Thoughtful
Solving the "human problem": The frontal feedback model
Raymond Noack
Consciousness and Cognition, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper argues that humans possess unique cognitive abilities due to the presence of a functional system that exists in the human brain that is absent in the non-human brain. This system, the frontal feedback system, was born in the hominin brain when the great phylogenetic expansion of the prefrontal cortex relative to posterior sensory regions surpassed a critical threshold. Surpassing that threshold effectively reversed the preferred direction of information flow in the highest association regions of the neocortex, producing the frontal feedback system. This reversal was from the caudo-rostral bias characteristic of non-human, or pre-human, brain dynamics to a rostro-caudal bias characteristic of modern human brain dynamics. The frontal feedback system works through frontal motor routines, or action schemes, manipulating the release and reconstruction of stored sensory memories in posterior sensory areas. As an obligatory feature of frontal feedback, a central character, or self, emerges within this cortical network that manifests itself as agent in these reconstructions as well as in the experience of sensory perceptions. Dynamical-systems modeling of cortical interactions is combined in the paper with recent neuroimaging studies of "resting-state" brain activity to bridge the gap between microscopic and macroscopic levels of cortical behavior. This synthesis is used to support the proposal of an information flow reversal occurring in the hominin brain and also to explain how such a reversal generates the wide variety of cognitive and experiential phenomena that many consider to be uniquely human.
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Hajo Adam & Adam Galinsky
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
We introduce the term "enclothed cognition" to describe the systematic influence that clothes have on the wearer's psychological processes. Providing a potentially unifying framework to integrate past findings and capture the diverse impact that clothes can have on the wearer, we propose that enclothed cognition involves the co-occurrence of two independent factors - the symbolic meaning of the clothes and the physical experience of wearing them. As a first test of our enclothed cognition perspective, the current research explored the effects of wearing a lab coat. A pretest found that a lab coat is generally associated with attentiveness and carefulness. We therefore predicted that wearing a lab coat would increase performance on attention-related tasks. In Experiment 1, physically wearing a lab coat increased selective attention compared to not wearing a lab coat. In Experiments 2 and 3, wearing a lab coat described as a doctor's coat increased sustained attention compared to wearing a lab coat described as a painter's coat, and compared to simply seeing or even identifying with a lab coat described as a doctor's coat. Thus, the current research suggests a basic principle of enclothed cognition - it depends on both the symbolic meaning and the physical experience of wearing the clothes.
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Joseph Simmons & Cade Massey
Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, forthcoming
Abstract:
Is optimism real, or are optimistic forecasts just cheap talk? To help answer this question, we investigated whether optimistic predictions persist in the face of large incentives to be accurate. We asked National Football League football fans to predict the winner of a single game. Roughly half (the partisans) predicted a game involving their favorite team, and the other half (the neutrals) predicted a game involving 2 teams they were neutral about. Participants were promised either a small incentive ($5) or a large incentive ($50) for correctly predicting the game's winner. Optimism emerged even when incentives were large, as partisans were much more likely than neutrals to predict partisans' favorite teams to win. Strong optimism also emerged among participants whose responses to follow-up questions strongly suggested that they believed the predictions they made. This research supports the claim that optimism is real.
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Stirring images: Fear, not happiness or arousal, makes art more sublime
Kendall Eskine, Natalie Kacinik & Jesse Prinz
Emotion, forthcoming
Abstract:
Which emotions underlie our positive experiences of art? Although recent evidence from neuroscience suggests that emotions play a critical role in art perception, no research to date has explored the extent to which specific emotional states affect aesthetic experiences or whether general physiological arousal is sufficient. Participants were assigned to one of five conditions - sitting normally, engaging in 15 or 30 jumping jacks, or viewing a happy or scary video - prior to rating abstract works of art. Only the fear condition resulted in significantly more positive judgments about the art. These striking findings provide the first evidence that fear uniquely inspires positively valenced aesthetic judgments. The results are discussed in the context of embodied cognition.
