The Capgras syndrome: Neurological/neuropsychological perspectives.

Discusses the Capgras syndrome, a disorder in which the patient believes that a close friend, relative, or other person is not the real person but an exact look-alike or impostor. References in the literature are reviewed regarding a neurological/neuropsychological cause of the disorder. The focus is shifted from a psychodynamic approach to a wider perspective, conceptualizing the syndrome as a disorder of the central nervous system (CNS). The importance of considering neurology and neuropsychology in proper diagnosis and treatment is highlighted. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Left-ear superiority in dichotic perception of vocal nonverbal sounds.

In 2 experiments, a total of 96 right-handed college students were asked to identify 2 dichotic sounds in recordings of (a) hummed melodic patterns; or (b) vocal nonspeech sounds, e.g., laughing or crying. In both cases a significant left-ear superiority was found. Data indicate that voice quality does not independently engage left or right hemisphere mechanisms since verbal and nonverbal vocal stimuli may be processed in different hemispheres. (French summary) (16 ref.) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Verbal and nonverbal cues in the perception of lying.

Examined the strategies that observers use to see through self-presentations. In Exp I, 5 male actor Ss (undergraduates) lied or told the truth in simulated job interviews. 41 observers were moderately accurate in judging the actors' truthfulness. Actors were consistently good or poor liars, but judges were not consistently good or poor. When actors lied, they gave less plausible, shorter answers with longer latencies. Observers seemed to use the plausibility and latency, as well as an answer's vagueness and consistency and an actor's smiling, postural shifting, and grooming, to determine whether he was lying. Exp II experimentally manipulated the content of an answer and a nonverbal cue. 74 undergraduate observers were more likely to judge a female job applicant as lying when her answers were self-serving. A long hesitation before an answer made observers more suspicious of an already self-serving answer and more certain of the truth of an already forthright one. (37 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The mental lexicon is fully specified: Evidence from eye-tracking.

Four visual-world experiments, in which listeners heard spoken words and saw printed words, compared an optimal-perception account with the theory of phonological underspecification. This theory argues that default phonological features are not specified in the mental lexicon, leading to asymmetric lexical matching: Mismatching input (pin) activates lexical entries with underspecified coronal stops (tin), but lexical entries with specified labial stops (pin) are not activated by mismatching input (tin). The eye-tracking data failed to show such a pattern. Although words that were phonologically similar to the spoken target attracted more looks than did unrelated distractors, this effect was symmetric in Experiment 1 with minimal pairs (tin–pin) and in Experiments 2 and 3 with words with an onset overlap (peacock–teacake). Experiment 4 revealed that /t/-initial words were looked at more frequently if the spoken input mismatched only in terms of place than if it mismatched in place and voice, contrary to the assumption that /t/ is unspecified for place and voice. These results show that speech perception uses signal-driven information to the fullest, as was predicted by an optimal perception account. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Judging attraction from nonverbal behavior: The gain phenomenon.

Used warm and cold nonverbal behaviors in an attempt to produce the gain phenomenon (i.e., the finding that people are more attracted to a person who is initially punishing and then rewarding than to one who is always rewarding). In Exp I with 33 male and 33 female undergraduates, nonverbal behaviors scaled for their capacity to convey attraction were factor analyzed. An actress then performed selected behaviors in videotaped conversations with a male. Subsequent ratings of the tapes confirmed that Ss attributed more mutual attraction to actors in warm than in cold segments. In Exp II with 27 male and 36 female undergraduates, segments were spliced together. A gain effect resulted: Ss judged the man as more attracted when the woman was first cold and then warm than when she was consistently warm. Explanations based on stimulus contrast, or adaptation level, theory were ruled out because Ss did not perceive the woman in the cold-warm sequence as warmer or as indicating more attraction to the man than in the warm-warm sequence. (19 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Depressed affect and time perception.

The article presents a resolution of an empirical conflict about the effect of depressed affect on time perception. We propose that depressed affect produces a subjective slowing of time but does not alter the perception of objective chronometric time passage. A between-subjects experiment is reported in which temporary depressed, neutral, and elated states were induced in adult subjects who then performed a sorting task for either 4 min or 13 min. Results of a measure of subjective speed of time passage revealed that time passed more slowly for the depressed subjects than for subjects in the other two affect conditions. Chronometric time judgments, however, were not influenced by perceiver affective state. The real-time difference of 4 min versus 13 min did significantly affect chronometric time judgments, but it had no effect on judgments of subjective speed of time passage. These findings are discussed in terms of their relevance both to previous time perception research and to the general understanding of depressed affect. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The relationship between displaying and perceiving nonverbal cues of affect: A meta-analysis to solve an old mystery.

