Age and forgetting rate with pictorial stimuli.

The rate of forgetting standardized line drawings of common objects was assessed in groups of young (M age?=?22 years) and older (M age?=?70.5 years) subjects. The two groups forgot equal quantities of pictorial stimuli over successive intervals of 10 min, 2 hr, and 48 hr, after being matched for original learning. In contrast, the older subjects showed the expected age decrement in reproduction of geometric designs from memory. These findings indicate that aging does not affect retention of pictures when differences in learning and retrieval abilities are controlled. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Recognition after tachistoscopic presentations of complex pictorial stimuli.

400 colored slides taken by amateur photographers were shown to 12 male university students at 80, 160, or 1000 msec. Recognition memory for the stimuli was assessed by a 2-alternative forced choice task. High recognition rates were found at each of the exposure times. Results are interpreted as contradicting the prior finding by M. C. Potter and E. I. Levy (see record 1969-12253-001) of low recognition rates under tachistoscopic conditions, and as showing that a single visual fixation can produce high recognition rates. (French summary) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Sex bias in language stimuli.

Discusses the need to eliminate sex bias from language stimuli. First, it is important to eliminate supports for sexism in general. Second, sex-biased stimuli are incompatible with the scientific goal of testing stimuli representative of the entire range of possible stimuli. Recommendations for how psychologists can remedy this problem are offered. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Weight differences in emotional responsiveness to proprioceptive and pictorial stimuli.

In 2 studies, 70 overweight and 76 normal-weight undergraduates were administered the Sadness and Elation components of the Nowlis Mood Adjective Check List to investigate weight differences in emotional responsiveness to proprioceptive and pictorial stimuli. Contrary to past evidence that overweight Ss are more emotional than normals, the emotional state of normal-weight Ss fluctuated with manipulations of their facial expression, whereas that of overweight Ss did not respond to these proprioceptive cues. Although research employing affectively loaded pictures found overweight Ss to be more emotionally responsive than normals to these external stimuli, no such weight differences were obtained when less polarized pictures were used in the present studies. It is concluded that even though overweight Ss were more emotionally responsive to extremely polarized external stimuli that demand perception, they were less responsive to proprioceptive stimuli derived from facial expressions and equally responsive to moderately polarized pictorial stimuli. (23 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Theoretical analysis of the cognitive processing of lexical and pictorial stimuli: Reading, naming, and visual and conceptual comparisons.

This article reviews the research literature on the differences between word reading and picture naming. A theory for the visual and cognitive processing of pictures and words is then introduced. The theory accounts for slower naming of pictures than reading of words. Reading aloud involves a fast, grapheme-to-phoneme transformation process, whereas picture naming involves two additional processes; (a) determining the meaning of the pictorial stimulus and (b) finding a name for the pictorial stimulus. We conducted a reading-naming experiment, and the time to achieve (a) and (b) was determined to be approximately 160 ms. On the basis of data from a second experiment, we demonstrated that there is no significant difference in time to visually compare two pictures or two words when size of the stimuli is equated. There is no difference in time to make the two types of cross-modality conceptual comparisons (picture first, then word, or word first, then picture). The symmetry of the visual and conceptual comparison results supports the hypothesis that the coding of the mind is neither intrinsically linguistic nor imagistic, but rather it is abstract. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Ethnocultural and linguistic bias in mental health evaluation of Hispanics.

At the root of effective mental health care is valid psychodiagnosis, premised upon accurate psychometric technology and sound clinical judgment. The majority of clinicians, however, are monolingual and White, which does today (and will increasingly) pose a problem for mental health service delivery—particularly for Hispanic patients. This article examines sources of ethnic and linguistic bias in evaluation of Hispanic clients. It is argued that even if unbiased assessment techniques can be developed, valid psychodiagnosis of Hispanic patients will remain illusory to the extent that clinicians are insensitive to the linguistic and cultural nuances of their clientele. Recommendations for improving clinical practice are offered. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Attentional bias for smoking and affective stimuli: A Stroop task study.

Prior research has demonstrated attentional biases to smoking-related cues among smokers, and several lines of research suggest strong ties between smoking and negative affect. The authors tested attentional biases to both smoking and affective cues in 27 smokers using an emotional Stroop paradigm, and examined the relationship between these forms of attentional bias. Findings indicated significant attentional biases to smoking-related and negative-affect words, but not positive-affect words. In addition, there was a significant correlation between the degree of attentional bias to smoking and negative-affect words. These data provide evidence of a close association between smoking-related and affective cue processing from a cognitive perspective. Potential theoretical and clinical implications for these findings are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Cultural and linguistic bias in mental health evaluations of deaf people.

