Mood and realism of confidence judgements of one''s own answers to general knowledge questions

This study examines the effect of a depressed mood on the realism of subjects' confidence judgements of the correctness of answers to general knowledge questions. Research conducted on how mood influences cognitive processes gives reason to expect that a depressed mood might increase the realism of individuals' confidence ratings. Sixty subjects were divided into three conditions, two of which were given mood induction, one condition into an elated-happy mood and one condition into a depressed-sad mood. As evidenced by subjects' responses to mood scales only the depressed condition was affected by the mood induction. All subjects answered 93 general knowledge questions and rated their confidence in the correctness of the answer given. Subjects were instructed to think aloud when answering the last 31 questions. The conditions did not differ with respect to the proportion of questions answered correctly, mean level of confidence, nor with respect to three measures of the realism in subjects' confidence ratings (calibration, over/underconfidence and resolution). The results were the same when questions answered with and without think aloud instructions were analysed separately.     

Hungry people prefer larger bodies and objects: The importance of testing boundary effects

Several lab-based studies have indicated that when people are hungry, they judge larger women's bodies as more attractive, compared to when they are satiated. These satiety-dependent judgements are assumed to provide explanatory power when it comes to the noted cross-cultural differences in attitudes towards women's adiposity, whereby people who live in regions that are under greater nutritional stress tend to have more favourable attitudes towards bigger bodies. However, it is premature to assume that women's bodies are the proper or actual domain of the satiety-dependent judgement shifts found within research study testing contexts until stimuli other than female bodies have also been tested: The research programme falls into the trap of confirmation bias unless we also seek out disconfirmatory evidence and test the boundaries of the effects of hunger. Accordingly, we collected attractiveness judgements of female and male bodies manipulated to vary in size by varying level of adiposity, and objects manipulated to vary in size, from 186 participants who also reported their current hunger level. We found that larger sizes of stimuli in general, and women's bodies in particular, especially when judged by women, were judged as more attractive by the hungrier participants. We discuss these patterns in the context of the Insurance Hypothesis, the Environmental Security Hypothesis, and the impact of hunger on acquisition.     

Something from nothing: exploring dimensions of children's knowing through the repeated reading of favourite books

Witte‐Townsend and DiGiulio explore some of the dimensions of knowing that children, teachers and parents may engage together during story‐time. They reflect on some of their own long‐term relationships with children and children's books, especially Phoebe Gilman's Gilman P 1992 Something from nothing (New York, NY, Scholastic Inc)  [Google Scholar] Something from nothing (published in 1992) and Simms Taback's Taback S 1999 Joseph had a little overcoat (New York, NY, Viking‐Penguin)  [Google Scholar] Joseph had a little overcoat, published in 1999. The authors probe issues such as why children ask to hear a favourite story over and over and why they suddenly abandon all interest and move on to a new book. They explore the meaning of the silences that sometimes arise during story‐time, pooling around the young listeners as the last words of the book are read. Witte‐Townsend and DiGiulio remind us of the value of literature in the lives of children and they affirm that the reading and re‐reading of favourite stories enables the understanding of complex human issues and contributes significantly to social, emotional and spiritual growth.     

Moral reasoning in autistic individuals: a theoretical review / El razonamiento moral en personas con Trastorno del Espectro Autista: una revisión teórica

Abstract

Individuals diagnosed with an Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) often find it difficult to attribute mental states to others and to understand their own and others’ behaviour (Theory of Mind, [ToM]/social cognition). These difficulties can affect their moral judgements. The present article focuses on evidence on moral reasoning and ToM, with the aim of analysing theoretical and review research into autism. The weight intention has in moral reasoning and the causal relation between mental states, actions and outcomes is an essential part of this study. Evidence in the field of autism reports how autistic people would not be able to make moral judgements based on the agent’s intention. Instead, they would reason based on the outcomes of the action. For example, this can be translated into misunderstandings, malicious judgements or ‘over-blaming’ in accidental situations (ambiguous valences). These impairments can confirm the association between ToM and moral reasoning.     