The authors address the decades-old mystery of the association between individual differences in the expression and perception of nonverbal cues of affect. Prior theories predicted positive, negative, and zero correlations in performance—given empirical results ranging from r = ?.80 to r = +.64. A meta-analysis of 40 effects showed a positive correlation for nonverbal behaviors elicited as intentional communication displays but zero for spontaneous, naturalistic, or a combination of display types. There was greater variation in the results of studies having round robin designs and analyzed with statistics that do not account for the interdependence of data. The authors discuss implications for theorists to distinguish emotional skills in terms of what people are capable of doing versus what people actually do. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Developmental studies of perception.

Review of an enormous special literature on age changes of perception. 3 trends: (a) assimilation effects decrease with age while contrast effects increase, (b) errors of judgment in verticality sharply diminish, (c) incomplete and very complex patterns are difficult for the child. Most unresolved questions lie in the 1st trend. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

An ecological-transactional understanding of community violence: Theoretical perspectives.

Community violence has emerged as a major risk factor for the development of mental health problems in children and adolescents. If mental health providers are to meet the needs of children and communities dealing with community violence, then they will need to integrate principles from various subdisciplines in psychology (e.g., developmental psychology, school psychology, developmental psychopathology) as well as disciplines outside of psychology (e.g., sociology, public health, medicine) to understand fully the developmental impact of exposure to community violence. The development of such a model is necessary to identify the pathways, risk, and protective factors on which prevention and intervention programs can be built. The goal of this article is to present an ecological-transactional model of community violence as a conceptual framework for understanding the existing literature and for guiding future research on community violence exposure and child development. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

A neuropsychological theory of positive affect and its influence on cognition.

Positive affect systematically influences performance on many cognitive tasks. A new neuropsychological theory is proposed that accounts for many of these effects by assuming that positive affect is associated with increased brain dopamine levels. The theory predicts or accounts for influences of positive affect on olfaction, the consolidation of long-term (i.e., episodic) memories, working memory, and creative problem solving. For example, the theory assumes that creative problem solving is improved, in part, because increased dopamine release in the anterior cingulate improves cognitive flexibility and facilitates the selection of cognitive perspective. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Decision making and reward in frontal cortex: Complementary evidence from neurophysiological and neuropsychological studies.

Patients with damage to the prefrontal cortex (PFC)—especially the ventral and medial parts of PFC—often show a marked inability to make choices that meet their needs and goals. These decision-making impairments often reflect both a deficit in learning concerning the consequences of a choice, as well as deficits in the ability to adapt future choices based on experienced value of the current choice. Thus, areas of PFC must support some value computations that are necessary for optimal choice. However, recent frameworks of decision making have highlighted that optimal and adaptive decision making does not simply rest on a single computation, but a number of different value computations may be necessary. Using this framework as a guide, we summarize evidence from both lesion studies and single-neuron physiology for the representation of different value computations across PFC areas. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

How liked and disliked foods affect time perception.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the influence on time perception of pictures showing liked or disliked foods in comparison with a neutral picture. Healthy adults performed a temporal bisection task in which they had to categorize the presentation duration of pictures (neutral, liked, and disliked foods) as more similar to a short (400 ms) or to a long (1,600 ms) standard duration. The data revealed that the presentation duration of food pictures was underestimated compared with the presentation duration of the neutral picture, and that this underestimation was more marked for the disliked than for the liked food pictures. These results are consistent with the idea that this time underestimation arises from an attentional-bias mechanism. The food pictures, and particularly those depicting disliked food items, distracted attention away from the processing of time. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Interaction between affect and cognition in word perception.

Investigated the hypothesis that the accuracy with which a briefly shown word is perceived depends on both the affective tone of the word and the activation of the corresponding memory code. To increase activation, expectation and word frequency were manipulated. Ss were exposed to a 25-ms flash of a target word. They then chose, from a word pair, the target word. In half the trials, this word pair was given before the flash to create an expectation. Consistent with the hypothesis, when the words were infrequent, accuracy in perception was lower for affective than for neutral words regardless of expectation. When the words were frequent, there was no effect of affective tone in the absence of expectation; in the presence of expectation, accuracy was higher for affective than for neutral words. The valence of the affective words had no effect. Results are interpreted in terms of attentional mechanisms implicated in conscious perception. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The psychological foundations of the affective lexicon.