Examines assessment issues related to deaf clients, focusing on cultural and linguistic bias. Reliability and validity problems encountered when administering intellectual and personality assessments to hearing-impaired Ss are discussed. Factors influencing psychological assessment are addressed, including inaccurate beliefs and problems with rapport, miscommunication, and using interpreters. It is recommended that research be conducted to refine the psychometric properties of assessment instruments used, that psychologists become more sophisticated about deaf culture, and that psychologists interested in working with deaf clients need to become more skilled in the use of sign language. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Assessment of cognitive bias in depression.

Describes a procedure for the assessment of depressive distortion, a construct hypothesized by A. T. Beck (1967, 1976) to be a central mechanism in the cause and maintenance of dysphoria and other symptoms of depression. The questionnaire assesses Ss' interpretations of events depicted in brief stories and measures presence of a tendency to select the most negative, pessimistic, or self-deprecating response options. The psychometric properties of the procedure are reported, and validity issues are addressed. There was a consistent relation between scores on the Beck Depression Inventory and depressive–distortion scores across samples of 590 college students, 29 outpatients in therapy for depression, and 20 inpatients. From test–retest data, it appears that Ss with high scores on both depression and distortion had the highest levels of depression 8 wks after initial testing. Although the results confirm Beck's hypothesis of a characteristic cognitive bias in depression, research is needed to analyze the role of bias in maintaining depressed mood and to clarify the nature of the bias. (21 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Language use in intergroup contexts: The linguistic intergroup bias.

Three experiments examine how the type of language used to describe in-group and out-group behaviors contributes to the transmission and persistence of social stereotypes. Two experiments tested the hypothesis that people encode and communicate desirable in-group and undesirable out-group behaviors more abstractly than undesirable in-group and desirable out-group behaviors. Experiment 1 provided strong support for this hypothesis using a fixed-response scale format controlling for the level of abstractness developed from G. R. Semin and K. Fiedler's (see record 1988-20078-001) linguistic category model. Experiment 2 yielded the same results with a free-response format. Experiment 3 demonstrated the important role that abstract versus concrete communication plays in the perpetuation of stereotypes. The implications of these findings and the use of the linguistic category model are discussed for the examination of the self-perpetuating cycle of stereotypes in communication processes. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Common and distinctive features of verbal and pictorial stimuli as determinants of psychophysiological responsivity.

The present study focuses on the relation between stimulus features and psychophysiological responsivity by using a modified version of the information detection paradigm. Compound pictorial and verbal stimuli were used as the relevant stimuli that Ss were instructed to memorize. Skin conductance responses were measured during the subsequent presentation of a sequence of test stimuli. We hypothesized that the electrodermal responsivity to the critical stimulus would reflect the degree it matches the relevant one. The results indicated that when the critical stimulus was identical to the relevant stimulus, responsivity was maximal. Neutral stimuli produced minimal responsivity, and critical stimuli that only partially matched the relevant one produced intermediate levels of responsivity (in spite of the subjects' awareness of the differences between the critical and the relevant stimuli). Comparison of the geometric and contrast models for similarity showed that the pattern of responsivity violated the minimality and symmetry assumptions of the geometric model. The relation between cognitive processes and psychophysiological responsivity is discussed, as are implications for the application of the guilty knowledge technique for detecting information. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Late positive potential to appetitive stimuli and local attentional bias.

Predicated on the idea that positive affects high in approach motivation are crucial in goal-directed behaviors, research has found that these positive affects cause narrowed attention. The present research was designed to investigate a possible neurophysiological underpinning of this effect. Previous research has suggested that the late positive potential (LPP) of the event-related brain potential is increased by emotionally arousing stimuli because of the attention-grabbing nature of such stimuli. Other research has suggested that left prefrontal cortical regions are associated with narrowed attention and approach-motivated affect. Integrating these two lines of evidence, the present research examined LPPs to appetitive versus neutral pictures and assessed the relationship of these LPPs to local versus global attentional bias following the picture primes. Results revealed that appetitive in comparison with neutral pictures evoked larger LPP amplitudes bilaterally over central and parietal regions and asymmetrically over frontal regions. Moreover, these LPP amplitudes to appetitive pictures predicted greater locally biased attention caused by the appetitive pictures. These results provide the first evidence that LPPs are associated with the local attentional bias induced by appetitive motivation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Conditioning-induced attentional bias for face stimuli measured with the emotional Stroop task.

