Conscious knowledge influences decision‐making differently in substance abusers with and without co‐morbid antisocial personality disorder

Decision‐making impairment, as measured by the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT), is a consistent finding among individuals with substance use disorder (SUD). We studied how this impairment is influenced by co‐morbid antisocial personality disorder (ASPD) and conscious knowledge of the task. Three groups were investigated: SUD individuals without co‐morbid ASPD (n = 30), SUD individuals with co‐morbid ASPD (n = 16), and healthy controls (n = 17). Both SUD and SUD+ASPD participants had poor overall IGT performance. A block‐by‐block analysis revealed that SUD participants exhibited slow but steady improvement across the IGT, whereas SUD+ASPD participants exhibited initial normal improvement, but dropped off during the last 40 trials. Conscious knowledge of the task was significantly correlated to performance for controls and SUD participants, but not for SUD+ASPD participants. Our findings suggest that decision‐making proceeds differently in SUD and SUD+ASPD individuals due to differences in acquisition and application of conscious knowledge.     

Driving stimuli increases accessibility of aggression-related concepts in “angry” drivers

Stimuli present in aversive situations (even initially neutral stimuli) can become associated with aggressive feelings and thoughts become capable of acting as cues for aggressive thoughts. The present research examined whether driving stimuli can serve as triggers for aggression-related concepts for individuals predisposed to becoming angry while driving (i.e., high in self-reported trait driving anger). Using the General Aggression Model (Anderson & Bushman, 2002) as a guide, two studies demonstrated that participants high in trait driving anger responded more quickly to aggressive words when paired with driving than neutral stimuli. There were no differences in primes for nonaggressive words and nonwords. Study 2 also found that, for participants high in driving anger, increased accessibility of aggressive words following driving primes predicted self-reported anger in a provoking driving scenario.     

Modulation of the leniency bias in the discursive dilemma

We experimentally approach the discursive dilemma to gain insight into people's procedural appropriateness judgments. We relied on a vignette in which three people had formed opinions about two skills (premises) of a candidate to decide whether to hire her/him (conclusion). The dilemma arises when different outcomes (hire vs. not hire) are achieved depending on whether the majority opinion is independently considered for each premise or for the global conclusion of each judge. Participants were asked to choose the procedure they thought to be more appropriate to reach a decision. In Experiment 1, we found a leniency effect (a bias to prefer the aggregation procedure that led to hiring the candidate), which was reduced by introducing the participant as a juror with an exogenously provided negative opinion about the candidate's skills. In Experiment 2, we replicated the opinion effect, even when subjects did not participate as jury members. In Experiment 3, we found that the leniency bias was only reduced when participants' negative opinion was aligned with a majority of negative premises, but not with a majority of negative conclusions. We discuss present findings in terms of the identification of empirical regularities that may affect people's procedural legitimacy judgments.     

Bias or equality? Unconscious thought equally integrates temporally scattered information

In previous experiments on unconscious thought, information was presented to participants in one continuous session; however, in daily life, information is delivered in a temporally partitioned way. We examined whether unconscious thought could equally integrate temporally scattered information when making overall evaluations. When presenting participants with information in two temporally partitioned sessions, participants’ overall evaluation was based on neither the information in the first session (Experiment 1) nor that in the second session (Experiment 2); instead, information in both sessions were equally integrated to reach a final judgment. Conscious thought, however, overemphasized information in the second session. Experiments 3 and 4 further ruled out possible influencing factors including differences in the distributions of positive/negative attributes in the first and second sessions and on-line judgment. These findings suggested that unconscious thought can integrate information from a wider range of periods during an evaluation, while conscious thought cannot.     

Training fast and frugal heuristics in military decision making

Fast and frugal heuristics have been used to model decision making in applied domains very effectively, suggesting that they could be used to improve applied decision making. We developed a fast and frugal heuristic for infantry decisions using experts from the British Army. This was able to predict around 80% of their decisions using three cues. Next, we examined the benefits of learning to use the fast and frugal heuristic by training junior officers in the British Army to apply the heuristic and assessing their accuracy and mental workload when making decisions. Their performance was compared to a control condition of junior officers who applied standard military decision methods. Participants using the fast and frugal heuristic made decisions as accurately as participants in the control condition, but with reduced mental demand. This demonstrates that fast and frugal heuristics can be learnt and are as effective as analytic decision methods.     

