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Regulatory focus (RF) theory (Higgins, 1997) states that individuals follow different strategic concerns when focusing on gains (promotion) rather than losses (prevention). Applying the Reflective-Impulsive Model (RIM, Strack & Deutsch, 2004), this dissertation investigates RF’s influence on basic information processing, specifically semantic processing (Study 1), semantic (Study 2) and affective (Study 3) associative priming, and basic reflective operations (Studies 4-7). Study 1 showed no effect of RF on pre-activation of RF-related semantic concepts in a lexical decision task (LDT). Study 2 indicated that primes fitting a promotion focus improve performance in a LDT for chronically promotion-focused individuals, but not chronically prevention-focused individuals. However, the latter performed better when targets fit their focus. Stronger affect and arousal after processing valent words fitting an RF may explain this pattern. Study 3 showed some evidence for stronger priming effects for negative primes in a bona-fide pipeline task (Fazio et al., 1995) for chronically prevention-focused participants, while also providing evidence that situational prevention focus insulates individuals from misattributing the valence of simple primes. Studies 4-7 showed that a strong chronic prevention focus leads to greater negation effects for valent primes in an Affect Misattribution Procedure (Payne et al., 2005), especially when it fits the situation. Furthermore, Study 6 showed that these effects result from stronger weighting of negated valence rather than greater ease in negation. Study 7 showed that the increased negation effect is independent of time pressure. Broad implications are discussed, including how RF effects on basic processing may explain higher-order RF effects.
Virtual reality (VR) has made its way into mainstream psychological research in the last two decades. This technology, with its unique ability to simulate complex, real situations and contexts, offers researchers unprecedented opportunities to investigate human behavior in well controlled designs in the laboratory. One important application of VR is the investigation of pathological processes in mental disorders, especially anxiety disorders. Research on the processes underlying threat perception, fear, and exposure therapy has shed light on more general aspects of the relation between perception and emotion. Being by its nature virtual, i.e., simulation of reality, VR strongly relies on the adequate selection of specific perceptual cues to activate emotions. Emotional experiences in turn are related to presence, another important concept in VR, which describes the user's sense of being in a VR environment. This paper summarizes current research into perception of fear cues, emotion, and presence, aiming at the identification of the most relevant aspects of emotional experience in VR and their mutual relations. A special focus lies on a series of recent experiments designed to test the relative contribution of perception and conceptual information on fear in VR. This strand of research capitalizes on the dissociation between perception (bottom up input) and conceptual information (top-down input) that is possible in VR. Further, we review the factors that have so far been recognized to influence presence, with emotions (e.g., fear) being the most relevant in the context of clinical psychology. Recent research has highlighted the mutual influence of presence and fear in VR, but has also traced the limits of our current understanding of this relationship. In this paper, the crucial role of perception on eliciting emotional reactions is highlighted, and the role of arousal as a basic dimension of emotional experience is discussed. An interoceptive attribution model of presence is suggested as a first step toward an integrative framework for emotion research in VR. Gaps in the current literature and future directions are outlined.
In three studies, we investigated, if and how different modes of presentation - written, auditory, audiovisual (auditory combined with pictures) - affect comprehension of semantically identical materials. Children, beginning from the age of 7, and adults were included into the studies. A vast amount of studies have shown that pictures can facilitate text comprehension (e.g. Carney & Levin, 2002).
Other than the majority of these previous studies, we assessed text comprehension with methods that we assume to allow more differentiated insights into the cognitive processes that - according to current theories - underlie text comprehension. Text comprehension involves at least three levels of mental representations (see Kintsch, 1998). Moreover, text comprehension means constructing a locally and globally coherent mental representation of the text content.
Using a sentence recognition task (see Schmalhofer & Glavanov, 1986), we examined whether the memory of the text surface, the text base, and the situation model differs between written, auditory, and audiovisual text presentation in a sample of 103 8- and 10-year-olds and adults (Study I), and between auditory and audiovisual text presentation in a sample of 106 7-, 9-, and 11-year-olds (Study II). Furthermore, we examined with 155 9- and 11-year-olds, whether the ability to draw inferences to establish local and global coherence differs between written, auditory, and audiovisual text presentation. These inferences were indicated by reaction times to words associated with a protagonist's super- (global) or subordinate (local) goal.
