小学儿童分享的发展及反馈信息的促进效应

研究以独裁者博弈任务为载体,考查了小学儿童分享行为的发展趋势,并探讨了不同来源的正向反馈信息对于儿童分享行为的促进效应。研究随机选取了小学二、四、六年级的学生共386名,每个年级的三个实验组在自然分享条件后分别接受来自权威、同伴和自我的正向反馈信息,继而完成后续任务。结果表明:(1)在自然分享情况下,六年级儿童的分享数量显著多于二、四年级儿童的分享数量;随着年级升高,儿童从倾向于利己分享逐渐转为以平分为主;(2)来自同伴和权威的正向反馈可以提高二、四年级儿童的分享数量;自我评价的正向反馈明显提高四、六年级儿童的分享数量。结论:小学儿童的分享数量和进行平分的人数比例都随年级升高而增加,来自同伴、权威和自我的正向反馈分别适用于特定年龄阶段儿童的分享行为促进。     

A pawn by any other name? Social information processing as a function of psychopathic traits

Past research has linked psychopathic traits with the ability to manipulate others, either through deception or violence. Recent observations in corporate settings suggest that enhanced interpersonal assessments might underlie this process, giving psychopathic individuals the ability to detect useful and/or vulnerable victims. To test this hypothesis, a non-forensic sample of males participated in a social memory experiment involving the recognition of faces and recalling the biographical details of artificially created characters differing in their relative career success and emotional vulnerability. High-psychopathy participants had near-perfect recognition for sad, unsuccessful female characters, but impaired memory for other characters. The findings suggest that psychopathic personality is associated with “predatory memory” even in the absence of overt criminality.     

Group information elaboration and group decision making: The role of shared task representations

Decision making groups often exchange and integrate distributed information to a lesser extent than is desirable for high-quality decisions. We propose that group members’ shared task representations play an important role in this respect, because groups are often insufficiently attuned to the task’s information elaboration requirements. Task representations emphasizing elaboration of decision-relevant information should therefore enhance decision-making performance. This should hold especially when group members realize that they share these task representations, because this realization removes psychological barriers to introducing new insights. Testing these hypotheses, we compared information elaboration and decision-making performance of control groups and groups receiving instructions emphasizing information elaboration in two experiments. Half of the experimental groups were also made to realize that they shared the elaboration instructions. As predicted, groups with task representations emphasizing information elaboration and the realization they shared these representations outperformed groups in the other conditions. This effect was mediated by information elaboration.     

A field experiment testing the utility of regulatory fit messages for promoting physical activity

Guided by regulatory focus theory, we examined whether messages tailored to individuals’ promotion- or prevention-goal orientation (regulatory focus) elicit positive thoughts and feelings about physical activity and increase participation in physical activity. Inactive participants (N = 206) were assigned randomly to receive either promotion-focused or prevention-focused messages encouraging physical activity. Two weeks after message exposure, we assessed participants’ thoughts and feelings about physical activity and physical activity behavior. Tailored messages that fit individuals’ regulatory focus led to greater physical activity participation and more positive feelings than non-fit messages, particularly in the promotion-focused condition. Furthermore, positive retrospective feelings about physical activity mediated the effects of the tailored messages on behavior. These findings provide support for regulatory focus theory and direction for enhancing the effectiveness of messages encouraging physical activity and other health behaviors.     

The situated person: Effects of construct accessibility on situation construals and interpersonal perception

Three studies examined the interrelationship between primed constructs, situation construal, and person perception. Previous research on priming and person perception has generally neglected the situational context. We predicted that when rich situational information is included, primed constructs can lead to assimilation effects on situation construals, which can in turn lead to contrast effects in person perceptions. Study 1 demonstrated that when situation information is included in the experimental context, primes lead to contrast in person perceptions. Study 2, employing a subliminal methodology, demonstrated that these effects could not be accounted for via previous explanations of contrast effects, such as correction-based mechanisms, that require overt recognition of the priming stimuli by the participants. Study 3 demonstrated that the contrastive effects of the priming stimuli on person perception obtained in Studies 1 and 2 are in fact due to the intervening assimilative effects of the priming stimuli on situation construal—that is, the primed constructs led to contrast effects on perceptions of the actor via their assimilative effects on perceptions of the situation in which that actor was embedded. Additionally, moderator variables demonstrated that this effect is most pronounced when the target actor’s behavior is described as relatively unambiguous or situation focus is increased.     

