bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The empathy impulse: A multinomial model of intentional and unintentional empathy for pain
Authors: Cameron Daryl , Spring Victoria L , Todd Andrew R.
Published: July 2018

Empathy for pain is often described as automatic. Here, we used implicit measurement and multinomial modeling to formally quantify unintentional empathy for pain: empathy that occurs despite intentions to the contrary. We developed the pain identification task (PIT), a sequential priming task wherein participants judge the painfulness of target experiences while trying to avoid the influence of prime experiences. Using multinomial modeling, we distinguished 3 component processes underlying PIT performance: empathy toward target stimuli (Intentional Empathy), empathy toward prime stimuli (Unintentional Empathy), and bias to judge target stimuli as painful (Response Bias). In Experiment 1, imposing a fast (vs. slow) response deadline uniquely reduced Intentional Empathy. In Experiment 2, inducing imagine-self (vs. imagine-other) perspective-taking uniquely increased Unintentional Empathy. In Experiment 3, Intentional and Unintentional Empathy were stronger toward targets with typical (vs. atypical) pain outcomes, suggesting that outcome information matters and that effects on the PIT are not reducible to affective priming. Typicality of pain outcomes more weakly affected task performance when target stimuli were merely categorized rather than judged for painfulness, suggesting that effects on the latter are not reducible to semantic priming. In Experiment 4, Unintentional Empathy was stronger for participants who engaged in costly donation to cancer charities, but this parameter was also high for those who donated to an objectively worse but socially more popular charity, suggesting that overly high empathy may facilitate maladaptive altruism. Theoretical and practical applications of our modeling approach for understanding variation in empathy are discussed.
What is in a name? The Development of Cross-Cultural Differences in Referential Intuitions
Authors: Li Jincai , Liu Longgen , Chalmers Elizabeth , Snedeker Jesse
Published: July 2018

Past work has shown systematic differences between Easterners’ and Westerners’ intuitions about the reference of proper names. Understanding when these differences emerge in development will help us understand their origins. In the present study, we investigate the referential intuitions of English- and Chinese- speaking children and adults in the U.S. and China. Using a truth-value judgement task modelled on Kripke's classic Gödel case, we find that the cross-cultural differences are already in place at age seven. Thus, these differences cannot be attributed to later education or enculturation. Instead, they must stem from differences that are present in early childhood. We consider alternate theories of reference that are compatible with these findings and discuss the possibility that the cross-cultural differences reflect differences in perspective-taking strategies
Are you mind-wandering, or is your mind on task? The effect of probe framing on mind-wandering reports
Authors: Weinstein Yana , De Lima Henry Joseph , van der Zee Tim
Published: July 2018

The last decade has seen a dramatic rise in the number of studies that utilize the probe-caught method of collecting mind-wandering reports. This method involves stopping participants during a task, presenting them with a thought probe, and asking them to choose the appropriate report option to describe their thought-state. In this experiment we manipulated the framing of this probe, and demonstrated a substantial difference in mind-wandering reports as a function of whether the probe was presented in a mind-wandering frame compared with an on-task frame. This framing effect has implications both for interpretations of existing data, as well as for methodological choices made by researchers who use the probe-caught mind-wandering paradigm.
StudySwap Tutorial
Authors: Chartier Christopher R. , McCarthy Randy J.
Published: July 2018

StudySwap is an online platform where researchers can post brief descriptions of resources available for use (“HAVE”s) or resources they need that another researcher may have (“NEED”S) to initiate multi-site collaborations. This tutorial describes step-by-step instructions for posting HAVEs on StudySwap, posting NEEDs on StudySwap, responding to the posts of other researchers, and creating exchange agreements to define expectations of all collaborative parties prior to data collection.
The role of the opioid system in decision making and cognitive control: A review
Authors: van Steenbergen Henk , Eikemo Marie , Leknes Siri
Published: July 2018

The opioid system plays a key role in the regulation of affective processing including pain, pleasure, and reward. However, there is also increasing evidence that this system plays a broader role and can modulate cognitive function. In particular, increasing evidence suggests that the mu-opioid system influences how we choose between actions of different values and how we control our behavior in the face of distracting information. The present paper reviews the available evidence from studies that have used pharmacological manipulations of the mu-opioid system in healthy human volunteers. Our review covers experimental paradigms that have investigated reward-based decision making, impulsivity, neuropsychological tests of executive functioning, attention, inhibition and effort. The reviewed findings provide an emerging picture of how the mu-opioid system influences higher-level cognitive function via modulation of valuation, motivation and control circuits dense in mu-opioid receptors, including orbitofrontal cortex, basal ganglia, amygdalae, anterior cingulate cortex, and prefrontal cortex. The working model we put forward proposes that opioids influence decision making and cognitive control by increasing the subjective value of reward and reducing aversive arousal. The review highlights potential mechanisms that might underlie the effects of mu-opioids on decision making and cognitive control and provides important directions for future research.
How to create a human communication system: A theoretical model
Authors: Lister Casey J , Fay Nicolas
Published: July 2018