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Food for Thought? Trust Your Unconscious When Energy Is Low
Maarten Bos, Ap Dijksterhuis & Rick van Baaren
Journal of Neuroscience, Psychology, and Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Recent studies showed that a period of unconscious thought can help when making complex decisions. Under some circumstances, unconscious thought improves decisions even more than conscious thought. Executive functioning depends on energy provided by glucose, and we know from previous research that the performance of various conscious processes deteriorates when energy is low. Unconscious processes require less energy and may operate unhampered when energy is low. Therefore, we propose that whereas low blood glucose levels impair conscious thought, this is not the same for unconscious thought. An experiment, where we manipulated blood glucose levels, indicated that indeed, when making decisions, the unconscious can best be trusted when blood glucose levels are low, whereas conscious deliberation yields the best results when blood glucose levels are elevated.
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Individual and group IQ predict inmate violence
Brie Diamond, Robert Morris & J.C. Barnes
Intelligence, forthcoming
Abstract:
There is a long tradition of theoretical and empirical research linking intelligence to criminal activity. At the same time, the extant literature has been slow to examine this relationship in other settings. One such setting in which this relationship may also manifest is the prison environment, where knowledge on the determinants of prison misconduct has important implications for prison management and security. Drawing from a representative sample of inmates from a large Southern state in the US, the current study presents the first assessment of the relationship between intelligence and prison misconduct. The effect of intelligence, measured via the WAIS-R, on violent prison misconduct is analyzed controlling for inmate and prison-level factors. Results indicated that the individual's IQ, as well as the average IQ of the prison unit, was significantly and negatively related to violent prison misconduct. Implications and directions for future research are highlighted.
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The Cost of Collaboration: Why Joint Decision Making Exacerbates Rejection of Outside Information
Julia Minson & Jennifer Mueller
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Prior investigators have asserted that certain group characteristics cause group members to disregard outside information and that this behavior leads to diminished performance. We demonstrate that the very process of making a judgment collaboratively rather than individually also contributes to such myopic underweighting of external viewpoints. Dyad members exposed to numerical judgments made by peers gave significantly less weight to those judgments than did individuals working alone. This difference in willingness to use peer input was mediated by the greater confidence that the dyad members reported in the accuracy of their own estimates. Furthermore, dyads were no better at judging the relative accuracy of their own estimates and the advisor's estimates than individuals were. Our analyses demonstrate that, relative to individuals, dyads suffered an accuracy cost. Specifically, if dyad members had given as much weight to peer input as individuals working alone did, then their revised estimates would have been significantly more accurate.
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Michael Slepian & Nalini Ambady
Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, forthcoming
Abstract:
Cognitive scientists describe creativity as fluid thought. Drawing from findings on gesture and embodied cognition, we hypothesized that the physical experience of fluidity, relative to nonfluidity, would lead to more fluid, creative thought. Across 3 experiments, fluid arm movement led to enhanced creativity in 3 domains: creative generation, cognitive flexibility, and remote associations. Alternative mechanisms such as enhanced mood and motivation were also examined. These results suggest that creativity can be influenced by certain types of physical movement.
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Something Smells Fishy: On the Bidirectional Nature and Cognitive Mediation of Metaphoric Influence
Spike Lee & Norbert Schwarz
University of Michigan Working Paper, September 2011
Abstract:
In many languages, social suspicion is expressed metaphorically as something that has a smell; in English the smell is "fishy." If metaphors reflect conceptual knowledge grounded in perceptual experience, then processing perceptual information may activate its metaphorically associated conceptual information and vice versa, resulting in bidirectional effects. In seven experiments we tested for the behavioral effects of fishy smells on social suspicion among English speakers, the reversed effects of suspicion on smell identification and detection, and the mediation process. Incidental exposure to fishy smells induced suspicion and undermined cooperation in trust-based economic exchanges in a trust game (Study 1) and a public goods game (Study 2). Socially induced suspicion enhanced the identification of fishy smells, but not other smells (Study 3), an effect that was mediated by the activation and application of metaphorically associated concepts (Studies 4-6). Suspicion also heightened detection sensitivity to low concentrations of fishy smells (Study 7). The bidirectional nature of metaphoric influence challenges conceptual metaphor theory and supports the grounded cognition perspective. These findings also have implications for testing cognitive and other mechanisms underlying metaphoric influence and for exploring the cultural variation and origin of metaphoric knowledge.
