I did not expect to be dreaming: Explaining realization in lucid dreams with a Bayesian framework

The commonsense view is that a lucid dream starts when the dreamer realizes that they are currently dreaming. The notion of realization, however, has been accepted at face value, with little consideration of whether the dreamer realizes that they are dreaming in the sense of actual reasoning, or if it is a mere epiphenomenon of lucid dream initiation. This article offers a solution to this problem by, first, arguing that the transition to lucidity can occur as a result of successful reasoning, and second, building a model of this reasoning in terms of probabilistic reasoning. The established Bayesian model explains realization in lucid dreams taking under consideration two factors: the beliefs that the dreamer holds on what is generally probable and improbable, and the dreamer’s admissibility of being in a dream. Defended against important objections, the model offers an explanation of lucid dream initiation, relevant for future research on dreaming.     

Direct social perception of others’ subjective time

In this paper, I deploy Gallagher et al.’s theory of Direct Social Perception (DSP) to help explain how we perceive others’ subjective time. This process of second-person temporal perception plays an important role in interpersonal interaction, yet is often glossed over in discussions of intersubjectivity. Using A.D. Craig (2009) ‘awareness’ model of subjective time to unify converging evidence that subjective time is embodied, affective, and situated, I argue that subjective time cannot be considered as a hidden or invisible aspect of a private mind, but is partially externally visible through our gestures, expressions, and other behaviours as they unfold within a particular context. My central thesis is that, in face to face interactions, we are able to directly perceive these visible components of other people’s subjective time. This is made possible by our “enculturated” (Menary, 2015) and enactive perceptual faculties. The process of social perception is not a passive, unidirectional affair where static information about one person’s subjective time is transmitted to the other, but rather inextricably linked with action (both at the personal and subpersonal level) and interaction effects produced by a dynamic coupling between participants. Such an enactive perspective reveals how others’ subjective time can be perceived in everyday interactions.     

Social competence in early childhood: An empirical validation of the SOCIAL model

Social skills are the basis of human interactions and functioning in society. Social competence (SC) is thought to evolve gradually during childhood and adolescence via the interplay of multiple factors. In particular, the early years of life are marked by the emergence of basic social abilities and constitute the foundation for successful social development. The biopsychosocial SOcio-Cognitive Integration of Abilities modeL (SOCIAL) posits that internal (child-based), external (environment), and cognitive factors are critical to SC in the context of normal brain maturation; but this has yet to be shown empirically and comprehensively. This study tested the SOCIAL model in a sample of typically developing preschool children. Parents of 103 children (M = 67.59 months, SD = 11.65) completed questionnaires and children underwent neuropsychological assessment of executive functioning (EF), communication skills and social cognition. Three-step hierarchical regression analyses (1) Internal factors, 2) External factors, 3) Cognitive factors) confirmed that each step of the regression model significantly predicted SC. In the final model, general cognitive and socio-cognitive factors significantly predicted SC above and beyond internal and external factors: children with lower temperamental negative affect and less parent-reported executive dysfunction, as well as better non-verbal communication and theory of mind had better SC. Our findings support the conceptual SOCIAL model, and highlight the importance of internal, external, and cognitive factors for SC in the preschool years. Identification of factors associated with early social development can inform both normative and clinical approaches to identifying intervention loci and optimizing SC in those at risk for maladaptive social functioning.     

Multiple sclerosis,emotion perception and social functioning

People with multiple sclerosis (MS) can experience problems in interpreting others’ emotions from faces or voices. However, to date little is known about whether difficulties in emotion perception in MS are related to broader aspects of social functioning. Also, there are few studies reporting the effect of MS on more ecologically valid assessments of emotion perception using multimodal videos. The current study looks at (1) the effect of MS on perceiving emotions from faces, voices and multimodal videos; (2) the possible role of slowed processing and executive dysfunction in emotion perception problems in MS and (3) the relationship between emotion perception and broader social functioning in MS. 53 people with MS and 31 healthy controls completed tasks of emotion perception and cognition, and assessed their levels of social support and social participation. Participants with MS performed worse than demographically matched controls on all measures of emotion perception. Emotion perception performance was related to cognitive measures in those with MS. Also, significant associations were found between emotion perception difficulties in MS and poorer social function. In particular, people with MS who had poorer emotion perception also reported lower levels of social support from their friends, and regression analysis showed that this prediction was maintained even when disease severity and cognitive function were taken into account. These results show that problems with emotion perception in MS extend to more realistic tasks and may predict key aspects of social functioning.     

Person perception when aggressive or nonaggressive sports are primed

Previous research investigating the factors contributing to sports spectator violence has focused primarily on conscious processes such as the disinhibiting effects of aggressive models and physiological arousal. The current research borrows a methodology from social cognition work to examine the role of passive, category accessibility effects on fan hostility. Prior research has indicated that as a schema becomes more accessible in memory, the use of it to encode subsequent information is increased. It was therefore hypothesized that individuals for whom the category of hostility had been unobtrusively primed with aggressive-sports names (e.g., boxing) would rate an ambiguous target person as more hostile and as more likely to prefer hostile activities relative to persons who were primed with sports names which were not associated with violence (e.g., golf). The results supported the hypotheses, with subjects who were primed with aggressive-sports rating an unrelated target person's behavior as significantly more hostile and as more likely to prefer aggressive activities relative to subjects exposed to sentences containing references to nonaggressive-sports. Discussion includes the potential ramifications for spectator aggression at sporting events.     