Following a synthesis of naturalistic and experimental studies of language creation, we propose a theoretical model that describes the process through which human communication systems might arise and evolve. Three key processes are proposed that give rise to effective, efficient and shared human communication systems: 1) motivated signs that directly resemble their meaning facilitate cognitive alignment, improving communication success; 2) behavioral alignment onto an inventory of shared sign-to-meaning mappings bolsters cognitive alignment between interacting partners; 3) sign refinement, through interactive feedback, enhances the efficiency of the evolving communication system. By integrating the findings across a range of diverse studies, we propose a theoretical model of the process through which the earliest human communication systems might have arisen and evolved. Importantly, because our model is not bound to a single modality it can describe the creation of shared sign systems across a range of contexts, informing theories of language creation and evolution.
Проект краудсорсингового инжиниринга нейрофизиологических орбитальных экспериментов с переживающими слайсами ткани и культурой нервной ткани в ультракомпактных биоспутниках в формате «Cubesat»
Authors: Gradov Oleg
Published: July 2018

Проект краудсорсингового инжиниринга нейрофизиологических орбитальных экспериментов с переживающими слайсами ткани и культурой нервной ткани в ультракомпактных биоспутниках в формате «Cubesat» с интегрированными лабораториями на чипе
Fast-Forwarding Disgust Conditioning: US Pre-Exposure Facilitates Acquisition of Oculomotor Avoidance
Authors: Armstrong Thomas , Engel Mira , Press Trevor , Sonstroem Anneka , Reed Julian
Published: July 2018

During human development, disgust is acquired to a broad range of stimuli, from rotting food to moral transgressions. Disgust’s expansion surely involves associative learning, yet little is known about Pavlovian disgust conditioning. The present study examined conditioned disgust responding as revealed by oculomotor avoidance, the tendency to look away from offensive stimuli. In two experiments, oculomotor avoidance was acquired to a neutral image associated with a disgusting image. However, to our surprise, participants initially dwelled on disgusting images, avoiding them only after multiple exposures. In Experiment 1, this “rubbernecking” response delayed oculomotor avoidance of the associated neutral image. In Experiment 2, we exhausted rubbernecking prior to conditioning by repeatedly exposing participants to the disgusting images. This procedure elicited earlier oculomotor avoidance of the associated neutral stimulus, essentially fast-forwarding conditioning. These findings reveal competing motivational tendencies elicited by disgust stimuli that complicate associative disgust learning.
Green consumption does not make people cheat: Three replications of a moral licensing experiment (more recent version was published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2019.01.011)
Authors: Urban Jan , Bahník Štěpán , Braun Kohlová Markéta
Published: July 2018

A recent study (Mazar & Zhong, 2010) argued that green consumption may serve as a moral license and thus lead to subsequent dishonest behavior. In our three replications of the study (total N = 1,274), two of which were preregistered, participants’ level of green consumption was manipulated by having them purchase goods in either a green or conventional store. Three different tasks which allowed participants to cheat for monetary profit were used to measure dishonesty across the experiments. We found no effect of green consumption on subsequent honesty. These results cast doubt on the size of the effect found in the original study and suggest that green consumption is unlikely to trigger a cross-domain moral licensing effect.
Why not to use the journal impact factor as a criterion for the selection of junior researchers, and what to do instead: a comment on Bornmann & Williams (2017)
Authors: Peters Gjalt - Jorn Ygram
Published: July 2018

This is a letter to the editor, and as such, has no abstract.
Reflexivity in Rats: Location Control in Generalized Identity Matching-to-Sample
Authors: Beurms Sarah , Jurado Ana Gloria Plaza , Sánchez-Kuhn Ana , De Houwer Jan , Beckers Tom
Published: July 2018