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Fair or Not Fair? The Effects of Numerical Framing on the Perceived Justice of Outcomes
Jessica Kwong & Kin Fai Ellick Wong
Journal of Management, forthcoming
Abstract:
The authors draw on prospect theory and demonstrate that the perceived justice of an outcome is affected by the way numerical information is presented. Three experimental studies were conducted using five different samples, representing teachers, general employees, and future employees. People generally tend to see a bigger difference in the performance between the self versus another person when their performance components are presented in frames associated with small numbers (e.g., absence rate of 3% vs. 9%) than when they are presented in frames associated with large numbers (e.g., attendance rate of 97% vs. 91%). Despite the same objective performance difference (e.g., 6% in the above example), people expected different fair shares of rewards and evaluated justice of a given outcome differently across the two frames.
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Diversifying Experiences Enhance Cognitive Flexibility
Simone Ritter et al.
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Past research has linked creativity to unusual and unexpected experiences, such as early parental loss or living abroad. However, few studies have investigated the underlying cognitive processes. We propose that some experiences have in common a "diversifying" aspect and an active involvement, which together enhance cognitive flexibility (i.e., creative cognitive processing). In the first experiment, participants experienced complex unusual and unexpected events happening in a virtual reality. In the second experiment, participants were confronted with schema-violations. In both experiments, comparisons with various control groups showed that a diversifying experience - defined as the active (but not vicarious) involvement in an unusual event - increased cognitive flexibility more than active (or vicarious) involvement in normal experiences. Our findings bridge several lines of research and shed light on a basic cognitive mechanism responsible for creativity.
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The Challenge of Staying Happier: Testing the Hedonic Adaptation Prevention Model
Kennon Sheldon & Sonja Lyubomirsky
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, forthcoming
Abstract:
The happiness that comes from a particular success or change in fortune abates with time. The Hedonic Adaptation Prevention (HAP) model specifies two routes by which the well-being gains derived from a positive life change are eroded - the first involving bottom-up processes (i.e., declining positive emotions generated by the positive change) and the second involving top-down processes (i.e., increased aspirations for even more positivity). The model also specifies two moderators that can forestall these processes - continued appreciation of the original life change and continued variety in change-related experiences. The authors formally tested the predictions of the HAP model in a 3-month three-wave longitudinal study of 481 students. Temporal path analyses and moderated regression analyses provided good support for the model. Implications for the stability of well-being, the feasibility of "the pursuit of happiness," and the appeal of overconsumption are discussed.
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Self-Generated Persuasion: Effects of the Target and Direction of Arguments
Pablo Briñol, Michael McCaslin & Richard Petty
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Previous research has revealed that self-persuasion can occur either through role-playing (i.e., when arguments are generated to convince another person) or, more directly, through trying to convince oneself (i.e., when arguments are generated with oneself as the target). Combining these 2 traditions in the domain of attitude change, the present research investigated the impact on self-persuasion of the specific target of one's own persuasive attempt (i.e., others vs. oneself). We found that the efficacy of self-persuasion depended on whether people believed that they would have to put more or less effort in convincing the self or others. Specifically, we found opposite effects for self-generated arguments depending on whether the topic of persuasion was proattitudinal or counterattitudinal. Across 4 studies, it was shown that when the topic of the message was counterattitudinal, people were more effective in convincing themselves when the intended target of the arguments was themselves versus another person. However, the opposite was the case when the topic was proattitudinal. These effects were shown to stem from the differential effort perceived as necessary and actually exerted in trying to produce persuasion under these conditions.
