My sense is
The Power to Control Time: Power Influences How Much Time (You Think) You Have
Alice Moon & Serena Chen
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, September 2014, Pages 97–101
Abstract:
Time, because of its unrenewable nature, has often been called an equalizing resource. Though objectively, time is identical for everyone, time perception has been found to be a subjective experience that can be distorted by psychological cues; however, little research has examined individual and situational factors that influence time availability. Based on past research on power and illusory control, we hypothesized that powerful individuals would perceive having more available time as a consequence of their perceived control over time. Four studies experimentally demonstrated that power increases perceptions of available time, and that perceived control over time underlies this effect (Study 3). Finally, we provided initial evidence that increases in perceived time availability leads powerful individuals to feel less stressed (Study 5).
----------------------
Supernatural believers attribute more intentions to random movement than skeptics: An fMRI study
Tapani Riekki, Marjaana Lindeman & Tuukka Raij
Social Neuroscience, July/August 2014, Pages 400-411
Abstract:
A host of research has attempted to explain why some believe in the supernatural and some do not. One suggested explanation for commonly held supernatural beliefs is that they are a by-product of theory of mind (ToM) processing. However, this does not explain why skeptics with intact ToM processes do not believe. We employed fMRI to investigate activation differences in ToM-related brain circuitries between supernatural believers (N = 12) and skeptics (N = 11) while they watched 2D animations of geometric objects moving intentionally or randomly and rated the intentionality of the animations. The ToM-related circuitries in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) were localized by contrasting intention-rating-related and control-rating-related brain activation. Compared with the skeptics, the supernatural believers rated the random movements as more intentional and had stronger activation of the ToM-related circuitries during the animation with random movement. The strength of the ToM-related activation covaried with the intentionality ratings. These findings provide evidence that differences in ToM-related activations are associated with supernatural believers’ tendency to interpret random phenomena in mental terms. Thus, differences in ToM processing may contribute to differences between believing and unbelieving.
----------------------
Free will and paranormal beliefs
Ken Mogi
Frontiers in Psychology, April 2014
Abstract:
Free will is one of the fundamental aspects of human cognition. In the context of cognitive neuroscience, various experiments on time perception, sensorimotor coordination, and agency suggest the possibility that it is a robust illusion (a feeling independent of actual causal relationship with actions) constructed by neural mechanisms. Humans are known to suffer from various cognitive biases and failures, and the sense of free will might be one of them. Here I report a positive correlation between the belief in free will and paranormal beliefs (UFO, reincarnation, astrology, and psi). Web questionnaires involving 2076 subjects (978 males, 1087 females, and 11 other genders) were conducted, which revealed significant positive correlations between belief in free will (theory and practice) and paranormal beliefs. There was no significant correlation between belief in free will and knowledge in paranormal phenomena. Paranormal belief scores for females were significantly higher than those for males, with corresponding significant (albeit weaker) difference in belief in free will. These results are consistent with the view that free will is an illusion which shares common cognitive elements with paranormal beliefs.
----------------------
What you hear shapes how you think: Sound patterns change level of construal
Jochim Hansen & Johann Melzner
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, September 2014, Pages 131–138
Abstract:
Psychological distance and abstractness primes have been shown to increase one’s level of construal. We tested the idea that auditory cues which are related to distance and abstractness (vs. proximity and concreteness) trigger abstract (vs. concrete) construal. Participants listened to musical sounds that varied in reverberation, novelty of harmonic modulation, and metrical segmentation. In line with the hypothesis, distance/abstractness cues in the sounds instigated the formation of broader categories, increased the preference for global as compared to local aspects of visual patterns, and caused participants to put more weight on aggregated than on individualized product evaluations. The relative influence of distance/abstractness cues in sounds, as well as broader implications of the findings for basic research and applied settings are discussed.
----------------------
Gaze direction and brightness can affect self-reported emotion
Xiaobin Zhang, Qiong Li & Bin Zuo
Journal of Environmental Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Previous studies revealed that emotion (pleased or depressed) could bias perception in a metaphorically consistent manner (e.g., happy = white (up), depressed = dark (down)). The present study extended this view by investigating whether these metaphors can also affect the emotion of an observer in a metaphorically consistent manner. In Experiment 1, after gazing at a black screen, participants became more depressed and less pleased temporarily. Conversely, after gazing at a white screen, participants became more pleased and less depressed temporarily. Results from Experiment 2 revealed that after gazing at the top of the screen, participants felt more pleased and less depressed temporarily but felt the reverse when gazing at the bottom of the screen. These results suggest that metaphors can, at least temporarily, affect the emotion of an observer along a pleased-depressed dimension.
----------------------
Failure to see money on a tree: Inattentional blindness for objects that guided behavior
Ira Hyman, Benjamin Sarb & Breanne Wise-Swanson
Frontiers in Psychology, April 2014
Abstract:
How is it possible to drive home and have no awareness of the trip? We documented a new form of inattentional blindness in which people fail to become aware of obstacles that had guided their behavior. In our first study, we found that people talking on cell phones while walking waited longer to avoid an obstacle and were less likely to be aware that they had avoided an obstacle than other individual walkers. In our second study, cell phone talkers and texters were less likely to show awareness of money on a tree over the pathway they were traversing. Nonetheless, they managed to avoid walking into the money tree. Perceptual information may be processed in two distinct pathways – one guiding behavior and the other leading to awareness. We observed that people can appropriately use information to guide behavior without awareness.