Reflexivity entails that an organism can match a stimulus to itself (“A=A”) without direct training. Reflexivity is typically studied in identity matching-to-sample tasks wherein subjects are first presented with a sample stimulus in the middle position and trained to select the same stimulus from two comparison stimuli that are subsequently presented in the side positions. However, when the position of the comparisons is altered, nonhuman animals often revert to responding at chance levels, suggesting that they encode the location of stimuli together with their identity as part of the functional stimulus. This might hamper generalization of the task to novel stimuli (i.e., generalized identity matching-to-sample), which would be an observation of reflexivity. To test whether the use of multiple locations facilitates generalized identity matching-to-sample in rats, we used an olfactory matching-to-sample task. Two rats received training in which the location of the stimuli varied randomly. The speed with which they learned to match identical odors and the generalization to new stimuli was compared with two rats that received standard matching-to-sample training in which the location of the stimuli was fixed. We observed generalized identity matching-to-sample in two rats that could not be explained by reinforcement recency. However, we found no evidence that the use of multiple locations facilitated generalized identity matching-to-sample.
Uncomfortable Truths
Authors: Nosek Brian A.
Published: July 2018

Beliefs help humans make sense of the world, allowing us to understand our past and present and to predict and control our future. Our most elaborate beliefs are explanations of ourselves — who we are, what we are like and why we do the things we do. Forty years of psychological research reveal that humans are superb at generating explanations for their behavior but not accurate explanations. Self-explanations appear to say more about human capacity for telling a good story than the quality of self-insight. But identifying and giving up false beliefs is not so simple. Like possessions, we hold on to beliefs about ourselves long past their usefulness.
A Comparator-Hypothesis Account of Biased Contingency Detection
Authors: Vadillo Miguel A. , Barberia Itxaso
Published: July 2018

Our ability to detect statistical dependencies between different events in the environment is strongly biased by the number of coincidences between them. Even when there is no true covariation between a cue and an outcome, if the marginal probability of either of them is high, people tend to perceive some degree of statistical contingency between both events. The present paper explores the ability of the Comparator Hypothesis to explain the general pattern of results observed in this literature. Our simulations show that this model can account for the biasing effects of the marginal probabilities of cues and outcomes. Furthermore, the overall fit of the Comparator Hypothesis to a sample of experimental conditions from previous studies is comparable to that of the popular Rescorla-Wagner model. These results should encourage researchers to further explore and put to the test the predictions of the Comparator Hypothesis in the domain of biased contingency detection.
Perceptual contributions to racial bias in pain recognition
Authors: Mende-Siedlecki Peter , Qu-Lee Jennie Wen , Backer Robert , Van Bavel Jay Joseph
Published: July 2018

The pain of Black Americans is systematically under-diagnosed and under-treated, compared to the pain of their White counterparts. Extensive research has examined the psychological factors that might account for such biases, including status judgments, racial prejudice, and stereotypes about biological differences between Blacks and Whites. Across seven experiments we accumulated evidence that lower-level perceptual processes also uniquely contribute to downstream racial biases in pain recognition. We repeatedly observed that White participants showed more stringent thresholds for perceiving pain on Black faces, compared to White faces. A tendency to see painful expressions on Black faces less readily arose, in part, from a disruption in configural processing associated with other-race faces. Subsequent analyses revealed that this racial bias in pain perception could not be easily attributed to stimulus features (e.g., color, luminance, or contrast), subjective evaluations related to pain tolerance and experience (e.g., masculinity, dominance, etc.), or objective differences in face structure and expression intensity between Black and White faces. Finally, we observed that racial biases in perception facilitated biases in pain treatment decisions, and that this relationship existed over and above biased judgments of status and strength, explicit racial bias, and endorsement of false beliefs regarding biological differences. A meta-analysis across nine total experiments (N = 1289) confirmed the robustness and size of these effects. This research establishes a subtle, albeit influential, perceptual pathway to intergroup bias in pain care and treatment. Implications for racial bias, face perception, and medical treatment are discussed.
The High-Pass Filter Hypothesis for Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD)
Authors: Dellanna Luca
Published: July 2018

This paper proposes that one of the underlying causes of Autism Spectrum Disorder is the presence of a High-Pass Filter Effect applied to cognitive perception. Such an effect causes an enhancement of local details at the expense of global patterns. In particular, the High-Pass Filter Effect induces a disadvantage pertaining to mastering contextual fields (fields in which local features are noisy and information is distributed in adjacent perceptual pieces and in the relationship between them; for instance, interpersonal communication). Furthermore, in some cases, the High-Pass Filter Effect produces an advantage with respect to mastering detailed fields (fields in which information is intrinsic in modular, precise pieces of information; for example, computer science).In this paper, the High-Pass Filter Effect is explained, two secondary effects are described, (Peripheral Functionality Blindness and Prioritization by Specificity), and then a few examples of the way in which these effects induce the symptoms of Autism Spectrum Disorder are reported.
In defense of the commons: Young children negatively evaluate and sanction free-riders
Authors: Yang Fan , Choi You-jung , Misch Antonia , Yang Xin , Dunham Yarrow
Published: July 2018