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Creativity: Genius, madness, or a combination of both?
Andreas Fink et al.
Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, February 2012, Pages 11-18
Abstract:
We investigated the relationship between creativity, personality, latent inhibition (LI), and psychopathology. For this purpose, a sample of actors, 2 clinical samples (alcohol and polydrug dependents), and a group of university students were compared with respect to psychometrically determined creativity, personality, and LI. The results suggest that actors and polydrug dependents can be characterized by (a) high scores in the personality dimension psychoticism, (b) high originality during creative idea generation, and (c) decreased LI as compared with the other groups. Correlational analyses moreover revealed significant associations between LI, originality, and psychoticism. According to our findings, creative people and people suffering from mental disorders appear to share some common personality and cognitive traits.
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Alexandra Langmeyer, Angelika Guglhör-Rudan & Christian Tarnai
Journal of Individual Differences, Spring 2012, Pages 119-130
Abstract:
The present study is the first to examine the relationship between music preferences and personality among a sample of young Germans (N = 422, age range 21-26 years). We replicated the factor structure of the Short Test of Music Preferences (STOMP, Rentfrow & Gosling, 2003) by means of confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). The validity of the STOMP was also confirmed for the first time by rating soundclips. The relationship between the dimensions of personality (Big Five Inventory) and music preferences (STOMP and soundclips) was analyzed with a structural equation model (SEM). Gender differences were examined with multigroup analyses (MGA). Our findings corroborate earlier findings on the relationship between music preferences and personality: Individuals open to experience prefer reflective and complex music (e.g., classical) and intense and rebellious music (e.g., rock), whereas they dislike upbeat and conventional types of music (e.g., pop music). Extraverts, on the other hand, prefer upbeat and conventional and energetic and rhythmic types of music (e.g., rap/hip-hop). The results reveal some gender differences.
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The Impact of Personal Experience on Behavior: Evidence from Video-Rental Fines
Michael Haselhuhn et al.
Management Science, January 2012, Pages 52-61
Abstract:
Personal experience matters. In a field setting with longitudinal data, we disentangle the effects of learning new information from the effects of personal experience. We demonstrate that experience with a fine, controlling for the effect of learning new information, significantly boosts future compliance. We also show that experience with a large fine boosts compliance more than experience with a small fine, but that the influence of experience with both large and small fines decays sharply over time.
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Innovation Relies on the Obscure: A Key to Overcoming the Classic Problem of Functional Fixedness
Tony McCaffrey
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
A recent analysis of real-world problems that led to historic inventions and insight problems that are used in psychology experiments suggests that during innovative problem solving, individuals discover at least one infrequently noticed or new (i.e., obscure) feature of the problem that can be used to reach a solution. This observation suggests that research uncovering aspects of the human semantic, perceptual, and motor systems that inhibit the noticing of obscure features would enable researchers to identify effective techniques to overcome those obstacles. As a critical step in this research program, this study showed that the generic-parts technique can help people unearth the types of obscure features that can be used to overcome functional fixedness, which is a classic inhibitor to problem solving. Subjects trained on this technique solved on average 67% more problems than a control group did. By devising techniques that facilitate the noticing of obscure features in order to overcome impediments to problem solving (e.g., design fixation), researchers can systematically create a tool kit of innovation-enhancing techniques.
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Patricia Kanngiesser et al.