The Scandal of Deduction

This article provides the first comprehensive reconstruction and analysis of Hintikka’s attempt to obtain a measure of the information yield of deductive inferences. The reconstruction is detailed by necessity due to the originality of Hintikka’s contribution. The analysis will turn out to be destructive. It dismisses Hintikka’s distinction between surface information and depth information as being of any utility towards obtaining a measure of the information yield of deductive inferences. Hintikka is right to identify the failure of canonical information theory to give an account of the information yield of deductions as a scandal, however this article demonstrates that his attempt to provide such an account fails. It fails primarily because it applies to only a restricted set of deductions in the polyadic predicate calculus, and fails to apply at all to the deductions in the monadic predicate calculus and the propositional calculus. Some corollaries of these facts are a number of undesirable and counterintuitive results concerning the proposed relation of linguistic meaning (and hence synonymy) with surface information. Some of these results will be seen to contradict Hintikka’s stated aims, whilst others are seen to be false. The consequence is that the problem of obtaining a measure of the information yield of deductive inferences remains an open one. The failure of Hintikka’s proposal will suggest that a purely syntactic approach to the problem be abandoned in favour of an intrinsically semantic one.     

Regularized Multiple-Set Canonical Correlation Analysis

Multiple-set canonical correlation analysis (Generalized CANO or GCANO for short) is an important technique because it subsumes a number of interesting multivariate data analysis techniques as special cases. More recently, it has also been recognized as an important technique for integrating information from multiple sources. In this paper, we present a simple regularization technique for GCANO and demonstrate its usefulness. Regularization is deemed important as a way of supplementing insufficient data by prior knowledge, and/or of incorporating certain desirable properties in the estimates of parameters in the model. Implications of regularized GCANO for multiple correspondence analysis are also discussed. Examples are given to illustrate the use of the proposed technique. The work reported in this paper is supported by Grants 10630 and 290439 from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada to the first and the second authors, respectively. The authors would like to thank the two editors (old and new), the associate editor, and four anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments on earlier versions of this paper. Matlab programs that carried out the computations reported in the paper are available upon request.     

Valuing information and options: an experimental study

Participants in four studies were faced with everyday‐life decision scenarios involving risk, such as purchasing an airline ticket whose price may change. They were asked to state their maximum willingness to pay (WTP) for resolving the uncertainty with either perfect information or an option. The two are strategically equivalent, therefore, should be valued in the same way. Across all experiments, individuals tend to value the option more than the information. In addition, the distributions of responses reveal frequent and gross violations of normative bounds. Contrary to normative predictions, no relationship is found between individuals' valuation of the gamble and their reported WTP for information or option. Furthermore, although participants pay attention to the probabilities of outcomes in valuing the gambles, they ignore the probabilities in valuing uncertainty resolution. Several reasoning heuristics that participants use to come up with a value of information are identified, and it appears that the Information and Option contexts tend to trigger different heuristics. Shift in reference point and regret are consistent with the Information–Option valuation discrepancy. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

现实驱动和情节驱动对时间信息表征的影响

采用动窗技术,探讨在记叙文理解中现实驱动和情节驱动对时间信息表征的影响.实验1验证了强印象假设中时间转换的效应,说明读者是根据对现实的期望来建构情境模型的,具体来说,读者采用现实驱动的加工方式表征情境模型中的时间信息.实验2探讨现实驱动和情节驱动对时间信息表征的共同影响,结果表明,读者根据故事情节产生的愿望在一定程度上改变了现实驱动所产生的时间转换的效应,证实了情节驱动在表征情境模型中的时间信息时的作用.     

时间限制和成就动机对职业决策线索加工的影响

采用信息板技术探讨了时间限制条件下成就动机对职业决策线索加工的影响.结果表明:(1)时间限制影响了个体职业选择过程的平均决策时间、信息搜索深度和信息搜索模式,但未对决策满意度造成显著影响;(2)追求成功动机影响决策时的信息搜索模式,避免失败动机影响决策时的信息搜索深度.