Human flourishing depends on individuals paying costs to contribute to common goods, but such arrangements are vulnerable to “free-riding”, in which individuals benefit from others’ contributions without paying costs themselves. Systems of tracking and sanctioning free-riders can stabilize cooperation, but the origin of such tendencies is not well understood. Here, we provide evidence that children as young as four negatively evaluate and sanction free-riders. Across six studies we show that these tendencies are robust, large in magnitude, tuned to intentional rather than unintentional non-contribution, and generally consistent across third- and first-party cases. Further, these effects cannot be accounted for by factors that frequently co-occur with free-riding, such as the costs that free-riding imposes on the group or that free-riding is often non-conformity. Our findings demonstrate that from early in life children both hold and enforce a normative expectation that individuals are intrinsically obligated to contribute to the common good.
I’ll get there because I’m great, or am I? Narcissistic Vulnerability Moderates the Narcissistic Grandiosity – Goal Persistence Relationship
Authors: Manley Harry , Roberts Ross , Beattie Stuart , Woodman Tim
Published: July 2018

Across three studies, we examined the moderating effect of narcissistic vulnerability on the relationship between narcissistic grandiosity and persistence. In Study 1 (n = 338), narcissistic grandiosity predicted greater goal-drive persistence, but only when individuals also possessed a degree of narcissistic vulnerability. In Study 2 (n = 199), we replicated these effects and demonstrated that they were independent of socially desirable responding. In Study 3 (n = 372), narcissistic vulnerability moderated the grandiosity – persistence relationship to predict persistence for personally relevant goals and hypothetical goals. Notably, the moderating effect of vulnerability was independent of the effects of self-esteem. These results provide the first evidence that narcissistic grandiosity predicts persistence only in the presence of self-doubt regarding superiority. The results demonstrate the importance of considering the interplay between the two components of narcissism.
Social perspective taking is associated with self-reported prosocial behavior and regional cortical thickness across adolescence
Authors: Tamnes Christian K. , Overbye Knut , Ferschmann Lia , Fjell Anders M. , Walhovd Kristine Beate , Blakemore Sarah-Jayne , Dumontheil Iroise
Published: July 2018

Basic perspective taking and mentalising abilities develop in childhood, but recent studies indicate that the use of social perspective taking to guide decisions and actions has a prolonged development that continues throughout adolescence. Here, we aimed to replicate this research and investigate the hypotheses that individual differences in social perspective taking in adolescence are associated with real-life prosocial and antisocial behavior and differences in brain structure. We employed an experimental approach and a large cross-sectional sample (n=293) of participants aged 7-26 years old to assess age-related improvement in social perspective taking usage during performance of a version of the Director task. In subsamples, we then tested how individual differences in social perspective taking were related to self-reported prosocial behavior and peer relationship problems on the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) (n=184) and to magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) measures of regional cortical thickness and surface area (n=226). The pattern of results in the Director task replicated previous findings by demonstrating continued improvement in use of social perspective taking across adolescence. The study also showed that better social perspective taking usage is associated with more self-reported prosocial behavior, as well as to thinner cerebral cortex in regions in the left hemisphere encompassing parts of the caudal middle frontal and precentral gyri and lateral parietal regions. These associations were observed independently of age, and might partly reflect individual developmental variability. The relevance of cortical development was additionally supported by indirect effects of age on social perspective taking usage via cortical thickness.
Longitudinal Socio-Emotional Learning Intervention for Autism Via Smartglasses: Qualitative School Teacher Report of Practicality and Efficacy in General and Special Education Classroom Settings.
Authors: Keshav Neha U. , Vahabzadeh Arshya , Abdus-Sabur Rafiq , Liu Runpeng , Huey Krystal , Salisbury Joseph P. , Sahin Ned T.
Published: July 2018

There is considerable demand for special education services for the over half a million students with autism in the United States. While assistive technology may help to augment educational services, their implementation is prevented by a number of practical and attitudinal barriers. These barriers are especially pertinent for the newest and least familiar digital systems, such as computerized smartglasses loaded with specialized software modules, a technology that has already been shown to have an ability to deliver educational interventions through augmented reality. With this in mind, we sought to understand how school educators received and assessed the practicality of a smartglasses-based educational intervention in a single-subject study. The intervention is designed to aid with attention and social educational learning in autism. The intervention was delivered twice a day during a two-week study on a 13-year-old student with autism who attends a mainstream middle school in Massachusetts. Three different school educators delivered the intervention: the student’s general education teacher, special education teacher, and paraprofessional. Educators recorded their attitudes, practicality of the technology, and impact on the student and their classroom through the use of a digital log and a series of in-person interviews. Overall, the school educators experienced a positive view of the smartglasses. The smartglasses intervention was found to be logistically practical to implement, easily usable by educator and student, and was not time consuming to learn or to implement. Educators also identified the experience as being fun for the student, and felt the student demonstrated improvement to verbal and non-verbal skills. There were no adverse effects on the other students or the classroom, and the technology did not result in a distraction. These findings suggest that social skills interventions delivered by smartglasses may be practical, useful, and may lead to improvements in social communication skills. Further research on smartglasses may help to clarify the future role for augmenting special education in students with autism.
Moral Framing and Charitable Donation: Integrating exploratory social media analyses and confirmatory experimentation
Authors: Hoover Joseph , Johnson-Grey Kate M , Boghrati Reihane , Graham Jesse , Dehghani Morteza
Published: July 2018