Inferring social attributes from different face regions: Evidence for holistic processing

Two experiments investigated the role that different face regions play in a variety of social judgements that are commonly made from facial appearance (sex, age, distinctiveness, attractiveness, approachability, trustworthiness, and intelligence). These judgements lie along a continuum from those with a clear physical basis and high consequent accuracy (sex, age) to judgements that can achieve a degree of consensus between observers despite having little known validity (intelligence, trustworthiness). Results from Experiment 1 indicated that the face's internal features (eyes, nose, and mouth) provide information that is more useful for social inferences than the external features (hair, face shape, ears, and chin), especially when judging traits such as approachability and trustworthiness. Experiment 2 investigated how judgement agreement was affected when the upper head, eye, nose, or mouth regions were presented in isolation or when these regions were obscured. A different pattern of results emerged for different characteristics, indicating that different types of facial information are used in the various judgements. Moreover, the informativeness of a particular region/feature depends on whether it is presented alone or in the context of the whole face. These findings provide evidence for the importance of holistic processing in making social attributions from facial appearance.     

Positive and negative mediation as a function of whether the absent cue was previously associated with the outcome

After presenting two cues, A and B, together, later pairings of one of the cues alone with an outcome can generate changes in the associative value of the absent cue. These changes can be in the same direction as the present cue (i.e., positive mediation) or in the opposite direction to the present cue (i.e., negative mediation). We found both mediational effects in a human contingency task. In addition, we found that the direction of the change was determined by the existence of a prior association between the absent cue and the outcome. When a prior association exists, the absent cue tends to change its value in the opposite direction to the present cue, whereas when there is no prior association, the absent cue tends to change its value in the same direction as the present cue. Recent associative models (Stout & Miller, 2007 Stout, S. C. and Miller, R. R. 2007. Sometimes-competing retrieval (SOCR): A formalization of the comparator hypothesis. Psychological Review, 114: 759–783.  [Google Scholar]) can explain our results.     

What constrains grammatical gender effects on semantic judgements? Evidence from Portuguese

Four studies investigated whether grammatical gender biases the semantic judgements of Portuguese speakers, relative to speakers of English. Some research reports that grammatical gender has a pervasive influence on speakers' cognitive representations (e.g., Boroditsky, Schmidt, & Philips, 2003; Sera, Elieff, Forbes, Burch, & Rodriguez, 2002). Others argue that effects of grammar arise through linguistic processing (e.g., Vigliocco, Vinson, Paganelli, & Dworzynski, 2005) and are restricted to animate categories for which gender is a pertinent feature. The present results found effects of gender in Portuguese speakers' judgements of inanimate objects, but only when gender was task relevant and/or when the stimuli were words, rather than pictures. These findings support the view that gender effects on cognitive judgements arise as a function of linguistic processing and/or task demands, rather than directly influencing conceptual or semantic representations.     

To prosecute or not to prosecute: Law students' judicial decisions in CSA cases

Child sexual abuse (CSA) investigations are complicated and few cases are prosecuted. The aim of the present study was to investigate judicial decisions in CSA investigations. Seventy‐one law students (42 females, 29 males) read a vignette depicting a CSA investigation, assessed the complainant's and the accused's credibility, and if the case should be prosecuted or not. The participants were assigned to one of four conditions defined by a 2 (evidence: high probative value vs. low probative value) × 2 (complainant demeanour: emotional vs. neutral) factorial design. Females assigned higher credibility to the complainant than did males and males assigned higher credibility to the accused than did females. Emotionality, but not evidential value, affected credibility judgements: Females believed less in the suspect when the child behaved in an emotional manner. Most participants (94.4%) thought that the case should be prosecuted, though only 73.2% believed that prosecution could be corroborated. Corroboration of prosecution was affected by evidential value, but not emotionality. The results indicate that the behavior of alleged crime victims might affect males and females differently, which in turn could lead to biased judicial decisions in CSA investigations.     

Stochastic pairwise comparative judgements and direct ratings of alternatives in the REMBRANDT system

The REMBRANDT system for multicriteria decision analysis consists of both the multiplicative variant of the AHP (which employs a method of pairwise comparative judgements by a decision maker to arrive at final impact scores for the alternatives under consideration) and SMART, the simple multiattribute rating technique (which utilizes direct rating of alternatives to achieve final impact scores). This paper examines the effect of imprecision or uncertainty in the decision maker's pairwise judgements or ratings of alternatives by expressing each pairwise judgement or rating as a probability distribution, and the structure of REMBRANDT's component models is exploited to derive interval judgements or interval ratings of the alternatives’ final impact scores. These interval judgements or interval ratings can be used to determine the probability of rank reversal amongst alternatives, i.e. to assess the stability of the final impact score vector. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.