Paths from core belief disruption to post-traumatic stress symptoms and post-traumatic growth among Korean undergraduates: The mediating role of rumination

The post-traumatic growth (PTG) model proposes that cognitive processing is a key mechanism that leads to growth in the aftermath of traumatic events. Building upon the PTG model, the present study examined the paths from the disruption of core beliefs to post-traumatic stress symptoms (PTSS) and PTG via intrusive and deliberate rumination. The sample includes 370 Korean undergraduate students who reported at least one highly stressful experience in their lifetime. Structural equation modeling demonstrated that disruption of core beliefs predicted PTG both directly and indirectly through multiple pathways: via deliberate rumination, intrusive rumination, and the path from intrusive to deliberate rumination. The disruption of core beliefs positively predicted PTSS only through intrusive rumination. No bivariate relationship was found between PTSS and PTG. These findings support the different roles of intrusive rumination and deliberate rumination in mediating the paths from disruption of core beliefs to PTSS and PTG. Implications and limitations of this study were discussed.     

Moral Values Reveal the Causality Implicit in Verb Meaning

Prior work has found that moral values that build and bind groups—that is, the binding values of ingroup loyalty, respect for authority, and preservation of purity—are linked to blaming people who have been harmed. The present research investigated whether people's endorsement of binding values predicts their assignment of the causal locus of harmful events to the victims of the events. We used an implicit causality task from psycholinguistics in which participants read a sentence in the form “SUBJECT verbed OBJECT because…” where male and female proper names occupy the SUBJECT and OBJECT position. The participants were asked to predict the pronoun that follows “because”—the referent to the subject or object—which indicates their intuition about the likely cause of the event. We also collected explicit judgments of causal contributions and measured participants' moral values to investigate the relationship between moral values and the causal interpretation of events. Using two verb sets and two independent replications (N = 459, 249, 788), we found that greater endorsement of binding values was associated with a higher likelihood of selecting the object as the cause for harmful events in the implicit causality task, a result consistent with, and supportive of, previous moral psychological work on victim blaming. Endorsement of binding values also predicted explicit causal attributions to victims. Overall, these findings indicate that moral values that support the group rather than the individual reliably predict that people shift the causal locus of harmful events to those affected by the harms.     

中国神话中的具身心理学思想探索

西方“具身认知”心理学与赋存在中国文化里的以“天人合一”为核心的“体知”心理学思想息息相通, 而中国文化又有其独异于西方文化的“身体”智慧。文化的源头实为神话。追根溯源, 本文主要从具身认知的视阈中将中西方神话中“身体”的角色两相比照, 首先从本体论维度以现象学诠释的方法来描述神话的身体母体是如何生成的, 并以天地开辟神话、万物肇始神话和人类起源神话为例揭示中国“身体”的本体论特色—— 一元论; 其次再从空间维度以概念隐喻的理论来剖析神话的身体现象学场域是如何延展的, 并从物我同一角度、天人交感角度和人神相通角度来彰显中国“身体”的空间维度特色——气论; 最后再从时间维度以社会建构理论来解构神话的身体是如何在时间场域中流变的; 并从社会、文化和历史三个层面来表达中国“身体”的时间维度特色——易论。通过从中国神话故事中挖掘中国传统文化中独有的“具身智慧”, 以期为建立中国人自己的科学心理学起抛砖引玉之用。     

Support for the Populist Radical Right: Between Uncertainty Avoidance and Risky Choice

The last several decades have witnessed a structural change in politics toward cultural and identity conflicts, accompanied by the rise of populist radical right (PRR) parties. However, we know surprisingly little about the psychological or cognitive-motivational factors underlying PRR support. We claim that uncertainty avoidance (UA)—an epistemic avoidance motivation—represents a central motive because UA resonates with the PRR platform and precedes common predictors of PRR voting. Using data from the 2017 Austrian National Election Study, we found that UA was indeed indirectly associated with a higher likelihood of PRR voting. This association is because greater UA fostered right-wing sociocultural views, whereas associations with populist attitudes or expected government competence were more ambiguous. PRR parties appear to offer “certainty,” but as extreme parties, they also remain a “risky choice.” We conclude by discussing the contribution of a cognitive-motivational account to explain PRR voting.     

The association between risky decision making and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder symptoms: A preregistered assessment of need for cognition as underlying mechanism

Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is related to suboptimal decision making in experimental tasks and to real-life risk-taking behavior (RTB) such as substance abuse and unsafe traffic conduct. In this preregistered study, we tested whether these associations are mediated by need for cognition—the extent to which one tends towards, and enjoys, analytical thought. In a large sample of young adults (N = 463, M_age = 19.7 years), we tested whether need for cognition mediated the association between self-reported ADHD symptoms on the one hand and decision-making strategy complexity on an experimental gambling task and self-reported real-life RTB on the other hand. Preregistered confirmatory analyses indicated first that ADHD symptoms were positively associated with real-life RTB, but the association was not mediated by need for cognition. Second, ADHD symptoms were not related to decision-making strategy complexity, and need for cognition was not a significant mediator. Explorative analyses revealed that (a) need for cognition was associated with higher decision-making accuracy and slower reaction time; (b) need for cognition was related to inattentive but not to hyperactive/impulsive ADHD symptoms; (c) need for cognition was associated with health-related RTB but not interpersonal RTB; and (4) only the association between inattention and health-related RTB was mediated by need for cognition. We conclude that need for cognition is not a mediator in the association between ADHD symptoms and RTB. Additionally, we conclude that neither ADHD symptoms nor need for cognition predict decision-making strategy complexity. Implications for both future research and clinical practice are discussed.