On the malleability of the meaning of contexts: the influence of another person’s emotion expressions on situation perception

Research on the relationship between context and facial expressions generally assumes a unidirectional effect of context on expressions. However, according to the model of the meaning of emotion expressions in context (MEEC) the effect should be bidirectional. The present research tested the effect of emotion expression on the interpretation of scenes. A total of 380 participants either (a) rated facial expressions with regard to the likely appraisal of the eliciting situation by the emoter, (b) appraised the scenes alone or (c) appraised scenes shown together with the expressions they supposedly elicited. The findings strongly supported the MEEC. When a scene was combined with an expression signalling a situation that is undesirable, or high in locus of control or sudden, the participants appraised the scene correspondingly. Thus, the meaning of scenes is malleable and affected by the way that people are seen to react to them.     

交流语境对学习双方语言准确性的影响

研究安排了交流任务和个人迁移任务,创设了三种交流语境,比较不同语境下交流学习双方的语言准确性。结果显示：（1）三种语境中仅语言交流时语言准确性水平最高,交流语境中的对象可视性阻碍了语言准确性提高的速率,表情可视性降低了语言准确性水平;交流语言相似性水平高的被试,语言准确性水平提高的效率和效果均高于低的一方;（2）交流任务中仅语言交流时语言准确性最高,个人任务中对象可视语境下准确性最低;和交流任务相比,高相似被试个人任务中的准确性更高。表明：语言认知不完全代表交流认知,对象可视性阻碍语言认知和交流认知水平,表情可视性辅助语言共同提高交流认知水平。     

Factors that encourage generalization from extinction to test reduce resurgence of an extinguished operant response

Two experiments investigated methods that reduce the resurgence of an extinguished behavior (R1) that occurs when reinforcement for an alternative behavior (R2) is discontinued. In Experiment 1, R1 was first trained and then extinguished while R2 was reinforced during a 5‐ or 25‐session treatment phase. For half the rats, sessions in which R2 was reinforced alternated with sessions in which R2 was extinguished. Controls received the same number of treatment sessions, but R2 was never extinguished. When reinforcement for R2 was discontinued, R1 resurged in the controls. However, the alternating groups showed reduced resurgence, and the magnitude of the resurgences observed during their R2 extinction sessions decreased systematically over Phase 2. In Experiment 2, R1 was first reinforced with one outcome (O1). The rats then had two types of double‐alternating treatment sessions. In one type, R1 was extinguished and R2 produced O2. In the other, R1 was unavailable and R2 produced O3. R1 resurgence was weakened when O2, but not O3, was delivered freely during testing. Together, the results suggest that methods that encourage generalization between R1 extinction and resurgence testing weaken the resurgence effect. They are not consistent with an account of resurgence proposed by Shahan and Craig (2017).     

情绪背景和社会预期对社会经济决策行为的影响

采用最后通牒博弈范式,探讨不同情绪背景对社会经济决策中社会预期效应的影响。以90名大学生为被试,利用不同效价的电影片段(正性、负性和中性)诱发相应的目标情绪。通过操作社会规范性信息启动被试对分配方案公平性的不同预期。结果发现:在负性和中性情绪背景下,高预期组更倾向于拒绝接受不公平分配。在正性情绪背景下,高预期组和低预期组面对不公平提议时的接受率没有显著差异。结果表明正性情绪背景使社会预期效应发生改变,回应者对分配方案的高预期不再对决策结果产生显著影响。     

Ideology,inquiry, and antiquity: a critical notice of Lloyd's The Ideals of Inquiry: An Ancient History

A discussion of Lloyd's Tarner Lectures at Trinity College. The importance of Lloyd's previous scholarship is characterized and these sweeping, erudite lectures are placed in the context of that scholarship. In the broadest terms, the lectures are a call to culturally and historically comparative study of human reasoning. At their heart is a comparative history of scientific theorizing from the ancients through to modern science. Lloyd rejects the positivist picture, and the view of modern and ancient science as discontinuous; he urges scholars to undertake comparative work on the ancient sciences in different traditions. This critical notice evaluates Lloyd's view and raises several questions for further reflection.     

