In a cohort study, Maria Foraster and colleagues study associations between exposure to road traffic noise at schools, and trajectories of working memory and inattentiveness among schoolchildren aged 7 to 10 years in Barcelona, Spain.
A stable marker of face perception seems to be a left-side bias, that is, a tendency to rely more on the information conveyed by the left-side of faces as compared to their right-side. Previous studies showed that the left-side bias is affected by the familiarity or experience with the face stimuli. Since lower familiarity is the hallmark of other-race relative to own-race faces, the left-side bias should be weaker for other-race faces. Further, in Chinese participants face inversion has been found to abolish the left-side bias for own-race faces. Therefore, it is of interest, whether the face inversion effect on the left-side bias also holds for non-Chinese participants and generalizes across own- and other-race faces. We tested 65 Caucasian participants in an identity similarity judgment task with upright and inverted chimeric Caucasian and Asian faces. A significant left-side bias was observed for upright own-race faces, which was abolished by face inversion, indicating that it depe
Brian Chinchilla '12, a Psychology graduate, credits Westminster for his career as a Research Developer with Psychology Software Tools. During his undergraduate career, Westminster's Psychology Department and Psychology Software Tools connected, which piqued his interest into the company.
Negative feedback has been widely reported to be a demotivator that could frustrate the recipient’s need for competence and erode his intrinsic motivation in the same activity. Nevertheless, little attention has been devoted to the intertemporal effect of negative feedback on one’s intrinsic motivation in another activity. To fill this gap, we arranged participants in a game with two sessions and manipulated the content of feedback as a between-subject factor. In Session 1, participants had to complete a time estimation task with moderate difficulty, during which half of the participants received normal performance feedback and the other half received negative performance feedback. In Session 2, all participants were guided to accomplish a moderately difficult stopwatch task that was competence-supportive. A more pronounced win-loss difference wave of reward positivity (RewP) was detected in the experimental (negative performance feedback) group compared to the control (normal perf
Previous behavioral and neural studies have shown the effects of malicious envy on schadenfreude. However, it is unclear whether these effects are modulated by contextual frames (e.g., gain and loss frames). Thus, the present study aimed to investigate whether behavioral and event-related potential (ERP) effects of malicious envy on schadenfreude were different in gain and loss frames. To address this issue, participants in the present study believed they were playing a monetary game with several other players. In the malicious envy condition, participants won less money than the player in the gain frame and lost more money in the loss frame; in the control condition, both participants and the player gained little money in the gain frame and lost much in the loss frame. Subsequently, participants were informed that the player encountered a misfortune, i.e., gained little in the gain frame and lost much in the loss frame. Results showed that malicious envy increased feelings of schadenf