----------------------
Soft Assurance: Coping with Uncertainty Through Haptic Sensations
Femke van Horen & Thomas Mussweiler
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, September 2014, Pages 73–80
Abstract:
Uncertainty is an inescapable element of human life. But how do people deal with it? To date, most research has focused on the cognitive strategies people adopt to do so. In four experiments we examine, whether people may also use an alternative experiential route to cope with uncertainty. We demonstrate that (1) when faced with uncertainty, people seek soft haptic sensations (Experiments 1 and 2) and (2) that doing so is functional (Experiments 3 and 4). More specifically, we show that people shift their preference to objects with soft (i.e., soft-grip pen, soft candy) rather than hard properties (i.e., hard-grip pen, hard candy) when feeling uncertain. Furthermore, we show that holding something soft (i.e., a soft-grip pen, a soft cloth) as compared to something hard (i.e., a hard-grip pen, a hard cloth) reduces uncertainty on a subsequent ambiguous task and helps to shield against uncertainty in daily life by increasing tolerance towards uncertainty. Overall, this research reveals that humans may use their oldest and most fundamental sense – touch – as a basic experiential device to cope with uncertainty.
----------------------
Andreas Lind et al.
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Speech is usually assumed to start with a clearly defined preverbal message, which provides a benchmark for self-monitoring and a robust sense of agency for one’s utterances. However, an alternative hypothesis states that speakers often have no detailed preview of what they are about to say, and that they instead use auditory feedback to infer the meaning of their words. In the experiment reported here, participants performed a Stroop color-naming task while we covertly manipulated their auditory feedback in real time so that they said one thing but heard themselves saying something else. Under ideal timing conditions, two thirds of these semantic exchanges went undetected by the participants, and in 85% of all nondetected exchanges, the inserted words were experienced as self-produced. These findings indicate that the sense of agency for speech has a strong inferential component, and that auditory feedback of one’s own voice acts as a pathway for semantic monitoring, potentially overriding other feedback loops.
----------------------
If looks could kill: Anger attributions are intensified by affordances for doing harm
Colin Holbrook et al.
Emotion, forthcoming
Abstract:
Emotion perception is necessarily imprecise, leading to possible overperception or underperception of a given emotion extant in a target individual. When the costs of these two types of errors are recurrently asymmetrical, categorization mechanisms can be expected to be biased to commit the less costly error. Contextual factors can influence this asymmetry, resulting in a concomitant increase in biases in the perception of a given emotion. Anger motivates aggression, hence an important contextual factor in anger perception is the capacity of the perceived individual to inflict harm. The greater the capacity to harm, the more costly it is to underestimate the extent to which the target is angry, and therefore the more that perception should be biased in favor of overestimation. Consonant with this prediction, in two studies, U.S. adults perceived greater anger when models were holding household objects having affordances as weapons (e.g., garden shears) than when they were holding objects lacking such affordances (e.g., a watering can) or were empty-handed. Consistent with the unique relationship between anger and aggression, this positive bias did not appear in judgments of other negative emotions.
----------------------
Close Replication Attempts of the Heat Priming-Hostile Perception Effect
Randy McCarthy
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, September 2014, Pages 165–169
Abstract:
DeWall and Bushman (2009; Experiment 2) reported a study in which participants were exposed to heat-related, cold-related, or neutral (i.e., non-temperature-related) primes prior to reading an ambiguously aggressive vignette. Participants exposed to the heat-related primes judged the vignette’s protagonist as more hostile than participants in the cold-priming condition (d = 0.67) or neutral-priming condition (d = 0.63). This suggests that people mentally associate heat-related constructs with aggression-related constructs. To test the reliability of the effect and to estimate a more precise effect size, the current studies closely replicated DeWall and Bushman in two independent samples, each of which were more than two and a half times greater than the samples in the original study (total N = 688). These replication attempts failed to find any evidence that exposure to heat primes affected hostile perceptions relative to the cold primes (ds < − 0.06) or neutral primes (ds < 0.00). Further, a meta-analysis estimated that the difference in hostile perceptions between those in a heat priming condition and those in a neutral condition was about one-fifth of a standard deviation and not significantly different from zero, d = 0.18, 95% CI[− 0.09, 0.44]. Thus, I conclude that priming individuals with heat-related constructs does not reliably affect hostile perceptions.