Do appeals to moral values promote charitable donation during natural disasters? Using Distributed Dictionary Representation, we analyze tweets posted during Hurricane Sandy to explore associations between moral values and charitable donation sentiment. We then derive hypotheses from the observed associations and test these hypotheses across a series of preregistered experiments that investigate the effects of moral framing on perceived donation motivation (Studies 2 & 3), hypothetical donation (Study 4), and real donation behavior (Study 5). Overall, we find consistent associations between moral care and loyalty framing with donation sentiment and donation motivation. Further, our results indicate that framing a donation solicitation with moral care leads to larger donations, compared to non-moral solicitations. Overall, this work demonstrates that theoretically constrained, exploratory social media analyses can be used to generate viable hypotheses. Further, we identify novel associations between specific moral frames and a range of constructs relevant to charitable donation.
Functionalism in the lexicon: Where is it, and how did it get there?
Authors: Richie Russell
Published: July 2018

Why do languages have the words they have, and not some other set of words? While certainly there is some arbitrariness in the lexicon (English ‘frog’ vs. Spanish ‘rana’), there is just as surely some systematicity or functionality in it as well. What exactly might the nature of this systematicity or functionality be? For example, might the lexicon be efficiently adapted for communication, learning, memory storage, retrieval, or other cognitive functions? This paper critically reviews evidence that natural language lexicons efficiently carve up semantic fields (e.g., color, space, kinship) and have phonological forms that are similarly efficient when the aggregate lexicon is considered. The paper also suggests additional ways functionalism in lexicons might be assessed, and speculates on how functional lexicons may have arisen.
Voice-Only Communication Enhances Empathic Accuracy
Authors: Kraus Michael W.
Published: July 2018

This research tests the prediction that voice-only communication increases empathic accuracy over communication across senses. We theorized that people often intentionally communicate their feelings and internal states through the voice, and as such, voice-only communication allows perceivers to focus their attention on the channel of communication most active and accurate in conveying emotions to others. We used five experiments to test this hypothesis (N = 1,772), finding that voice-only communication elicits higher rates of empathic accuracy relative to vision-only and multi-sense communication both while engaging in interactions and perceiving emotions in recorded interactions of strangers. Experiments 4 and 5 reveal that voice-only communication is particularly likely to enhance empathic accuracy through increasing focused attention on the linguistic and para-linguistic vocal cues that accompany speech. Overall, the studies question the primary role of the face in communication of emotion, and offer new insights for improving emotion recognition accuracy in social interactions.
Putting the P Value in its Place
Authors: Krueger Joachim Israel , Heck Patrick Ryan
Published: July 2018

As the debate over best statistical practices continues in academic journals, conferences, and the blogosphere, working researchers (e.g., psychologists) need to figure out how much time and effort to invest in attending to experts’ arguments, how to design their next project, and how to craft a sustainable long-term strategy for data analysis and inference. The present special issue of the American Statistician promises help. In this article, we offer a modest proposal for a continued and informed use of the conventional p value without the pitfalls of statistical rituals. Other statistical indices should complement reporting, and extra-statistical (e.g., theoretical) judgments ought to be made with care and clarity.
The Future of Identity Development Research: Reflections, Tensions, and Challenges
Authors: Syed Moin , McLean Kate C.
Published: July 2018

In this chapter we review the contents of the Handbook and discuss important future directions for research on identity development. First, we reflect on the three major sections of the book: debates, applications, and extensions, highlighting why the sections are important and what we have learned. Second, we discuss tensions in the study of identity development that we identified as we edited this Handbook. These tensions include what aspect of identity is being studied, how culture is defined, and the strong emphasis on individual agency over context and opportunity. Finally, we discuss two major challenges to the field of identity development: conceptualizing what exactly is developing in identity development, and bridging the divide between identity process and identity content. Taken together, this chapter, like the Handbook more broadly, is meant to serve as a catalyst and inspiration for future identity development in the coming decades
No effect of gamification on attrition from a longitudinal cognitive testing study
Authors: Lumsden Jim Alexander , Skinner Andy , Coyle David , Lawrence Natalia , Munafo Marcus Robert
Published: July 2018