Overall, the results of these three studies taken together, indicate that children up to age 11 do not only have better memory of not only the text surface, but also of the situation model when pictures are added to an auditory text. This effect became apparent in comparison with both auditory and written texts. For the adults, in contrast, we did not find an effect of the presentation mode. Furthermore, both 9- and 11-year-olds were better at establishing global coherence at audiovisual compared to auditory text presentation. Written presentation turned out to be superior to auditory presentation in terms of both local and global coherence.
The emotion of surprise entails a complex of immediate responses, such as cognitive interruption, attention allocation to, and more systematic processing of the surprising stimulus. All these processes serve the ultimate function to increase processing depth and thus cognitively master the surprising stimulus. The present account introduces phasic negative affect as the underlying mechanism responsible for this switch in operating mode. Surprising stimuli are schema discrepant and thus entail cognitive disfluency, which elicits immediate negative affect. This affect in turn works like a phasic cognitive tuning switching the current processing mode from more automatic and heuristic to more systematic and reflective processing. Directly testing the initial elicitation of negative affect by surprising events, the present experiment presented high and low surprising neutral trivia statements to N = 28 participants while assessing their spontaneous facial expressions via facial electromyography. High compared to low surprising trivia elicited higher corrugator activity, indicative of negative affect and mental effort, while leaving zygomaticus (positive affect) and frontalis (cultural surprise expression) activity unaffected. Future research shall investigate the mediating role of negative affect in eliciting surprise-related outcomes.
Fremdschämen or Fremdscham, a negative emotion which arises while observing someone behave inappropriately, comes to fame after the turn of the millennium in german speaking countries. There, they name it literally „other‘s shame“ and it becomes obvious that this emotion happens most commonly while watching TV: reality shows, talent shows and bad comedies. The word even makes it to the dictionaries starting 2009, as its use increases unstoppably in everyday language, starting to get used in more and more situations, seemingly as a synonym of embarrassing or shameful. Still, a look in the emotional research on the subject returns exactly zero results as of 2011, leaving open the question as of what this emotion might be, and what it is not. The present wort aims at explaining not only the phenomenon of Fremdschämen, but also the Emotion behind it - Embarrassment -, at a process level.
Converging evidence from controlled experiments suggests that the mere processing of a number and its attributes such as value or parity might affect free choice decisions between different actions. For example the spatial numerical associations of response codes (SNARC) effect indicates the magnitude of a digit to be associated with a spatial representation and might therefore affect spatial response choices (i.e., decisions between a "left" and a "right" option). At the same time, other (linguistic) features of a number such as parity are embedded into space and might likewise prime left or right responses through feature words [odd or even, respectively; markedness association of response codes (MARC) effect]. In this experiment we aimed at documenting such influences in a natural setting. We therefore assessed number space and parity space association effects by exposing participants to a fair distribution task in a card playing scenario. Participants drew cards, read out loud their number values, and announced their response choice, i.e., dealing it to a left vs. right player, indicated by Playmobil characters. Not only did participants prefer to deal more cards to the right player, the card's digits also affected response choices and led to a slightly but systematically unfair distribution, supported by a regular SNARC effect and counteracted by a reversed MARC effect. The experiment demonstrates the impact of SNARC- and MARC-like biases in free choice behavior through verbal and visual numerical information processing even in a setting with high external validity.
Generating information, compared to reading, improves learning and enhances long-term retention of the learned content. This so-called generation effect has been demonstrated repeatedly for recall and recognition of single words. However, before adopting generating as a learning strategy in educational contexts, conditions moderating the effect need to be identified. This study investigated the impact of positive and negative mood states on the generation effect with short expository texts. According to the dual-force framework (Fiedler, Nickel, Asbeck, & Pagel, 2003), positive mood should facilitate generation by enhancing creative knowledge-based top-down processing (assimilation). Negative mood, however, should facilitate learning in the read-condition by enhancing critical stimulus-driven bottom-up processing (accommodation). In contrast to our expectations, we found no general generation effect but an overall learning advantage of read compared to generated texts. However, a significant interaction of learning condition and mood indicates that learners in a better mood recall generated texts better than learners in a more negative mood, whereas no mood effect was found when the texts were read. The results of the present study partially support the predictions of the dual-force framework and are discussed in the context of recent theoretical approaches to the generation effect.
