Motivational cues: The role of perceived senders' self‐control ability in raters' deception judgements

Previous studies have found that senders' personal traits may be used by others to make judgements about the senders' truthfulness. Two studies were conducted to examine whether perceived self‐control ability has an effect on deception judgement. Perceived self‐control was hypothesized to act as a motivational cue that participants would use to assess the sender's motivation to lie, which in turn would influence their deception judgement. Results revealed that when participants assessed the sender as having higher self‐control ability, they would consider the sender to be less motivated to lie in daily life (Study 1), and judge the sender more truthful in a text‐based deception judgement task (Study 2). However, the effect of perceived self‐control ability disappeared in a video‐based task (Study 2), likely due to the multitude of various cues available in audio‐visual stimuli. The theoretical and applied implications of the results are discussed.     

Face aftereffects suggest interdependent processing of expression and sex and of expression and race

Bruce and Young (1986) proposed that functionally different aspects of faces (e.g., sex, identity, and expression) are processed independently. Although interdependent processing of identity and expression and of identity and sex have been demonstrated previously, evidence for interdependent processing of sex and expression is equivocal. Using a visual adaptation paradigm, we show that expression aftereffects can be simultaneously induced in different directions along anger–fear continua for male and female faces (Experiment 1) and for East Asian and Black African faces (Experiment 2). These findings for sex- and race-contingent expression aftereffects suggest that processing of expression is interdependent with processing of sex and race and are therefore problematic for models of face perception that have emphasized independent processing of functionally different aspects of faces. By contrast, our findings are consistent with models of face processing that propose that invariant physical aspects of faces and changeable social cues can be processed interdependently.     

The contribution of shape and surface information in the other-race face effect

Faces from another race are generally more difficult to recognize than faces from one's own race. However, faces provide multiple cues for recognition and it remains unknown what are the relative contribution of these cues to this “other-race effect”. In the current study, we used three-dimensional laser-scanned head models which allowed us to independently manipulate two prominent cues for face recognition: the facial shape morphology and the facial surface properties (texture and colour). In Experiment 1, Asian and Caucasian participants implicitly learned a set of Asian and Caucasian faces that had both shape and surface cues to facial identity. Their recognition of these encoded faces was then tested in an old/new recognition task. For these face stimuli, we found a robust other-race effect: Both groups were more accurate at recognizing own-race than other-race faces. Having established the other-race effect, in Experiment 2 we provided only shape cues for recognition and in Experiment 3 we provided only surface cues for recognition. Caucasian participants continued to show the other-race effect when only shape information was available, whereas Asian participants showed no effect. When only surface information was available, there was a weak pattern for the other-race effect in Asians. Performance was poor in this latter experiment, so this pattern needs to be interpreted with caution. Overall, these findings suggest that Asian and Caucasian participants rely differently on shape and surface cues to recognize own-race faces, and that they continue to use the same cues for other-race faces, which may be suboptimal for these faces.     

The developing role of prosody in novel word interpretation

This study examined whether children use prosodic correlates to word meaning when interpreting novel words. For example, do children infer that a word spoken in a deep, slow, loud voice refers to something larger than a word spoken in a high, fast, quiet voice? Participants were 4- and 5-year-olds who viewed picture pairs that varied along a single dimension (e.g., big vs. small flower) and heard a recorded voice asking them, for example, “Can you get the blicket one?” spoken with either meaningful or neutral prosody. The 4-year-olds failed to map prosodic cues to their corresponding meaning, whereas the 5-year-olds succeeded (Experiment 1). However, 4-year-olds successfully mapped prosodic cues to word meaning following a training phase that reinforced children’s attention to prosodic information (Experiment 2). These studies constitute the first empirical demonstration that young children are able to use prosody-to-meaning correlates as a cue to novel word interpretation.     

Switch detection in preschoolers' cognitive flexibility

The current study addressed the role of switch detection in cognitive flexibility by testing the effect of transition cues (i.e., cues that directly signal the need to switch or maintain a given task goal) in a cued set-shifting paradigm at 5 years of age. Children performed better, especially on switch trials, when transition cues were combined with traditional task cues (i.e., cues that directly signal the relevant task on a given trial) relative to conditions without transition cues. This effect was not influenced by explicit knowledge of transition cues or transition cue transparency, suggesting that transition cues did not need to be semantically processed to be beneficial. These findings reveal that young children’s difficulties in set-shifting situations stem partially from failures to monitor for the need to switch.     