People with anxiety disorder display attentional bias toward threat-related objects. Using classical fear conditioning, the authors investigated the possible source of such bias in normal participants. Following differential fear conditioning in which an angry face of either male or female (conditioned stimulus: CS+) was paired with mild electric fingershock (unconditioned stimulus: US) but the angry face of the other gender and all other facial expressions unpaired (CS-), an emotional Stroop task was administered. In the Stroop task, participants were required to identify the color of the facial stimuli (red, green, blue, or yellow). Response latency was significantly longer for the CS+ angry face than the other unpaired facial stimuli (CS-). Furthermore, this acquired attentional bias was positively correlated with the level of trait-anxiety measured before the conditioning and the degree of self-reported aversiveness of the US. Our results demonstrated that attentional bias could be induced in normal individuals through a simple associative learning procedure, and the acquisition is modulated by the level of trait anxiety and the level of perceived fear of the aversive US. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The effects of pictorial versus tangible stimuli in stimulus-preference assessments

OBJECTIVES: The purpose of this study was to compare 3-year risk-adjusted survival in patients undergoing coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) surgery and percutaneous transluminal coronary angioplasty. BACKGROUND: Coronary artery bypass graft surgery and angioplasty are two common treatments for coronary artery disease. For referral purposes, it is important to know the relative pattern of survival after hospital discharge for these procedures and to identify patient characteristics that are related to survival. METHODS: New York's CABG surgery and angioplasty registries were used to identify New York patients undergoing CABG surgery and angioplasty from January 1, 1993 to December 31, 1995. Mortality within 3 years of undergoing the procedure (adjusted for patient severity of illness) and subsequent revascularization within 3 years were captured. Three-year mortality rates were adjusted using proportional hazards methods to account for baseline differences in patients' severity of illness. RESULTS: Patients with one-vessel disease with the one vessel not involving the left anterior descending artery (LAD) or with less than 70% LAD stenosis had a statistically significantly longer adjusted 3-year survival with angioplasty (95.3%) than with CABG surgery (92.4%). Patients with proximal LAD stenosis of at least 70% had a statistically significantly longer adjusted 3-year survival with CABG surgery than with angioplasty regardless of the number of coronary vessels diseased. Also, patients with three-vessel disease had a statistically significantly longer adjusted 3-year survival with CABG surgery regardless of proximal LAD disease. Patients with other one-vessel or two-vessel disease had no treatment-related differences in survival. CONCLUSIONS: Treatment-related survival benefit at 3-years in patients with ischemic heart disease is predicted by the anatomic extent and specific site of the disease, as well as by the treatment chosen.     

The empirical basis of ethnocultural and linguistic bias in mental health evaluations of Hispanics.

Discusses limitations in R. G. Malgady et al (see record 1987-22971-001), including claims of bias in Hispanic psychopathology rates, claims of poor face validity of the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) for assessing Hispanics, and the importance of language preference for expressing psychopathology in bilinguals. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Concreteness training reduces dysphoria: Proof-of-principle for repeated cognitive bias modification in depression.

A tendency toward abstract and overgeneral processing is a cognitive bias hypothesized to causally contribute to symptoms of depression. This hypothesis predicts that training dysphoric individuals to become more concrete and specific in their thinking would reduce depressive symptoms. To test this prediction, 60 participants with dysphoria were randomly allocated either to (a) concreteness training; (b) bogus concreteness training, matched with concreteness training for treatment rationale, experimenter contact, and treatment duration but without active engagement in concrete thinking; (c) a waiting-list, no training control. Concreteness training resulted in significantly greater decreases in depressive symptoms and significantly greater increases in concrete thinking than the waiting-list and the bogus training control, and significantly greater decreases in rumination than the waiting-list control. These findings suggest that concreteness training has potential as a guided self-help intervention for mild-to-moderate depressive symptoms. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Inferential distance and children's memory for pictorial sequences.

Three-item pictorial sequences were shown to a total of 60 5-, 6-, and 7-yr-old children who were told to remember the events. Ss were tested subsequently on their abilities to recognize old pictures and select new pictures that were consistent with previously viewed sequences. New pictures varied in the inferential distance between them and the original sequence. All Ss judged close inferences as consistent with the sequence more often than distant inferences. In general, there was a progressive developmental improvement in accurate recognition of old items and correct discrimination of new items. This pattern of results was found for judgments based on sequential compatibility and on recognition of exact pictures. The probability of inferring new relationships from old sequences increased across the 3 age groups when correct memory for original sequences was controlled. Results indicate a developmental improvement in inferential skills beyond age-related changes in memory for premise information. Furthermore, distance of inferences is an important dimension of the stimuli that can affect memory and comprehension judgments. (12 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)