Shame,guilt, and facial emotion processing: initial evidence for a positive relationship between guilt-proneness and facial emotion recognition ability

Shame and guilt are closely related self-conscious emotions of negative affect that give rise to divergent self-regulatory and motivational behaviours. While guilt-proneness has demonstrated positive relationships with self-report measures of empathy and adaptive interpersonal functioning, shame-proneness tends to be unrelated or inversely related to empathy and is associated with interpersonal difficulties. At present, no research has examined relationships between shame and guilt-proneness with facial emotion recognition ability. Participants (N?=?363) completed measures of shame and guilt-proneness along with a facial emotion recognition task which assessed the ability to identify displays of anger, sadness, happiness, fear, disgust, and shame. Guilt-proneness was consistently positively associated with facial emotion recognition ability. In contrast, shame-proneness was unrelated to capacity for facial emotion recognition. Findings provide support for theory arguing that guilt and empathy operate synergistically and may also help explain the inverse relationship between guilt-proneness and propensity for aggressive behaviour.     

Amodal processing of visual speech as revealed by priming

This study investigated the linguistic processing of visual speech (video of a talker's utterance without audio) by determining if such has the capacity to prime subsequently presented word and nonword targets. The priming procedure is well suited for the investigation of whether speech perception is amodal since visual speech primes can be used with targets presented in different modalities. To this end, a series of priming experiments were conducted using several tasks. It was found that visually spoken words (for which overt identification was poor) acted as reliable primes for repeated target words in the naming, written and auditory lexical decision tasks. These visual speech primes did not produce associative or reliable form priming. The lack of form priming suggests that the repetition priming effect was constrained by lexical level processes. That priming found in all tasks is consistent with the view that similar processes operate in both visual and auditory speech processing.     

Changes in the structure of children's isometric force variability with practice

This study examined the effect of age and practice on the structure of children's force variability to test the information processing hypothesis that a reduction of sensorimotor system noise accounts in large part for age-related reductions in perceptual-motor performance variability. In the study, 6-year-olds, 10-year-olds, and young adults practiced on 5 consecutive days (15 trials/day), maintaining for 15-s trials a constant level of force (5 or 25% of maximum voluntary contraction) against an object using a pinch grip (thumb and index finger). With increasing age, the amount of force error and variability decreased, but the sequential structure of variability increased in irregularity. With practice, children reduced the amount of variability by changing the structure of the force output so as to be more similar to that of their older counterparts. The findings provide further evidence that practice-driven changes in the structure of force output, rather than a decline in the amount of white noise, largely account for age-related reductions in the amount of force variability.     

Familiarity can increase stereotyping

Two experiments show that repeated exposure to information about a target person reduces individuation and thereby increases stereotyping of the target person based on social group memberships. The effect is not due to familiarity-induced liking (the mere exposure effect), nor is it mediated by increased accessibility of the target’s social category, nor by increases in perceived social judgeability. The results are most consistent with the use of feelings of familiarity as a regulator of processing mode, such that familiar objects receive less systematic or analytic processing. In everyday life, frequent exposure to another person ordinarily produces not only familiarity but also liking, individuated knowledge, and friendship, factors that may effectively limit stereotyping. But when previous exposure is unconfounded from these other factors, its effect can be to increase stereotyping.     

PHONOLOGY IN THE LEXICAL PROCESSING OF CHINESE: PRIMING TONE NEIGHBOURS

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The effects of statistical training on choice heuristics in choice under uncertainty

Kahneman and Tversky (1984) proposed that decision makers perceive choice uncertainty in two ways: (1) as a distribution of possible outcomes or (2) as a single uncertain outcome. Using statistical training as a factor that influences these perceptions, and thus the type of decision approach individuals use, we found that individuals with different levels of experience displayed differences in the decisions they made and in the choice heuristics used to make those decisions. Statistically naive individuals were more likely to prefer loss-minimizing alternatives, use a more non-compensatory heuristic, and spend more time on loss-related information than their statistically experienced counterparts. When a distributional cue, indicating the distributional nature of choice outcomes, was presented to both experience groups, the naive group was found to use a decision approach similar to the experienced group and to make similar decisions. The results are discussed in terms of the need to include factors that alter individuals' approaches to uncertainty in future behavioral models of uncertain choice.     

汉字词识别过程的形,音,义编码作用的研究

本文通过两个实验,采用汉字词形、音、义特征匹配任务,探讨了影响汉字词的形、音、义编码与提取方式的有关因素。实验一发现在速示条件下,对汉字词再认的成绩并不受字词的使用度的影响,反应时无明显变化,而主要受编码加工的深度影响。在形、音、义特征加工中,对音码的加工时间最长,再认的正确率最低;义码的加工时间较短,再认正确率最高;形码的反应时及再认成绩介于音码与义码之间。实验二在非速示条件下也获得了相同的结果。研究结果表明,在汉字词的形、音、义特征中,存在着编码加工深度的差异。     

Facilitation and disruption of lateralized syllable processing by unattended stimuli in the opposite visual field

The influence of lateralized unattended stimuli on the processing of attended stimuli in the opposite visual field can shed light on the nature of information that is transferred between hemispheres. On a cued bilateral task, participants tried to identify a syllable in the attended visual field, which elicits a left hemisphere (LH) advantage and different processing strategies by the two hemispheres. The same or a different syllable or a neutral stimulus appeared in the unattended field. Transmission of unattended syllable codes between hemispheres is symmetric, as revealed by equal interference for the two visual fields. The LH is more accurate than the RH in encoding unattended syllables, as indicated by facilitation in the left but not right visual field and a greater frequency of identifiable intrusions into the left than right field. However, asymmetric encoding strategies are different for attended and unattended syllables.     

Arguments for adjuncts

It is commonly assumed across the language sciences that some semantic participant information is lexically encoded in the representation of verbs and some is not. In this paper, we propose that semantic obligatoriness and verb class specificity are criteria which influence whether semantic information is lexically encoded. We present a comprehensive survey of the English verbal lexicon, a sentence continuation study, and an on-line sentence processing study which confirm that both factors play a role in the lexical encoding of participant information.