Classroom Behavior and the Ability to Decode Nonverbal Cues in Boys With Severe Emotional Disturbance

Abstract

Nonverbal decoding skills are important for successful social functioning, particularly for emotionally disturbed children. Boys with severe emotional disturbance (n = 25) and a control group of boys (n = 22) were compared regarding the relationship between ratings of classroom social behaviors and nonverbal decoding skills. Participants were predominantly African American. The Diagnostic Analysis of Nonverbal Accuracy (Nowicki, 2001; Nowicki & Duke, 1994) was administered individually to the boys while teachers completed ratings of their social behavior in the classroom. The 2 groups of boys did not differ in nonverbal skills. However, aggressive classroom behaviors were associated with specific nonverbal skills only for the boys with severe emotional disturbance. These findings suggest that nonverbal abilities may have a greater impact on the social behavior of emotionally disturbed boys. Future research is needed to better understand the social difficulties of boys with severe emotional disturbance.     

Sensitivity to probabilistic orthographic cues to lexical stress in adolescent speakers with autism spectrum disorder and typical peers

Lexical stress refers to the opposition of strong and weak syllables within polysyllabic words and is a core feature of the English prosodic system. There are probabilistic cues to lexical stress present in English orthography. For example, most disyllabic English words ending with the letters “-ure” have first-syllable stress (e.g., “pasture”, but note words such as “endure”), whereas most ending with “-ose” have second-syllable stress (e.g., “propose”, but note examples such as “glucose”). Adult native speakers of English are sensitive to these probabilities during silent reading. During testing, they tend to assign first-syllable stress when reading a nonword such as “lenture” but second-syllable stress when reading “fostpose” (Arciuli & Cupples, 2006 Arciuli, J. and Cupples, L. 2006. The processing of lexical stress during visual word recognition: Typicality effects and orthographic correlates. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 59(5): 920–948. [Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). Difficulties with prosody, including problems processing lexical stress, are a notable feature of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The current study investigated the ability of adolescents with ASD (13–17 years of age) to show this sensitivity compared with a group of typically developing peers. Results indicated reduced sensitivity to probabilistic cues to lexical stress in the group with ASD. The implications of these findings are discussed.     

Secrets and Disclosures: How Young Children Handle Secrets

The authors examined the influence of content and verbal cues on young children's understanding of secret information and of its disclosure. Participants were 209 5- and 6-year-old children in an experiment where a puppet, named Zinc, was the protagonist. Children were asked to whom Zinc would disclose a list of pieces of information, some of which are considered secrets. Children could choose between Zinc's friend, a nonfriend, both friend and nonfriend, or nobody. Participants were divided in 2 experiment groups: In the first group a prior verbal cue was given to the participants that some information might be secret, whereas in the second group no prior cue was presented. Results showed that young children, similar to older individuals, differentiated between secrets and nonsecrets partly on the basis of content, and chose to withhold secrets more than nonsecrets or to share secrets more with friends than with nonfriends, following the restrictive self-disclosure pattern. In contrast, young children did not withhold nonsecret information, but they shared it with friends and nonfriends. However, when given verbal cues regarding potential secrecy of the information, young children chose more restrictive disclosure patterns for all types of content.     

The impact of holiday eating cues on self-regulatory bolstering for dieters and non-dieters

Objective: Two studies examined the hypothesis that the presence vs. absence of holiday food cues leads dieters to bolster self-regulatory resources and reduce consumption of a snack food. Study 1 evaluated snack-food consumption on a holiday vs. a non-holiday and in Study 2, the proposed underlying mechanism – the bolstering of self-regulatory resources when facing holiday-related cues – was explored.

Methods: Study 1 followed a quasi-experimental design in which participants (N?=?152) consumed candies either on a holiday or a non-holiday. Dieting behaviour was measured and the main outcome measure was consumption quantity. In Study 2, a true experiment, participants (N?=?110) read primes associated with holiday eating, holiday history or a neutral topic. Self-regulatory bolstering was assessed as the main outcome measure.

Results: Study 1 showed that dieters consume more of a food item on an ordinary day relative to a holiday; the consumption patterns of non-dieters did not vary based on holiday cues. Study 2 demonstrated that dieters, but not non-dieters, bolster self-regulatory resources to a greater extent in the presence vs. absence of a holiday food cue.

Conclusion: Dieters are better equipped to defend their diet-related goals when facing strong holiday-related temptations than weaker, everyday temptations.