Background:
Sit-to-stand height-adjustable desks (HAD) may promote workplace standing, as long as workers use them on a regular basis. The aim of this study was to investigate (i) how common HAD in German desk-based workers are, and how frequently HADs are used, (ii) to identify sociodemographic, health-related, and psycho-social variables of workday sitting including having a HAD, and (iii) to analyse sociodemographic, health-related, and psycho-social variables of users and non-users of HADs.
Methods:
A cross-sectional sample of 680 participants (51.9% men; 41.0 ± 13.1 years) in a desk-based occupation was interviewed by telephone about their occupational sitting and standing proportions, having and usage of a HAD, and answered questions concerning psycho-social variables of occupational sitting. The proportion of workday sitting was calculated for participants having an HAD (n = 108) and not-having an HAD (n = 573), as well as for regular users of HAD (n = 54), and irregular/non-users of HAD (n = 54). Linear regressions were conducted to calculate associations between socio-demographic, health-related, psychosocial variables and having/not having an HAD, and the proportion of workday sitting. Logistic regressions were executed to examine the association of mentioned variables and participants’ usage of HADs.
Results:
Sixteen percent report that they have an HAD, and 50% of these report regular use of HAD. Having an HAD is not a correlate of the proportion of workday sitting. Further analysis restricted to participants having available a HAD highlights that only the ‘perceived advantages of sitting less’ was significantly associated with HAD use in the fully adjusted model (OR 1.75 [1.09; 2.81], p < 0.05).
Conclusions:
The present findings indicate that accompanying behavioral action while providing an HAD is promising to increase the regular usage of HAD. Hence, future research needs to address the specificity of behavioral actions in order to enhance regular HAD use, and needs to give more fundamental insights into these associations.
Respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) is related to cardiac vagal outflow and the respiratory pattern. Prior infant studies have not systematically examined respiration rate and tidal volume influences on infant RSA or the extent to which infants' breathing is too fast to extract a valid RSA. We therefore monitored cardiac activity, respiration, and physical activity in 23 six-month old infants during a standardized laboratory stressor protocol. On average, 12.6% (range 0-58.2%) of analyzed breaths were too short for RSA extraction. Higher respiration rate was associated with lower RSA amplitude in most infants, and lower tidal volume was associated with lower RSA amplitude in some infants. RSA amplitude corrected for respiration rate and tidal volume influences showed theoretically expected strong reductions during stress, whereas performance of uncorrected RSA was less consistent. We conclude that stress-induced changes of peak-valley RSA and effects of variations in breathing patterns on RSA can be determined for a representative percentage of infant breaths. As expected, breathing substantially affects infant RSA and needs to be considered in studies of infant psychophysiology.
The prosocial tendencies measure (PTM; Carlo and Randall, 2002) is a widely used measurement for prosocial tendencies in English speaking participants. This instrument distinguishes between six different types of prosocial tendencies that partly share some common basis, but also can be opposed to each other. To examine these constructs in Germany, a study with 1067 participants was conducted. The study investigated the structure of this German version of the PTM-R via exploratory factor analysis, confirmatory factor analysis, correlations with similar constructs in subsamples as well as via measurement invariance test concerning the original English version. The German translation showed a similar factor structure to the English version in exploratory factor analysis and in confirmatory factor analysis. Measurement invariance was found between the English and German language versions of the PTM and support for the proposed six-factor structure (altruistic, anonymous, compliant, dire, emotional and public prosocial behavior) was also found in confirmatory factor analysis. Furthermore, the expected interrelations of these factors of prosocial behavior tendencies were obtained. Finally, correlations of the prosocial behavior tendencies with validating constructs and behaviors were found. Thus, the findings stress the importance of seeing prosocial behavior not as a single dimension construct, but as a factored construct which now can also be assessed in German speaking participants.