Principled moral sentiment and the flexibility of moral judgment and decision making

Three studies test eight hypotheses about (1) how judgment differs between people who ascribe greater vs. less moral relevance to choices, (2) how moral judgment is subject to task constraints that shift evaluative focus (to moral rules vs. to consequences), and (3) how differences in the propensity to rely on intuitive reactions affect judgment. In Study 1, judgments were affected by rated agreement with moral rules proscribing harm, whether the dilemma under consideration made moral rules versus consequences of choice salient, and by thinking styles (intuitive vs. deliberative). In Studies 2 and 3, participants evaluated policy decisions to knowingly do harm to a resource to mitigate greater harm or to merely allow the greater harm to happen. When evaluated in isolation, approval for decisions to harm was affected by endorsement of moral rules and by thinking style. When both choices were evaluated simultaneously, total harm -- but not the do/allow distinction -- influenced rated approval. These studies suggest that moral rules play an important, but context-sensitive role in moral cognition, and offer an account of when emotional reactions to perceived moral violations receive less weight than consideration of costs and benefits in moral judgment and decision making.     

Randomized trial of a calling-infused career workshop incorporating counselor self-disclosure

A randomized controlled trial was used to test (1) the efficacy of a two-session career development workshop for college student participants; (2) the effect of counselor self-disclosure on outcomes; and (3) the effect of infusing calling and vocation concepts on outcomes. Both standard (person-environment fit) and calling/vocation-infused interventions improved career decision self-efficacy relative to a wait-list control. Counselor self-disclosure also increased participant career decision self-efficacy in both conditions and increased appraisals of meaning in life for participants in calling/vocation-infused workshops. Incorporating considerations of calling and vocation neither detracted from nor added to workshop effectiveness. Career development workshops were supported, as was the use of moderate counselor self-disclosure. Suggestions for career counseling practice and intervention research are discussed.     

Working memory involved in predicting future outcomes based on past experiences

Deficits in working memory have been shown to contribute to poor performance on the Iowa Gambling Task [IGT: Bechara, A., &; Martin, E.M. (2004). Impaired decision making related to working memory deficits in individuals with substance addictions. Neuropsychology, 18, 152–162]. Similarly, a secondary memory load task has been shown to impair task performance [Hinson, J., Jameson, T. &; Whitney, P. (2002). Somatic markers, working memory, and decision making. Cognitive, Affective, &; Behavioural Neuroscience, 2, 341–353]. In the present study, we investigate whether the latter findings were due to increased random responding [Franco-Watkins, A. M., Pashler, H., &; Rickard, T. C. (2006). Does working memory load lead to greater impulsivity? Commentary on Hinson, Jameson, and Whitney’s (2003). Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory &; Cognition, 32, 443–447]. Participants were tested under Low Working Memory (LWM; n = 18) or High Working Memory (HWM; n = 17) conditions while performing the Reversed IGT in which punishment was immediate and reward delayed [Bechara, A., Dolan, S., &; Hindes, A. (2002). Decision making and addiction (part II): Myopia for the future or hypersensitivity to reward? Neuropsychologia, 40, 1690–1705]. In support of a role for working memory in emotional decision making, compared to the LWM condition, participants in the HWM condition made significantly greater number of disadvantageous selections than that predicted by chance. Performance by the HWM group could not be fully explained by random responding.     

Emotional Policy: Personal Sadness and Anger Shape Judgments about a Welfare Case

When making decisions about a welfare case, it is reasonable for one's thoughts and feelings about the potential welfare recipient to influence the decision. It is less reasonable for one's "incidental" feelings (e.g., sadness or anger arising from an event in one's personal life) to influence such decisions. In two studies, however, data reveal that incidental anger and sadness do in fact carry over, shaping welfare policy preferences. Study 1 found that incidental anger decreased the amount of welfare assistance participants recommended providing relative to neutral emotion, whereas sadness increased the amount recommended. Study 2 replicated the results and found that limiting participants' cognitive resources eliminated the difference between sadness and anger, thus implying that differences in depth-of-thought drove the effects. In sum, the results reveal ways in which: (a) personal emotions carry over to shape preferences for public policies, (b) emotions of the same valence have opposing effects, and (c) differential depth-of-cognitive-processing contributes to such effects.     

Risk taking under the influence: A fuzzy-trace theory of emotion in adolescence

Fuzzy-trace theory explains risky decision making in children, adolescents, and adults, incorporating social and cultural factors as well as differences in impulsivity. Here, we provide an overview of the theory, including support for counterintuitive predictions (e.g., when adolescents “rationally” weigh costs and benefits, risk taking increases, but it decreases when the core gist of a decision is processed). Then, we delineate how emotion shapes adolescent risk taking—from encoding of representations of options, to retrieval of values/principles, to application of those values/principles to representations of options. Our review indicates that: (i) gist representations often incorporate emotion including valence, arousal, feeling states, and discrete emotions; and (ii) emotion determines whether gist or verbatim representations are processed. We recommend interventions to reduce unhealthy risk taking that inculcate stable gist representations, enabling adolescents to identify quickly and automatically danger even when experiencing emotion, which differs sharply from traditional approaches emphasizing deliberation and precise analysis.