Psychological Science
March
2007 (Volume 18, Issue 3 Page 193-281) View
Issue
Research Reports
Young
Children Learning Spanish Make Rapid Use of Grammatical Gender in Spoken
Word Recognition
All nouns in Spanish have grammatical gender, with obligatory gender marking on preceding articles (e.g., la and el, the feminine and masculine forms of "the," respectively). Adult native speakers of languages with grammatical gender exploit this cue in on-line sentence interpretation. In a study investigating the early development of this ability, Spanish-learning children (34–42 months) were tested in an eye-tracking procedure. Presented with pairs of pictures with names of either the same grammatical gender (la pelota, "ball [feminine]"; la galleta, "cookie [feminine]") or different grammatical gender (la pelota; el zapato, "shoe [masculine]"), they heard sentences referring to one picture (Encuentra la pelota, "Find the ball"). The children were faster to orient to the referent on different-gender trials, when the article was potentially informative, than on same-gender trials, when it was not, and this ability was correlated with productive measures of lexical and grammatical competence. Spanish-learning children who can speak only 500 words already use gender-marked articles in establishing reference, a processing advantage characteristic of native Spanish-speaking adults.
The present research demonstrates that the visual perspective—own first-person versus observer's third-person—people use to picture themselves engaging in a potential future action affects their self-perceptions and subsequent behavior. On the eve of the 2004 U.S. presidential election, registered voters in Ohio were instructed to use either the first-person or the third-person perspective to picture themselves voting in the election. Picturing voting from the third-person perspective caused subjects to adopt a stronger pro-voting mind-set correspondent with the imagined behavior. Further, this effect on self-perception carried over to behavior, causing subjects who were instructed to picture voting from the third-person perspective to be significantly more likely to vote in the election. These findings extend previous research in autobiographical memory and social judgment linking the observer's perspective with dispositional attributions, and demonstrate the causal role of imagery in determining future behavior.
When
God Sanctions Killing: Effect of Scriptural Violence on Aggression
Violent people often claim that God sanctions their actions. In two studies, participants read a violent passage said to come from either the Bible or an ancient scroll. For half the participants, the passage said that God sanctioned the violence. Next, participants competed with an ostensible partner on a task in which the winner could blast the loser with loud noise through headphones (the aggression measure). Study 1 involved Brigham Young University students; 99% believed in God and in the Bible. Study 2 involved Vrije Universiteit–Amsterdam students; 50% believed in God, and 27% believed in the Bible. In Study 1, aggression increased when the passage was from the Bible or mentioned God. In Study 2, aggression increased when the passage mentioned God, especially among participants who believed in God and in the Bible. These results suggest that scriptural violence sanctioned by God can increase aggression, especially in believers.
Emotions
and False Memories: Valence or Arousal?
The effects of mood on false memories have not been studied systematically until recently. Some results seem to indicate that negative mood may reduce false recall and thus suggest an influence of emotional valence on false memory. The present research tested the effects of both valence and arousal on recall and recognition and indicates that the effect is actually due to arousal. In fact, whether participants' mood is positive, negative, or neutral, false memories are significantly more frequent under conditions of high arousal than under conditions of low arousal.
Dissociative
Tendencies and Memory Performance on Directed-Forgetting Tasks
The current article presents two studies that aimed to replicate DePrince and Freyd's (2001, 2004) studies demonstrating that high and low dissociators differentially recall neutral and trauma words under conditions of varying cognitive load. We did not find this effect. This lack of replication was apparent for both free recall and word recognition memory and in both studies. In effect, we found little evidence to support betrayal trauma theory, yet observed increased memory fallibility, as demonstrated by lower general recall and (in one study) commission errors, in high dissociators.
Commentaries
Short Reports
Research Articles
Required
Sample Size to Detect the Mediated Effect
Mediation models are widely used, and there are many tests of the mediated effect. One of the most common questions that researchers have when planning mediation studies is, "How many subjects do I need to achieve adequate power when testing for mediation?" This article presents the necessary sample sizes for six of the most common and the most recommended tests of mediation for various combinations of parameters, to provide a guide for researchers when designing studies or applying for grants.