The prospect of assessing cognition longitudinally is attractive to researchers, health practitioners and pharmaceutical companies alike. However, such repeated-testing regimes place a considerable burden on participants, and with cognitive tasks typically being regarded as effortful and unengaging, these studies may experience high levels of participant attrition. One potential solution is to gamify these tasks to make them more engaging: increasing participant willingness to take part and reducing attrition. However, such an approach must balance task validity with introducing entertaining gamelike elements.We investigated the effects of gamelike features on participant attrition using a between-subjects, longitudinal online testing study. We used three variants of a common cognitive task, the stop signal task, with a single gamelike feature in each: one variant where points were rewarded for performing optimally, another where the task was given a graphical theme, and a third variant which was a standard stop signal task and served as a control condition. Participants completed four compulsory test sessions over four consecutive days before entering a six-day voluntary testing period where they faced a daily decision to either drop out or continue taking part. Participants were paid for each session they completed.We saw no evidence for an effect of gamification on attrition, with participants dropping out of each variant at equal rates. Our findings raise doubts about the ability of gamification to increase engagement with cognitive testing studies.
Asymmetric accommodation during interaction leads to the regularisation of linguistic variants
Authors: Feher Olga , Ritt Nikolaus , Smith Kenny
Published: July 2018

Linguistic variation is constrained by grammatical and social context, making the occurrence of particular variants at least somewhat predictable. We explore accommodation during interaction as a potential mechanism to explain this phenomenon. Specifically, we test a hypothesis derived from historical linguistics that interaction between categorical and variable users is inherently asymmetric: while variable users accommodate to their partners, categorical users are reluctant to do so, because it would mean violating the rules of their grammar. We ran two experiments in which participants learnt a miniature language featuring a variable or categorical grammatical marker and then used it to communicate. Our results support the asymmetric accommodation hypothesis: variably-trained participants accommodated to their categorically-trained partners, who tended not to change their behaviour during interaction. These results may reflect general social cognitive constraints on acquiring and using variable linguistic devices, and give insights into how small-scale interactive mechanisms may influence population-level linguistic phenomena.
Quality of Life and Psychosocial Needs of Patients with Thyroid Cancer
Authors: Masangkay Christian Victor Aquino
Published: July 2018

Due to their generally positive prognosis, patients with thyroid cancer experience cancer differently compared to patients with other types of cancer. The different set of experiences that come with the unique medical trajectory and treatment of thyroid cancer may lead to a different quality of life and may necessitate a different set of psychosocial support. This paper reviews and critiques some extant literature on the quality of life and psychosocial needs of patients with thyroid cancer. Although they have a positive prognosis and relatively less aggressive cancer treatment, their quality of life is still affected by their illness and its treatment. The “good cancer” label sometimes falls short to its promise. Accordingly, patients’ psychosocial needs in each of the quality of life domains—physical, psychological, social, and environmental—should be addressed. Addressing experience of fatigue, employment issues, depression, and anxiety is especially important. A comprehensible and readily doable list of recommendations for patients and their health care providers is suggested to help address patients’ psychosocial needs and improve their quality of life.
Participation in organized activities protects against adolescents’ risky substance use, even beyond development in conscientiousness
Authors: McCabe Kira O. , Modecki Kathryn , Barber Bonnie L.
Published: July 2018

Adolescents are at a significant risk for binge drinking and illicit drug use. One way to protect against these behaviors is through participation in extracurricular activities. However, there is a debate about whether highly conscientious adolescents are more likely to participate in activities, which raises the concern of a confound. To disentangle these relationships, we tested the latent trajectories of substance use and personality across three years, with participation in activities and sports as time-varying predictors. We surveyed 687 adolescents (55% female, 85.4% Caucasian) in Western Australia schools across 3 years. At Time 1, the students were in Year 10 (mean age 15 years). The results showed that participation in activities and conscientiousness are related, but each uniquely predicts slower growth in substance use. Across waves, participation in activities predicted less risky substance use a year later, over and above conscientiousness development. These results suggest that there may be unique benefits of participation in activities that protect against risky substance use.
How well do similarity measures predict priming in abstract and concrete concepts?
Authors: Montefinese Maria , Buchanan Erin Michelle , Vinson David
Published: July 2018