Journal of Comparative Psychology, November 2011, Pages 436-445
Abstract:
The endowment effect describes the bias that people often value things that they possess more than things they do not possess. Thus, they are often reluctant to trade items in their possession for items of equivalent value. Some nonhuman primates appear to share this bias with humans, but it remains an open question whether they show endowment effects to the same extent as humans do. We investigated endowment effects in all four great ape species (Pan paniscus, Pan troglodytes, Gorilla gorilla, Pongo pygmaeus) by varying whether apes were endowed with food items (Experiment 1, N = 22) or tools that were instrumental in retrieving food (Experiment 2, N = 23). We first assessed apes' preferences for items of a pair and their willingness to trade items in their possession. We then endowed apes with one item of a pair and offered them to trade for the other item. Apes showed endowment effects for food, but not for tools. In Experiment 3, we endowed bonobos (N = 4) and orangutans (N = 5) with either one or 12 food items. Endowment effects did not differ between species and were not influenced by the number of endowed food items. Our findings suggest that endowment effects in great apes are restricted to immediate food gratification and remain unaffected by the quantity of food rewards. However, endowment effects do not seem to extend to other, nonconsumable possessions even when they are instrumental in retrieving food. In general, apes do not show endowment effects across a range of different commodities as humans typically do.
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Katherine Vytal et al.
Psychophysiology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Anxiety impairs the ability to think and concentrate, suggesting that the interaction between emotion and cognition may elucidate the debilitating nature of pathological anxiety. Using a verbal n-back task that parametrically modulated cognitive load, we explored the effect of experimentally induced anxiety on task performance and the startle reflex. Findings suggest there is a crucial inflection point between moderate and high cognitive load, where resources shift from anxious apprehension to focus on task demands. Specifically, we demonstrate that anxiety impairs performance under low load, but is reduced when subjects engage in a difficult task that occupies executive resources. We propose a two-component model of anxiety that describes a cognitive mechanism behind performance impairment and an automatic response that supports sustained anxiety-potentiated startle. Implications for therapeutic interventions and emotional pathology are discussed.
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Emotion Regulation Reduces Loss Aversion and Decreases Amygdala Responses to Losses
Peter Sokol-Hessner, Colin Camerer & Elizabeth Phelps
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, forthcoming
Abstract:
Emotion regulation strategies can alter behavioral and physiological responses to emotional stimuli and the neural correlates of those responses in regions such as the amygdala or striatum. The current study investigates the brain systems engaged when using an emotion regulation technique during financial decisions. In decision-making, regulating emotion with reappraisal-focused strategies that encourage taking a different perspective has been shown to reduce loss aversion as observed both in choices and in the relative arousal responses to actual loss and gain outcomes. In the current study, we find using fMRI that behavioral loss aversion correlates with amygdala activity in response to losses relative to gains. Success in regulating loss aversion also correlates with the reduction in amygdala responses to losses, but not to gains. Furthermore, across both decisions and outcomes, we find the reappraisal strategy increases baseline activity in dorsolateral and ventromedial prefrontal cortex, and the striatum. The similarity of the neural circuitry observed to that seen in emotion regulation, despite divergent tasks, serves as further evidence for a role of emotion in decision-making, and for the power of reappraisal to change assessments of value and thereby choices.
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Hidden conflicts: Explanations make inconsistencies harder to detect
Sangeet Khemlani & P.N. Johnson-Laird
Acta Psychologica, March 2012, Pages 486-491
Abstract:
A rational response to an inconsistent set of propositions is to revise it in a minimal way to restore consistency. A more important psychological goal is usually to create an explanation that resolves the inconsistency. We report five studies showing that once individuals have done so, they find inconsistencies harder to detect. Experiment 1 established the effect when participants explained inconsistencies, and Experiment 2 eliminated the possibility that the effect was a result of demand characteristics. Experiments 3a and 3b replicated the result, and showed that it did not occur in control groups that evaluated (or justified) which events in the pairs of assertions were more surprising. Experiment 4 replicated the previous findings, but the participants carried out all the conditions acting as their own controls. In all five studies, control conditions established that participants were able to detect comparable inconsistencies. Their explanations led them to re-interpret the generalizations as holding by default, and so they were less likely to treat the pairs of assertions as inconsistent. Explanations can accordingly undo the devastating consequences of logical inconsistencies, but at the cost of a subsequent failure to detect them.