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According to the tripartite model of text representation (van Dijk & Kintsch, 1983), readers form representations of the text surface and textbase, and construct a situation model. In this study, an experiment was conducted to investigate whether these levels of representation would be affected by adding illustrations to narrative text and whether the order of text and illustrations would make a difference. Students aged between 7 and 13 years (N = 146) read 12 narrative texts, 4 of them with illustrations presented before their corresponding sentences, 4 with illustrations presented after, and 4 without any illustration. A sentence recognition task was used to assess the accuracy for text surface, textbase, and situation model. For the text surface and situation model, neither the presence of illustrations nor the order of text and illustrations influenced accuracy. However, the textbase was negatively affected by illustrations when they followed their corresponding sentences. We suggest that illustrations can initiate model inspection after situation model construction (Schnotz, 2014), a process that can make substantial changes to the textbase representation.
Catastrophizing thoughts may contribute to the development of anxiety, but functional emotion regulation may help to improve treatment. No study so far directly compared up- and down-regulation of fear by cognitive reappraisal. Here, healthy individuals took part in a cued fear experiment, in which multiple pictures of faces were paired twice with an unpleasant scream or presented as safety stimuli. Participants (N = 47) were asked (within-subjects) to down-regulate, to up-regulate and to maintain their natural emotional response. Valence and arousal ratings indicated successful up- and down-regulation of the emotional experience, while heart rate and pupil dilation increased during up-regulation, but showed no reduction in down-regulation. State and trait anxiety correlated with evaluations of safety but not threat stimuli, which supports the role of deficient safety learning in anxiety. Reappraisal did not modulate this effect. In conclusion, this study reveals evidence for up-regulation effects in fear, which might be even more efficient than down-regulation on a physiological level and highlights the importance of catastrophizing thoughts for the maintenance of fear and anxiety.
Perceptual changes that an agent produces by efferent activity can become part of the agent’s minimal self. Yet, in human agents, efferent activities produce perceptual changes in various sensory modalities and in various temporal and spatial proximities. Some of these changes occur at the “biological” body, and they are to some extent conveyed by “private” sensory signals, whereas other changes occur in the environment of that biological body and are conveyed by “public” sensory signals. We discuss commonalties and differences of these signals for generating selfhood. We argue that despite considerable functional overlap of these sensory signals in generating self-experience, there are reasons to tell them apart in theorizing and empirical research about development of the self.
Emotion-motivation models propose that behaviors, including health behaviors, should be predicted by the same variables that also predict negative affect since emotional reactions should induce a motivation to avoid threatening situations. In contrast, social cognitive models propose that safety behaviors are predicted by a different set of variables that mainly reflect cognitive and socio-structural aspects. Here, we directly tested these opposing hypotheses in young adults (N = 4134) in the context of COVID-19-related safety behaviors to prevent infections. In each participant, we collected measures of negative affect as well as cognitive and socio-structural variables during the lockdown in the first infection wave in Germany. We found a negative effect of the pandemic on emotional responses. However, this was not the main predictor for young adults’ willingness to comply with COVID-19-related safety measures. Instead, individual differences in compliance were mainly predicted by cognitive and socio-structural variables. These results were confirmed in an independent data set. This study shows that individuals scoring high on negative affect during the pandemic are not necessarily more likely to comply with safety regulations. Instead, political measures should focus on cognitive interventions and the societal relevance of the health issue. These findings provide important insights into the basis of health-related concerns and feelings as well as behavioral adaptations.
Facial masks have become and may remain ubiquitous. Though important for preventing infection, they may also serve as a reminder of the risks of disease. Thus, they may either act as cues for threat, priming avoidance-related behavior, or as cues for a safe interaction, priming social approach. To distinguish between these possibilities, we assessed implicit and explicit evaluations of masked individuals as well as avoidance bias toward relatively unsafe interactions with unmasked individuals in an approach-avoidance task in an online study. We further assessed Covid19 anxiety and specific attitudes toward mask-wearing, including mask effectiveness and desirability, hindrance of communication from masks, aesthetic appeal of masks, and mask-related worrying. Across one sample of younger (18–35 years, N = 147) and one of older adults (60+ years, N = 150), we found neither an average approach nor avoidance bias toward mask-wearing compared to unmasked individuals in the indirect behavior measurement task. However, across the combined sample, self-reported mask-related worrying correlated with reduced avoidance tendencies toward unmasked individuals when Covid19 anxiety was low, but not when it was high. This relationship was specific to avoidance tendencies and was not observed in respect to explicit or implicit preference for mask-wearing individuals. We conclude that unsafe interaction styles may be reduced by targeting mask-related worrying with public interventions, in particular for populations that otherwise have low generalized Covid19 anxiety.
