explicit measures. The only variable that significantly correlated with IAT scores was the density of smokers in participants' social environment; those with more smoking in their social environment showed weaker negative social associations with smoking. Results suggest implicit cognition regarding the social consequences of smoking may be a relevant predictor of smoking cessation outcome.     

Semantic re-interpretation and garden path recovery

Participant's eye-movements were recorded while they read locally ambiguous sentences. Evidence for processing difficulty was found when the interpretation of the initially preferred misanalysis clashed with that of the globally correct analysis, demonstrating the persistence of the earlier interpretation. Processing difficulty associated with the syntactic reanalysis was largely localised to the disambiguating region, with difficulty due to semantic persistence occurring later. The results show that semantic persistence is not limited to extreme cases of parse failure, and can occur even when reanalysis is relatively straightforward.     

From grammatical number to exact numbers: early meanings of 'one', 'two', and 'three' in English, Russian, and Japanese

This study examined whether singular/plural marking in a language helps children learn the meanings of the words 'one,' 'two,' and 'three.' First, CHILDES data in English, Russian (which marks singular/plural), and Japanese (which does not) were compared for frequency, variability, and contexts of number-word use. Then young children in the USA, Russia, and Japan were tested on Counting and Give-N tasks. More English and Russian learners knew the meaning of each number word than Japanese learners, regardless of whether singular/plural cues appeared in the task itself (e.g., "Give two apples" vs. "Give two"). These results suggest that the learning of "one," "two" and "three" is supported by the conceptual framework of grammatical number, rather than that of integers.     

Interference by process, not content, determines semantic auditory distraction

Distraction by irrelevant background sound of visually-based cognitive tasks illustrates the vulnerability of attentional selectivity across modalities. Four experiments centred on auditory distraction during tests of memory for visually-presented semantic information. Meaningful irrelevant speech disrupted the free recall of semantic category-exemplars more than meaningless irrelevant sound (Experiment 1). This effect was exacerbated when the irrelevant speech was semantically related to the to-be-remembered material (Experiment 2). Importantly, however, these effects of meaningfulness and semantic relatedness were shown to arise only when instructions emphasized recall by category rather than by serial order (Experiments 3 and 4). The results favor a process-oriented, rather than a structural, approach to the breakdown of attentional selectivity and forgetting: performance is impaired by the similarity of process brought to bear on the relevant and irrelevant material, not the similarity in item content.     

Activating event knowledge

An increasing number of results in sentence and discourse processing demonstrate that comprehension relies on rich pragmatic knowledge about real-world events, and that incoming words incrementally activate such knowledge. If so, then even outside of any larger context, nouns should activate knowledge of the generalized events that they denote or typically play a role in. We used short stimulus onset asynchrony priming to demonstrate that (1) event nouns prime people (sale-shopper) and objects (trip-luggage) commonly found at those events; (2) location nouns prime people/animals (hospital-doctor) and objects (barn-hay) commonly found at those locations; and (3) instrument nouns prime things on which those instruments are commonly used (key-door), but not the types of people who tend to use them (hose-gardener). The priming effects are not due to normative word association. On our account, facilitation results from event knowledge relating primes and targets. This has much in common with computational models like LSA or BEAGLE in which one word primes another if they frequently occur in similar contexts. LSA predicts priming for all six experiments, whereas BEAGLE correctly predicted that priming should not occur for the instrument-people relation but should occur for the other five. We conclude that event-based relations are encoded in semantic memory and computed as part of word meaning, and have a strong influence on language comprehension.