Context Matters for Social-Emotional Learning: Examining Variation in Program Impact by Dimensions of School Climate

This paper examines whether three dimensions of school climate—leadership, accountability, and safety/respect—moderated the impacts of the INSIGHTS program on students’ social‐emotional, behavioral, and academic outcomes. Twenty‐two urban schools and N = 435 low‐income racial/ethnic minority students were enrolled in the study and received intervention services across the course of 2 years, in both kindergarten and first grade. Intervention effects on math and reading achievement were larger for students enrolled in schools with lower overall levels of leadership, accountability, and safety/respect at baseline. Program impacts on disruptive behaviors were greater in schools with lower levels of accountability at baseline; impacts on sustained attention were greater in schools with lower levels of safety/respect at baseline. Implications for Social‐Emotional Learning program implementation, replication, and scale‐up are discussed.     

Can the Same Politician Help and Hurt the Evaluations of Another Politician? The Role of Categorization on the Elicitation of Assimilation and Contrast Effects in the Mexican Political Context

Two studies investigated the effects of bringing a highly controversial politician to mind on the evaluations of another politician in the Mexican political context. We took advantage of the dynamic nature of the Mexican political context in which politicians often threaten to leave or actually leave their political parties, influencing the categorization process. We hypothesized that the same controversial politician could elicit assimilation and contrast effects on the evaluations of another politician, depending on whether both political figures were treated as lateral categories or members of the same superordinate category. Study 1 found support for the predicted contrast effects but only among those who did not classify both political figures as members of the same political party. Study 2 found support for the expected interexemplar assimilation effects but only among those who classified both political figures as members of the same political party. The theoretical and applied implications of our results were discussed.     

Do Student Evaluations of University Reflect Inaccurate Beliefs or Actual Experience? A Relative Rank Model

It was shown that student satisfaction ratings are influenced by context in ways that have important theoretical and practical implications. Using questions from the UK's National Student Survey, the study examined whether and how students' expressed satisfaction with issues such as feedback promptness and instructor enthusiasm depends on the context of comparison (such as possibly inaccurate beliefs about the feedback promptness or enthusiasm experienced at other universities) that is evoked. Experiment 1 found strong effects of experimentally provided comparison context—for example, satisfaction with a given feedback time depended on the time's relative position within a context. Experiment 2 used a novel distribution‐elicitation methodology to determine the prior beliefs of individual students about what happens in universities other than their own. It found that these beliefs vary widely and that students' satisfaction was predicted by how they believed their experience ranked within the distribution of others' experiences. A third study found that relative judgement principles also predicted students' intention to complain. An extended model was developed to show that purely rank‐based principles of judgement can account for findings previously attributed to range effects. It was concluded that satisfaction ratings and quality of provision are different quantities, particularly when the implicit context of comparison includes beliefs about provision at other universities. Quality and satisfaction should be assessed separately, with objective measures (such as actual times to feedback), rather than subjective ratings (such as satisfaction with feedback promptness), being used to measure quality wherever practicable. © 2014 The Authors. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.     

The Medium Shapes the Message: McLuhan and Grice Revisited in Race Talk Online

Compared with the wealth of research accumulated on face‐to‐face social interactions, relatively little research has examined race talk within anonymous Web 2.0 mediums. We investigated online threaded comments on YouTube video clips of two race‐related incidents involving New Zealand television presenter Paul Henry. Through thematic content analysis, thematic analysis, and discourse analysis, it was found that characteristics unique to Web 2.0 were associated with the appearance of old‐fashioned racism and high‐levels of obscenity (together with modern racism/symbolic racism). The hyper‐low context of communication led to interpretive ambiguity; conversation sequences failed to follow Gricean maxims for cooperative communication, with most comments attracting no replies and the modal sequence being two turns. There was almost never resolution to a disagreement online: rather there was points‐scoring against opposing opinions and a tangential style of dialogue influenced by the asynchronous and anonymous nature of communication. The YouTube medium shaped but did not determine the message, as obscenity and racist content in the target video from the eliciting public figure influenced the subsequent degree of obscenity and hostility in the responses. A third corpus that examined responses to our own research on race talk presented on a news website (stuff.co.nz) underlined this point by engendering a dramatically different response to the same subject, retaining the tangential style of communication, but with little to no obscenity. A framework to understand race talk as a function of both medium and context effects is proposed. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.