Individual differences in self-attributed mindfulness levels are related to the experience of time and cognitive self-control

The objective of this correlational study was to investigate how dispositional mindfulness is related to the experience of time as operationalized by the assessment of the time perspectives, impulsiveness, and duration judgment tasks. A sample of students (N = 63) completed self-report measures of mindfulness (FMI, CHIME), the time perspectives (ZTPI), impulsiveness (BIS), conducted psychophysical tasks of (a) auditory duration discrimination in the milliseconds range, (b) visual duration reproduction in the multiple-second range, and performed an attention task, the Attention Network Test. Being more mindful in daily life was related to less impulsiveness, better emotional handling of the past, and a more pronounced future perspective. Mindfulness was also related to more accurate timing in the milliseconds and multiple-seconds range but not to attentional control. These findings suggest a close association between dispositional mindfulness with the temporal organization of behaviour and the perception of time.     

Expert athletes activate somatosensory and motor planning regions of the brain when passively listening to familiar sports sounds

The present functional magnetic resonance imaging study examined the neural response to familiar and unfamiliar, sport and non-sport environmental sounds in expert and novice athletes. Results revealed differential neural responses dependent on sports expertise. Experts had greater neural activation than novices in focal sensorimotor areas such as the supplementary motor area, and pre- and postcentral gyri. Novices showed greater activation than experts in widespread areas involved in perception (i.e. supramarginal, middle occipital, and calcarine gyri; precuneus; inferior and superior parietal lobules), and motor planning and processing (i.e. inferior frontal, middle frontal, and middle temporal gyri). These between-group neural differences also appeared as an expertise effect within specific conditions. Experts showed greater activation than novices during the sport familiar condition in regions responsible for auditory and motor planning, including the inferior frontal gyrus and the parietal operculum. Novices only showed greater activation than experts in the supramarginal gyrus and pons during the non-sport unfamiliar condition, and in the middle frontal gyrus during the sport unfamiliar condition. These results are consistent with the view that expert athletes are attuned to only the most familiar, highly relevant sounds and tune out unfamiliar, irrelevant sounds. Furthermore, these findings that athletes show activation in areas known to be involved in action planning when passively listening to sounds suggests that auditory perception of action can lead to the re-instantiation of neural areas involved in producing these actions, especially if someone has expertise performing the actions.     

Neural processing of intentional biological motion in unaffected siblings of children with autism spectrum disorder: An fMRI study

Despite often showing behaviorally typical levels of social cognitive ability, unaffected siblings of children with autism spectrum disorder have been found to show similar functional and morphological deficits within brain regions associated with social processing. They have also been reported to show increased activation to biological motion in these same regions, such as the posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS), relative to both children with autism and control children. It has been suggested that this increased activation may represent a compensatory reorganization of these regions as a result of the highly heritable genetic influence of autism. However, the response patterns of unaffected siblings in the domain of action perception are unstudied, and the phenomenon of compensatory activation has not yet been replicated. The present study used functional magnetic resonance imaging to determine the neural responses to intentional biological actions in 22 siblings of children with autism and 22 matched controls. The presented actions were either congruent or incongruent with the actor’s emotional cue. Prior studies reported that typically developing children and adults, but not children with autism, show increased activation to incongruent actions (relative to congruent), within the pSTS and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. We report that unaffected siblings did not show a compensatory response, or a preference for incongruent over congruent trials, in any brain region. Moreover, interaction analyses revealed a sub-region of the pSTS in which control children showed an incongruency preference to a significantly greater degree than siblings, which suggests a localized deficit in siblings. A sample of children with autism also did not show differential activation in the pSTS, providing further evidence that it is an area of selective disruption in children with autism and siblings. While reduced activation to both conditions was unique to the autism sample, lack of differentiation to incongruent and congruent intentional actions was common to both children with ASD and unaffected siblings.     