The
Format in Which Uncertainty Information Is Presented Affects Decision
Biases
We examined how the format in which uncertainty information is presented affects two biases in humans' choice behavior. In a computer task, participants were given four common-ratio effect and four common-consequence effect problems in each of four different formats. In these problems, uncertainty information was described, as percentages (e.g., 80%) or as frequencies (e.g., 16/20), or was experienced, either serially (20 outcomes shown one at a time) or simultaneously (20 outcomes all shown at once). Presenting information as percentages attenuated the common-ratio effect and augmented the common-consequence effect, which suggests that these biases have different underlying mechanisms. Participants' percentage estimates of outcome likelihoods did not differ according to the format in which the information was presented; however, participants' nonverbal estimates of outcome likelihoods differed across formats. The results suggest that uncertainty information presented as percentages is processed differently than the same uncertainty information presented in other formats.
Most people consider it morally acceptable to redirect a trolley that is about to kill five people to a track where the trolley would kill only one person. In this situation, people seem to follow the guidelines of utilitarianism by preferring to minimize the number of victims. However, most people would not consider it moral to have a visitor in a hospital killed to save the lives of five patients who were otherwise going to die. We conducted two experiments in which we pinpointed a novel factor behind these conflicting intuitions. We show that moral intuitions are influenced by the locus of the intervention in the underlying causal model. In moral dilemmas, judgments conforming to the prescriptions of utilitarianism are more likely when the intervention influences the path of the agent of harm (e.g., the trolley) than when the intervention influences the path of the potential patient (i.e., victim).
Can
Infants Map Meaning to Newly Segmented Words? Statistical Segmentation
and Word Learning
The present experiments investigated how the process of statistically segmenting words from fluent speech is linked to the process of mapping meanings to words. Seventeen-month-old infants first participated in a statistical word segmentation task, which was immediately followed by an object-label-learning task. Infants presented with labels that were words in the fluent speech used in the segmentation task were able to learn the object labels. However, infants presented with labels consisting of novel syllable sequences (nonwords; Experiment 1) or familiar sequences with low internal probabilities (part-words; Experiment 2) did not learn the labels. Thus, prior segmentation opportunities, but not mere frequency of exposure, facilitated infants' learning of object labels. This work provides the first demonstration that exposure to word forms in a statistical word segmentation task facilitates subsequent word learning.
Under incidental instructions, thirty-eight 2-year-olds were trained on a six-element deterministic sequence of spatial locations. Following training, subjects were informed of the presence of a sequence and asked to either reproduce or suppress the learned material. Children's production of the trained sequence was modulated by these instructions. When asked to suppress the trained sequence, the children were able to increase generation of paths that were not from the training sequence. Their performance was thus dependent on active suppression of knowledge, rather than on a random generation strategy. This degree of control in 2-year-olds stands in stark contrast to 3-year-olds' failure to control explicitly instructed rule-based knowledge (as measured by the dimensional-change card-sort task). We suggest that the incidental nature of a learning episode enables the acquisition of a more procedural form of knowledge with which this age group has more experience prior to the onset of fluent language.
To understand how and why people tolerate ongoing social and economic inequality, we conducted two studies investigating the hypothesis that system justification is associated with reduced emotional distress and a lack of support for helping the disadvantaged. In Study 1, we found that the endorsement of a system-justifying ideology was negatively associated with moral outrage, existential guilt, and support for helping the disadvantaged. In Study 2, the induction of a system-justification mind-set through exposure to "rags-to-riches" narratives decreased moral outrage, negative affect, and therefore intentions to help the disadvantaged. In both studies, moral outrage (outward-focused distress) was found to mediate the dampening effect of system justification on support for redistribution, whereas existential guilt (Study 1) or negative affect in general (Study 2; inward-focused distress) did not. Thus, system-justifying ideology appears to undercut the redistribution of social and economic resources by alleviating moral outrage.
Heart
Rate Variability Reflects Self-Regulatory Strength, Effort, and Fatigue
Experimental research reliably demonstrates that self-regulatory deficits are a consequence of prior self-regulatory effort. However, in naturalistic settings, although people know that they are sometimes vulnerable to saying, eating, or doing the wrong thing, they cannot accurately gauge their capacity to self-regulate at any given time. Because self-regulation and autonomic regulation colocalize in the brain, an autonomic measure, heart rate variability (HRV), could provide an index of self-regulatory strength and activity. During an experimental manipulation of self-regulation (eating carrots or cookies), HRV was elevated during high self-regulatory effort (eat carrots, resist cookies) compared with low self-regulatory effort (eat cookies, resist carrots). The experimental manipulation and higher HRV at baseline independently predicted persistence at a subsequent anagram task. HRV appears to index self-regulatory strength and effort, making it possible to study these phenomena in the field as well as the lab.