----------------------
Producing a commentary slows concurrent hazard perception responses
Angela Young, Peter Chapman & David Crundall
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, forthcoming
Abstract:
Commentary driver training involves teaching drivers how to verbally acknowledge their perceptual and cognitive processes while driving, and has been shown to improve performance in driving-related tasks. However, those studies demonstrating benefits of commentary training have not done so under conditions of live commentary, which is the typical protocol used with advanced drivers. In the current study we present the results of 2 experiments that show that producing a commentary can actually slow responses to hazards on a concurrent hazard perception task. In Experiment 1, participants producing a live commentary showed significantly longer hazard response times than an untrained, silent, control group. In Experiment 2, a shorter, clipped commentary was introduced to attempt to reduce the demands placed upon participants. However, both the clipped and full commentary conditions showed reduced accuracy and longer response times, relative to a silent condition, and no difference was observed between the 2 types of commentary. Analysis of eye movements in both experiments revealed that fixation durations were shorter when a commentary was produced but time to first fixate the hazard was not affected. This suggests that commentaries encourage more active interrogation of the visual scene, but that this can be detrimental to performance in average drivers.
----------------------
Stress enhances reconsolidation of declarative memory
Marieke Bos et al.
Psychoneuroendocrinology, August 2014, Pages 102–113
Abstract:
Retrieval of negative emotional memories is often accompanied by the experience of stress. Upon retrieval, a memory trace can temporarily return into a labile state, where it is vulnerable to change. An unresolved question is whether post-retrieval stress may affect the strength of declarative memory in humans by modulating the reconsolidation process. Here, we tested in two experiments whether post-reactivation stress may affect the strength of declarative memory in humans. In both experiments, participants were instructed to learn neutral, positive and negative words. Approximately 24 h later, participants received a reminder of the word list followed by exposure to the social evaluative cold pressor task (reactivation/stress group, nexp1 = 20; nexp2 = 18) or control task (reactivation/no-stress group, nexp1 = 23; nexp2 = 18). An additional control group was solely exposed to the stress task, without memory reactivation (no-reactivation/stress group, nexp1 = 23; nexp2 = 21). The next day, memory performance was tested using a free recall and a recognition task. In the first experiment we showed that participants in the reactivation/stress group recalled more words than participants in the reactivation/no-stress and no-reactivation/stress group, irrespective of valence of the word stimuli. Furthermore, participants in the reactivation/stress group made more false recognition errors. In the second experiment we replicated our observations on the free recall task for a new set of word stimuli, but we did not find any differences in false recognition. The current findings indicate that post-reactivation stress can improve declarative memory performance by modulating the process of reconsolidation. This finding contributes to our understanding why some memories are more persistent than others.
----------------------
Hippocampal Neurogenesis Regulates Forgetting During Adulthood and Infancy
Katherine Akers et al.
Science, 9 May 2014, Pages 598-602
Abstract:
Throughout life, new neurons are continuously added to the dentate gyrus. As this continuous addition remodels hippocampal circuits, computational models predict that neurogenesis leads to degradation or forgetting of established memories. Consistent with this, increasing neurogenesis after the formation of a memory was sufficient to induce forgetting in adult mice. By contrast, during infancy, when hippocampal neurogenesis levels are high and freshly generated memories tend to be rapidly forgotten (infantile amnesia), decreasing neurogenesis after memory formation mitigated forgetting. In precocial species, including guinea pigs and degus, most granule cells are generated prenatally. Consistent with reduced levels of postnatal hippocampal neurogenesis, infant guinea pigs and degus did not exhibit forgetting. However, increasing neurogenesis after memory formation induced infantile amnesia in these species.
----------------------
Yuwei Jiang & Jiewen Hong
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, September 2014, Pages 147–152
Abstract:
In this research, we examined the malleability of processing fluency from the angle of people's a priori expectation of how fluently stimuli will be processed. Results from three studies suggest that the value of the fluency experience is contingent on how easy or difficult people expect the incoming information would be processed. Specifically, participants had higher evaluations of the target when their experienced processing fluency conformed (vs. did not conform) to their expected processing fluency. We also found that the interactive effect between expected fluency and experienced fluency was mediated by a sense of assurance when people’s subjective fluency experience conformed to their expectations. Moreover, we showed that a positive effect of processing fluency occurred when people are under cognitive load (affective route); and interpreting the fluency experience in terms of one's expected fluency occurs when people had enough cognitive capacity (interpretive route).
----------------------
Sample size bias in judgments of perceptual averages
Paul Price et al.
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, forthcoming
Abstract:
Previous research has shown that people exhibit a sample size bias when judging the average of a set of stimuli on a single dimension. The more stimuli there are in the set, the greater people judge the average to be. This effect has been demonstrated reliably for judgments of the average likelihood that groups of people will experience negative, positive, and neutral events (Price, 2001; Price, Smith, & Lench, 2006) and also for estimates of the mean of sets of numbers (Smith & Price, 2010). The present research focuses on whether this effect is observed for judgments of average on a perceptual dimension. In 5 experiments we show that people’s judgments of the average size of the squares in a set increase as the number of squares in the set increases. This effect occurs regardless of whether the squares in each set are presented simultaneously or sequentially; whether the squares in each set are different sizes or all the same size; and whether the response is a rating of size, an estimate of area, or a comparative judgment. These results are consistent with a priming account of the sample size bias, in which the sample size activates a representation of magnitude that directly biases the judgment of average.