Subjects rated their confidence that each word from a set of 585 words referred to an emotion. As a strategy for discriminating words that refer to genuine emotions from words that refer to other kinds of conditions, ratings were collected in two different linguistic contexts: first, in the context of feeling something and second, in the context of being something. We hypothesized that words that referred to genuine emotions would be judged as such when presented in the context of feeling or being (e.g., feeling angry and being angry should both be rated as emotions). Words not referring to genuine emotions, however, were expected to show one of several other patterns. For example, words such as abandoned, which refer to objective states of the world, were expected to be rated as emotions in the feeling context but not in the being context. A discriminant analysis showed that such patterns could be used to distinguish the categories of a taxonomy of psychological conditions that Ortony, Clore, and Foss (1987) have proposed. The most discriminable categories were the four classes of affective, cognitive, external, and bodily conditions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The nonverbal display of psychological androgyny.

Attempted to determine how individual differences in sex-role orientation, as assessed by the Bem Sex-Role Inventory, were related to undergraduates' display of nonverbal behaviors indicative of "masculinity" and "femininity." Smiling, gazing (feminine behaviors), interrupting, and filled pausing (masculine behaviors) were coded for sex-typed males and females and androgynous males and females assigned to either an instrumental situation or an expressive situation in 36 same-sex dyads. Analyses of nonverbal behavior showed that androgynous Ss showed a blend of both masculine and feminine behaviors. The blend was the product of the addition of cross-sex behavior and deletion of some sex-consonant behavior. In contrast, sex-typed Ss showed more cross-sex behavioral avoidance and more sex-consonant behavioral cohesion. Results are discussed in terms of S. L. Bem's (1974, 1975) and J. T. Spence and R. L. Helmreich's (1977) conceptions of masculinity and femininity. (23 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Cognitive planning in humans: neuropsychological, neuroanatomical and neuropharmacological perspectives

In recent years, considerable progress has been made in understanding the cognitive and neuroanatomical basis of high-level planning behaviour through a combination of neuropsychological, neuropharmacological and functional neuroimaging approaches. In this article, early evidence suggesting a relationship between planning impairments and damage to the frontal lobe is reviewed and several contemporary studies of planning behaviour in patients with circumscribed frontal lobe excisions are described in detail. These neuropsychological investigations, together with recent functional neuroimaging studies of normal control subjects, have identified a specific area within the mid-dorsolateral frontal cortex of humans which appears to be critically involved in the cognitive processes that mediate efficient planning. The functions of this region, both in cognitive planning and in related functions such as working memory, are then discussed in the context of a general theoretical framework for understanding the functional organization of "executive" processes within the human lateral frontal cortex. In the final sections, the relationship between the planning deficits observed after intrinsic frontal lobe damage and those exhibited by patients with neuropathology of primarily sub-cortical origin, such as Parkinson's disease, is discussed. A central model for much of this work has been the concept of cortico-striatal circuitry which emphasizes the relationship between the neocortex and the striatum. The combined evidence from comparative studies in patients and from functional neuroimaging studies on Parkinson's disease suggests that altered cortico-striatal interactions may disrupt normal planning function at a number of levels, possibly consequent upon intrinsic striatal pathology on the one hand and the partial loss of (frontal) cortical input to the basal ganglia on the other.     

Effects of reflection, restatement, probe, and nonverbal behaviors on client affect.

Examined the effects of counselor verbal behavior (reflections, probes, and restatements) and nonverbal behavior (presence or absence of nodding and smiling) on the verbal responses of 48 undergraduates. Each S participated in a half-hour counseling session which was divided into 4 time periods (baseline, counselor intervention, baseline, and counselor intervention). It was observed that probes resulted in more discussion of feelings than did either reflections or restatements. Nonverbal behavior did not affect discussion of feelings. Possible reasons for the effectiveness of the probe are considered. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The nonverbal expression of pride: Evidence for cross-cultural recognition.

The present research tests whether recognition for the nonverbal expression of pride generalizes across cultures. Study 1 provided the first evidence for cross-cultural recognition of pride, demonstrating that the expression generalizes across Italy and the United States. Study 2 found that the pride expression generalizes beyond Western cultures; individuals from a preliterate, highly isolated tribe in Burkina Faso, West Africa, reliably recognized pride, regardless of whether it was displayed by African or American targets. These Burkinabe participants were unlikely to have learned the pride expression through cross-cultural transmission, so their recognition suggests that pride may be a human universal. Studies 3 and 4 used drawn figures to systematically manipulate the ethnicity and gender of targets showing the expression, and demonstrated that pride recognition generalizes across male and female targets of African, Asian, and Caucasian descent. Discussion focuses on the implications of the findings for the universality of the pride expression. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)