Models of semantic representation predict that automatic priming is determined by associative and co-occurrence relations (i.e., spreading activation accounts), or to similarity in words' semantic features (i.e., featural models). Although, these three factors are correlated in characterizing semantic representation, they seem to tap different aspects of meaning. We designed two lexical decision experiments to dissociate these three different types of meaning similarity. For unmasked primes, we observed priming only due to association strength and not the other two measures; and no evidence for differences in priming for concrete and abstract concepts. For masked primes there was no priming regardless of the semantic relation. These results challenge theoretical accounts of automatic priming. Rather, they are in line with the idea that priming may be due to participants’ controlled strategic processes. These results provide important insight about the nature of priming and how association strength, as determined from word-association norms, relates to the nature of semantic representation.
Brief Report: Preliminary evidence that co-rumination fosters adolescents’ depression risk by increasing rumination
Authors: Stone Lindsey B , Gibb Brandon
Published: July 2018

Mounting research shows that the tendency to co-ruminate with peers regarding ongoing problems increases adolescents’ depression risk; however, the means by which this interpersonal process fosters risk has not been identified. This said, theorists have proposed that co-rumination increases depression risk, in part, by increasing one’s tendency to ruminate when alone. We tested this hypothesis in a study of 201 high-school freshmen who completed two assessments, six months apart. Supporting the proposed model, co-rumination predicted prospective increases in rumination and rumination predicted increases in depressive symptoms. The direct effect of co-rumination on depressive symptom change was not significant. Results indicate that co-rumination with friends may serve to increase rumination, which in turn increases depression risk.
When a second language hits a native language. What ERPs (do and do not) tell us about language retrieval difficulty in bilingual language production. Preprint.
Authors: Wodniecka Zofia , Szewczyk Jakub M. , Kałamała Patrycja , Mandera Paweł , Durlik Joanna
Published: July 2018

The accumulating evidence suggests that prior usage of a second language (L2) leads to processing costs on the subsequent production of a native language (L1). However, it is unclear mechanism underlies this effect. It has been proposed that the L1 cost reflects inhibition of L1 representation acting during L1 production; however, previous studies exploring this issue were inconclusive. It is also unsettled whether the mechanism operates on the whole-language level or is restricted to translation equivalents in the two languages. We report a study that allowed us to address both issues behaviorally with the use of ERPs while focusing on the consequences of using L2 on the production of L1. In our experiment, native speakers of Polish (L1) and learners of English (L2) named a set of pictures in L1 following a set of pictures in either L1 or L2. Half of the pictures were repeated from the preceding block and half were new; this enabled dissociation of the effects on the level of the whole language from those specific to individual lexical items. Our results are consistent with the notion that language after-effects operate at a whole-language level. Behaviorally, we observed a clear processing cost on the whole-language level and a small facilitation on the item-specific level. The whole-language effect was accompanied by an enhanced, fronto-centrally distributed negativity in the 250–350ms time-window which we identified as the N300 (in contrast to previous research, which probably misidentified the effect as the N2), a component that presumably reflects retrieval difficulty of relevant language representations during picture naming. As such, unlike previous studies that reported N2 for naming pictures in L1 after L2 use, we propose that the reported ERPs (N300) indicate that prior usage of L2 hampers lexical access to names in L1. Based on the literature, the after-effects could be caused by L1 inhibition and/or L2 interference, but the ERPs so far have not been informative about the causal mechanism.
The role of design and training in artifact expertise: The case of the abacus and visual attention
Authors: Srinivasan Mahesh , Wagner Katherine , Frank Michael C. , Barner David
Published: July 2018

Previous accounts of how people develop expertise have focused on how deliberate practice transforms the cognitive and perceptual representations and processes that give rise to expertise. However, the likelihood of developing expertise with a particular tool may also depend on the degree to which that tool fits pre-existing perceptual and cognitive abilities. The present studies explored whether the abacus – a descendent of the first human computing devices – may have evolved to exploit general biases in human visual attention, or whether developing expertise with the abacus requires learning special strategies for allocating visual attention to the abacus. To address this question, we administered a series of visual search tasks to abacus experts and subjects who had little to no abacus experience, in which search targets and distractors were overlaid atop abacus “beads.” Across three studies, we found that both experts and naïve subjects were faster to detect targets in semantically-relevant components of the abacus, suggesting that abacus training is not required to exhibit attentional biases toward these components of the abacus. This finding suggests that the attentional biases that scaffold numerical processing of the abacus may emerge from general properties of visual attention that are exploited by the design of the abacus itself.
A Simple Method for Comparing Complex Models: Bayesian Model Comparison for Hierarchical Multinomial Processing Tree Models using Warp-III Bridge Sampling
Authors: Gronau Quentin Frederik , Wagenmakers Eric-Jan , Heck Daniel W. , Matzke Dora
Published: July 2018

