Emotions as strategic information: Effects of other’s emotional expressions on fixed-pie perception, demands, and integrative behavior in negotiation

Negotiators often fail to reach integrative (”win-win”) agreements because they think that their own and other’s preferences are diametrically opposed—the so-called fixed-pie perception. We examined how verbal (Experiment 1) and nonverbal (Experiment 2) emotional expressions may reduce fixed-pie perception and promote integrative behavior. In a two-issue computer-simulated negotiation, participants negotiated with a counterpart emitting one of the following emotional response patterns: (1) anger on both issues, (2) anger on participant’s high priority issue and happiness on participant’s low-priority issue, (3) happiness on high priority issue and anger on low-priority issue, or (4) happiness on both issues. In both studies, the third pattern reduced fixed-pie perception and increased integrative behavior, whereas the second pattern amplified bias and reduced integrative behavior. Implications for how emotions shape social exchange are discussed.     

Bystanders' reactions towards co‐punishment events in the Taiwanese military: Examining the moderating effects of organizational norms

The present study examined bystanders' justice perceptions about co‐punishment events. In a sample of 169 logistic officers in the Taiwanese military, responsibility attributions (i.e. liability attributed to co‐punished persons) had a negative relationship with perceived harshness, and a positive relationship with perceived procedural justice. In addition, the effects of responsibility attributions on procedural justice were weaker if the person perceived stronger rather than weaker organizational norms of co‐punishment.     

比较母亲和老师对幼儿亲社会行为的评价：一致性和预测性

采用儿童移情和亲社会反应量表,由母亲（n=86）和老师（n=8）分别对86名3-5岁儿童进行评价,并记录实验情境中儿童的亲社会反应,考察母评和师评间的一致性,以及两种评价对儿童亲社会反应的预测性。结果发现：（1）母评得分高于师评,两种评价只在男孩中存在中等程度正相关;（2）只有师评能预测男孩的亲社会反应,两种评价对女孩的亲社会反应都有预测作用。结果提示评价者间的差异反映了不同评价者在儿童亲社会行为关注点上的特点。     

Agreement processing and attraction errors in aging: evidence from subject-verb agreement in German

Effects of aging on lexical processing are well attested, but the picture is less clear for grammatical processing. Where age differences emerge, these are usually ascribed to working-memory (WM) decline. Previous studies on the influence of WM on agreement computation have yielded inconclusive results, and work on aging and subject-verb agreement processing is lacking. In two experiments (Experiment 1: timed grammaticality judgment, Experiment 2: self-paced reading + WM test), we investigated older (OA) and younger (YA) adults’ susceptibility to agreement attraction errors. We found longer reading latencies and judgment reaction times (RTs) for OAs. Further, OAs, particularly those with low WM scores, were more accepting of sentences with attraction errors than YAs. OAs showed longer reading latencies for ungrammatical sentences, again modulated by WM, than YAs. Our results indicate that OAs have greater difficulty blocking intervening nouns from interfering with the computation of agreement dependencies. WM can modulate this effect.     

Co-activation of syntax in bilingual language production

We report four experiments that examined whether bilinguals’ production of one language is affected by the syntactic properties of their other language. Greek–English and English–Greek highly proficient fluent bilinguals produced sentence completions following subject nouns whose translation had either the same or different number. We manipulated whether participants produced completions in the same language as the subject (the source language; one-language production) or the other language (the non-source language; two-language production), and whether they used only one language or both languages within the experimental session. The results demonstrated that the grammar systems of both languages were activated during both one-language and two-language production. The effects of the non-source language were particularly enhanced in two-language utterances, when both languages were used in the experiment, and when it was the bilinguals’ native language. We interpret our results in terms of a model of bilingual sentence production.     

Tracking irregular morphophonological dependencies in natural language: evidence from the acquisition of subject-verb agreement in French

This study examines French-learning infants’ sensitivity to grammatical non-adjacent dependencies involving subject-verb agreement (e.g., le/les garçons lit/lisent ‘the boy(s) read(s)’) where number is audible on both the determiner of the subject DP and the agreeing verb, and the dependency is spanning across two syntactic phrases. A further particularity of this subsystem of French subject-verb agreement is that number marking on the verb is phonologically highly irregular. Despite the challenge, the HPP results for 24- and 18-month-olds demonstrate knowledge of both number dependencies: between the singular determiner le and the non-adjacent singular verbal forms and between the plural determiner les and the non-adjacent plural verbal forms. A control experiment suggests that the infants are responding to known verb forms, not phonological regularities. Given the paucity of such forms in the adult input documented through a corpus study, these results are interpreted as evidence that 18-month-olds have the ability to extract complex patterns across a range of morphophonologically inconsistent and infrequent items in natural language.     

Discriminating the integrated orientation of line segments and its statistical efficiencies

Abstract:  We carried out two experiments to investigate both how efficiencies fluctuate due to the experimental conditions and how we determine the representative efficiency among such various efficiencies in the discrimination task of line orientations. In Experiment 1, line segments were displayed simultaneously and dispersed spatially, while in Experiment 2, line segments were displayed sequentially. In both experiments, statistical efficiencies were calculated. In Experiment 1, efficiencies initially increased as stimulus duration increased, and decreased as the number of lines increased to a point where the efficiencies remained almost stable despite additional changes of stimulus duration or number of lines. In contrast, in Experiment 2, efficiencies were stable for almost all numbers of sequentially displayed lines, except for the condition that four lines were displayed in random positions. These stable efficiencies were approximately 50% in Experiment 1 and 30–50% in Experiment 2. We suggest that these stable efficiencies are varied in the context that human and ideal observers would adopt the same strategy regardless of the experimental conditions.     

Analysis of proposed three-class classification decision rules in terms of the ideal observer decision rule

We analyze recently proposed decision rules for three-class classification from the point of view of ideal observer decision theory. We consider three-class decision rules proposed by Scurfield, by Chan et al., and by Mossman. Scurfield's decision rule is shown to be a special case of the three-class ideal observer decision rule in three different situations. Chan et al. start with an ideal observer model and specify its decision-consequence utility structure in a way that causes two of the decision lines used by the ideal observer to overlap and the third line to become undefined. Finally, we show that, for a particular and obvious choice of ideal-observer-related decision variables, the Mossman decision rule cannot be a special case of the ideal observer decision rule. Despite the considerable difficulties presented by the three-class classification task, the three-class ideal observer provides a useful framework for analyzing a variety of three-class decision strategies.     

Two Routes to Grammatical Gender: Evidence from Hebrew

Access to grammatical gender in Hebrew was examined using gender decisions and grammaticality judgments. In gender decisions, and in rejecting agreement violations, the role of gender-marking regularity was robust; irregular feminine nouns were classified more slowly and produced more errors than did regular masculine nouns. These same exception nouns, however, produced radically different results when they appeared as part of a grammatical phrase. In this context, irregular nouns were processed as quickly and accurately as were regular nouns. These findings are interpreted within a model containing two routes to grammatical gender: one that involves an abstract gender node, and another that is form-based and is assumed to play a greater role in recovery from agreement errors. We also argue that there are cross-linguistic variations in the availability and speed of the form-based route to gender. Finally, we caution that under some circumstances grammatical gender may also be retrieved through a variety of heuristics that do not necessarily reflect the normal mechanisms of access to gender.