Singular Clues to Causality and Their Use in Human Causal Judgment

It is argued that causal understanding originates in experiences of acting on objects. Such experiences have consistent features that can be used as clues to causal identification and judgment. These are singular clues, meaning that they can be detected in single instances. A catalog of 14 singular clues is proposed. The clues function as heuristics for generating causal judgments under uncertainty and are a pervasive source of bias in causal judgment. More sophisticated clues such as mechanism clues and repeated interventions are derived from the 14. Research on the use of empirical information and conditional probabilities to identify causes has used scenarios in which several of the clues are present, and the use of empirical association information for causal judgment depends on the presence of singular clues. It is the singular clues and their origin that are basic to causal understanding, not multiple instance clues such as empirical association, contingency, and conditional probabilities.     

The vision heuristic: Judging music ensembles by sight alone

Team effectiveness and group performance are often defined by standards set by domain experts. Professional musicians consistently report that sound output is the most important standard for evaluating the quality of group performance in the domain of music. However, across six studies, visual information dominated rapid judgments of group performance. Participants (1062 experts and novices) were able to select the actual winners of live ensemble competitions and distinguish top-ranked orchestras from non-ranked orchestras based on 6-s silent video recordings yet were unable to do so from sound recordings or recordings with both video and sound. These findings suggest that judgments of group performance in the domain of music are driven at least in part by visual cues about group dynamics and leadership.     

Perceiving Aggression from Facial Structure: Further Evidence for a Positive Association with Facial Width‐to‐Height Ratio and Masculinity,but not for Moderation by Self‐Reported Dominance

Recent work has indicated that individual differences in facial structure are linked to perceptions of aggressiveness. In particular, the relative width of a face [facial width‐to‐height ratio (fWHR)] has been suggested to be a reliable cue to aggressive behaviour, at least in men. Additionally, facial masculinity has been associated with perceptions of dominance, a close proxy of aggressiveness. In two studies, we assessed the robustness of this link using faces transformed along these vectors in men (Studies 1 and 2) and women (Study 2). Additionally, we examined whether individual differences in self‐reported dominance of perceivers moderated this association in order to extend previous work indicating that own dominance affects perception of such behaviour in others. Results indicated that both male and female faces with increased fWHR and increased facial masculinity were perceived as more aggressive. However, we found no systematic evidence for moderating effects of self‐reported dominance on the perception of aggression in others. Taken together, these results further support the robustness of fWHR and facial masculinity as cues to aggressiveness but question whether observers' own dominance moderates their perception of these cues in others. Copyright © 2013 European Association of Personality Psychology     

Personality Traits and Relationship Satisfaction in Intimate Couples: Three Perspectives on Personality

Personality traits are important predictors of relationship satisfaction. However, the majority of previous study findings are based on self‐perceptions of personality. Thus, by means of the self‐, partner‐, and meta‐perceptions of personality, the present study focused on three different perspectives on the Big Five personality traits to examine dyadic associations with relationship satisfaction of intimate couples. The study was based on the first measurement occasion of the Swiss longitudinal study ‘Co‐Development in Personality: Longitudinal Approaches to Personality Development in Dyads across the Life Span’ and included data of 216 couples. The main analyses were based on Actor‐Partner Interdependence Model. Three general findings emerged. First, the three personality perspectives represented related, albeit distinct, constructs, and showed incremental validity with respect to relationship satisfaction. Second, neuroticism was negatively related to relationship satisfaction, whereas agreeableness and conscientiousness were positively related to relationship satisfaction across all perspectives. Third, substantial associations between e xtraversion and relationship satisfaction were exclusively evident in terms of the partner‐ and meta‐perception. The present results contribute to the literature by showing that each perspective is essential for the understanding of the role of personality for relationship satisfaction. Copyright © 2014 European Association of Personality Psychology     

Race Prejudice and Economic Beliefs

Abstract

Following Yinger's assertion that the association between racism and personality variables is “exaggerated” and Heaven's findings that in South Africa white racism is associated with specific attitudes toward economic issues, the present study investigated the relationship between British race prejudice and economic beliefs. A British sample (N = 72) was administered an Attitudes toward West Indians scale, various personality and attitudinal measures, as well as an economic locus of control scale. Results showed racism to be significantly related to authoritarianism and the external/denial subscale of that scale. Further step-wise regression analysis showed scores on the authoritarian attitudes scale and the external/denial subscale to be significant predictors of prejudice.