Multinomial processing trees (MPTs) are a popular class of cognitive models for categorical data. Typically, researchers compare several MPTs, each equipped with many parameters, especially when the models are implemented in a hierarchical framework. A Bayesian solution is to compute posterior model probabilities and Bayes factors. Both quantities, however, rely on the marginal likelihood, a high-dimensional integral that cannot be evaluated analytically. In this case study, we show how Warp-III bridge sampling can be used to compute the marginal likelihood for hierarchical MPTs. We illustrate the procedure with two published data sets and demonstrate how Warp-III facilitates Bayesian model averaging.
Perceptual Boundaries Cause Mnemonic Trade-Offs Between Local Boundary Processing and Across-Trial Associative Binding
Authors: Heusser Andrew C. , Ezzyat Youssef , Shiff Ilana , Davachi Lila
Published: July 2018

Episodic memories are not veridical records of our lives, but rather are better described as organizedsummaries of experience. Theories and empirical research suggest that shifts in perceptual, temporal, andsemantic information lead to a chunking of our continuous experiences into segments, or “events.”However, the consequences of these contextual shifts on memory formation and organization remainsunclear. In a series of 3 behavioral studies, we introduced context shifts (or “event boundaries”) betweentrains of stimuli and then examined the influence of the boundaries on several measures of associativememory. In Experiment 1, we found that perceptual event boundaries strengthened associative bindingof item-context pairings present at event boundaries. In Experiment 2, we observed reduced temporalorder memory for items encoded in distinct events relative to items encoded within the same event, anda trade-off between the speed of processing at boundaries, and temporal order memory for items thatflanked those boundaries. Finally, in Experiment 3 we found that event organization imprinted structureon the order in which items were freely recalled. These results provide insight into how boundary- andevent-related organizational processes during encoding shape subsequent representations of events inepisodic memory.
Illuminating Ipsative Change in Personality Disorder and Normal Personality: A Multimethod Examination from a Prospective Longitudinal Perspective
Authors: Woods William C. , Edershile Elizabeth A. , Wright Aidan G.C. , Lenzenweger Mark F.
Published: July 2018

Research suggests that both personality disorder (PD) and normal personality change as systems of variables (e.g., the general factor of PD), rather than as individual variables (e.g., neuroticism). Consequently, understanding PD and normal personality as multidimensional systems may yield additional insights over traditional single variable approaches. Normal personality change has been attributed to increase across adaptive traits (i.e., the maturity principle), suggesting that shifts in the overall magnitude of construct expression plays a role in systemic change. We examined the extent to which total ipsative, system-level change was accounted for by shifts in the overall level of constructs (i.e., severity/maturity) as well as shifts in the configuration of PD and normal personality (i.e., style) across self-report and structured interview. Results demonstrated that overall change in PD and normal personality measured via self-report reflected both stylistic and severity change, whereas structured interview of PD primarily reflected shifts in profile severity.
Music Disorder Impaired Intonation but Spared Lexical Tone Processing In Chinese Children and Adults
Authors: Li Jiaqi
Published: July 2018

Music and language are two closely-related domains. Whether the music disorder affects adults’ and children’s language processing such as intonation and tone identification ability still remains unclear. The current study aimed at investigating whether people who are impaired in pitch perception and who have normal music ability perform differently in intonation identification and tone identification tasks. Eleven adults and twenty-one children who have pitch disorder, thirteen adult controls and twenty-three children controls participated in this study. They were required to listen to Mandarin sentences containing both intonation and lexical tone in the same syllable and judge the intonation (in the intonation task) and tone (in the tone task). Results showed that overall, music disorder impaired people in the identification of intonation, rather than lexical tones, in both adults and children. Besides, the perception of lexical tones has not been fully developed in 9-year-old children, while their ability to identify intonation was mature, which indicated that intonation identification ability might be mature earlier than tone identification in human beings.
Automated audiovisual depression analysis
Authors: Girard Jeffrey M. , Cohn Jeffrey F
Published: July 2018

Analysis of observable behavior in depression primarily relies on subjective measures. New computational approaches make possible automated audiovisual measurement of behaviors that humans struggle to quantify (e.g., movement velocity and voice inflection). These tools have the potential to improve screening and diagnosis, identify new behavioral indicators of depression, measure response to clinical intervention, and test clinical theories about underlying mechanisms. Highlights include a study that measured the temporal coordination of vocal tract and facial movements, a study that predicted which adolescents would go on to develop depression based on their voice qualities, and a study that tested the behavioral predictions of clinical theories using automated measures of facial actions and head motion.