Action binding is the effect that the perceived time of an action is shifted towards the action related feedback. A much larger action binding effect in schizophrenia compared to normal controls has been shown, which might be due to positive symptoms like delusions. Here we investigated the relationship between delusional thinking and action binding in healthy individuals, predicting a positive correlation between them. The action binding effect was evaluated by comparing the perceived time of a keypress between an operant (keypress triggering a sound) and a baseline condition (keypress alone), with a novel testing method that massively improved the precision of the subjective timing measurement. A positive correlation was found between the tendency of delusional thinking (measured by the 21-item Peters et al. delusions inventory) and action binding across participants after controlling for the effect of testing order between operant and baseline conditions. The results indicate that delusional thinking in particular influences action time perception and support the notion of a continuous distribution of schizotypal traits with normal controls at one end and clinical patients at the other end.
Little research has focused on motivational state-trait interactions to explain impulse buying. Although the trait chronic regulatory focus has been linked to impulse buying, no evidence yet exists for an effect of situational regulatory focus and no research has examined whether the fit of chronic and situational regulatory focus can influence impulse buying with actual consumptive consequences rather than purchase intentions. Two laboratory experiments (total N = 250) manipulated situational regulatory focus before providing opportunities for impulse buying. In addition, cognitive constraint was manipulated as a potential boundary condition for regulatory focus effects. Situational promotion focus increased impulse buying relative to situational prevention focus in participants with strong chronic promotion, consistent with regulatory fit theory and independently of cognitive constraint. Surprisingly, situational promotion focus also increased impulse buying in participants with strong chronic prevention, but only under low cognitive constraint. These results may be explained by diverging mediating cognitive processes for promotion vs. prevention focus' effect on impulse buying. Future research must focus more on combining relevant states and traits in predicting consumer behavior. Marketing implications are discussed.
Reading fluency is a major determinant of reading comprehension but depends on moderating factors such as auditory working memory (AWM), word recognition and sentence reading skills. We investigated how word and sentence reading skills relate to reading comprehension differentially across the first 6 years of schooling and tested which reading variable best predicted teacher judgements. We conducted our research in a rather transparent language, namely, German, drawing on two different data sets. The first was derived from the normative sample of a reading comprehension test (ELFE-II), including 2056 first to sixth graders with readings tests at the word, sentence and text level. The second sample included 114 students from second to fourth grade. The latter completed a series of tests that measured word and sentence reading fluency, pseudoword reading, AWM, reading comprehension, self-concept and teacher ratings. We analysed the data via hierarchical regression analyses to predict reading comprehension and teacher judgements. The impact of reading fluency was strongest in second and third grade, afterwards superseded by sentence comprehension. AWM significantly contributed to reading comprehension independently of reading fluency, whereas basic decoding skills disappeared after considering fluency. Students' AWM and reading comprehension predicted teacher judgements on reading fluency. Reading comprehension judgements depended both on the students' self-concept and reading comprehension. Our results underline that the role of word reading accuracy for reading comprehension quickly diminishes during elementary school and that teachers base their assessments mainly on the current reading comprehension skill.
Threat detection plays a vital role in adapting behavior to changing environments. A fundamental function to improve threat detection is learning to differentiate between stimuli predicting danger and safety. Accordingly, aversive learning should lead to enhanced sensory discrimination of danger and safety cues. However, studies investigating the psychophysics of visual and auditory perception after aversive learning show divergent findings, and both enhanced and impaired discrimination after aversive learning have been reported. Therefore, the aim of this web-based study is to examine the impact of aversive learning on a continuous measure of visual discrimination. To this end, 205 participants underwent a differential fear conditioning paradigm before and after completing a visual discrimination task using differently oriented grating stimuli. Participants saw either unpleasant or neutral pictures as unconditioned stimuli (US). Results demonstrated sharpened visual discrimination for the US-associated stimulus (CS+), but not for the unpaired conditioned stimuli (CS-). Importantly, this finding was irrespective of the US's valence. These findings suggest that associative learning results in increased stimulus salience, which facilitates perceptual discrimination in order to prioritize attentional deployment.
The suffering of an opponent is an important social affective cue that modulates how aggressive interactions progress. To investigate the affective consequences of opponent suffering on a revenge seeking individual, two experiments (total N = 82) recorded facial muscle activity while participants observed the reaction of a provoking opponent to a (retaliatory) sound punishment in a laboratory aggression task. Opponents reacted via prerecorded videos either with facial displays of pain, sadness, or neutrality. Results indicate that participants enjoyed seeing the provocateur suffer: indexed by a coordinated muscle response featuring an increase in zygomaticus major (and orbicularis oculi muscle) activation accompanied by a decrease in corrugator supercilii activation. This positive facial reaction was only shown while a provoking opponent expressed pain. Expressions of sadness, and administration of sound blasts to nonprovoking opponents, did not modulate facial activity. Overall, the results suggest that revenge-seeking individuals enjoy observing the offender suffer, which could represent schadenfreude or satisfaction of having succeeded in the retaliation goal.