Search results for "Experimental and Cognitive Psychology"
showing 10 items of 1162 documents
Maintenance of weight loss after obesity treatment: is continuous support necessary?
2002
Abstract Objective: This study examined outcome differences of 109 obese subjects, who participated in a 10-week cognitive-behavioral inpatient treatment followed by either a weight maintenance program or a follow-up period without professional support. Methods: Self-rated weight loss, eating behaviors, and general psychopathology were assessed several months before treatment, when subjects were admitted, at discharge, and at the 6-, 12-, and 18-month follow-ups. Structured interviews for mental disorders and eating pathology were conducted additionally. Results: The mean weight of the sample at baseline was 127 kg. Weight loss of the total sample amounted to 8.0 kg (6.3%) and was completel…
“The sound of affect”: Age differences in perceiving valence and arousal in music and their relation to music characteristics and momentary mood
2018
Throughout life, music plays an important role in individuals’ everyday affective experiences. Previous findings suggest that preferences for, and perceptions of, music with distinct affective qualities might differ for individuals from different age groups. To date, however, evidence from age-comparative studies across adulthood is rare and little is known about the mechanisms that contribute to age differences in music perception. In an age-heterogeneous sample ranging from adolescence to old adulthood ( n = 50; 12–75 years), we investigated differences in affect perceptions of 147 sounds and 465 songs of various musical styles and dates of origin, as well as the respective roles of musi…
Imagination in human social cognition, autism, and psychotic-affective conditions
2016
Abstract Complex human social cognition has evolved in concert with risks for psychiatric disorders. Recently, autism and psychotic-affective conditions (mainly schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and depression) have been posited as psychological ‘opposites’ with regard to social-cognitive phenotypes. Imagination, considered as ‘forming new ideas, mental images, or concepts’, represents a central facet of human social evolution and cognition. Previous studies have documented reduced imagination in autism, and increased imagination in association with psychotic-affective conditions, yet these sets of findings have yet to be considered together, or evaluated in the context of the diametric mode…
Age Differences in Learning from Instructional Animations
2015
Summary: The present study tests the effects of the decline of executive functions and spatial abilities with aging on the comprehension of a complex instructional animation. An animation of a piano mechanism was presented individually to 33 young adults and 31 elderly participants. Two presentation speeds of the animation (normal and slow) were compared in a 2×2 experimental design. Eye movements were recorded during the learning time. Then, four executive function tests (inhibition, shifting, updating, and processing speed) and a spatial ability test (differential aptitude test) were undertaken by each participant. Results showed that the comprehension of animations was significantly affe…
Compensatory strategies in processing facial emotions: evidence from prosopagnosia.
2006
We report data on the processing of facial emotion in a prosopagnosic patient (H.J.A.). H.J.A. was relatively accurate at discriminating happy from angry upright faces, but he performed at chance when the faces were inverted. Furthermore, with upright faces there was no configural interference effect on emotion judgements, when face parts expressing different emotions were aligned to express a new emergent emotion. We propose that H.J.A.'s emotion judgements relied on local rather than on configural information, and this local information was disrupted by inversion. A compensatory strategy, based on processing local face parts, can be sufficient to process at least some facial emotions.
Subjective states associated with retrieval failures in Parkinson's disease.
2013
Abstract Instances in which we cannot retrieve information immediately but know that the information might be retrieved later are subjective states that accompany retrieval failure. These are expressed in feeling-of-knowing (FOK) and Tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) experiences. In Experiment 1, participants with Parkinson’s disease (PD) and older adult controls were given general questions and asked to report when they experienced a TOT state and to give related information about the missing word. The PD group experienced similar levels of TOTs but provided less correct peripheral information related to the target when in a TOT state. In Experiment 2, participants were given a Semantic (general kno…
Modelling terror management theory: computer simulations of the impact of mortality salience on religiosity
2017
ABSTRACTThis article outlines the development – and reports on the experimental findings – of two computational models designed to simulate the dynamic systems and behavioural patterns identified and clarified by research on terror management theory. The causal architectures of these models are informed by empirical research on the effects of mortality salience on “religiosity” (and vice versa). They are also informed by research on the way in which perception of personal and environmental hazards activate evolved cognitive and coalitional precautionary systems that can intensify anxiety-alleviating behaviours such as imaginative engagement with supernatural agents postulated within a relig…
Do transposed-letter effects occur across lexeme boundaries?
2006
A masked priming lexical decision experiment was conducted to examine whether or not assignment of letter position in a word can be influenced by lexeme boundaries. The experiment was run in Basque, which is a strongly agglutinating language with a high proportion of inflected and compound words. Nonword primes were created by transposing two nonadjacent letters that crossed or did not cross morphological boundaries. Specifically, we compared morphologically complex prime-target pairs (e.g., arbigide-ARGIBIDE) with orthographic controls (e.g., arkipide-ARGIBIDE; note that ARGIBIDE is a compound of ARGI + BIDE) and noncompound pairs (e.g., ortakila--ORKATILA) with orthographic controls (e.g.…
E-Hitz: A word frequency list and a program for deriving psycholinguistic statistics in an agglutinative language (Basque)
2007
We describe a Windows program that enables users to obtain a broad range of statistics concerning the properties of word and nonword stimuli in an agglutinative language (Basque), including measures of word frequency (at the whole-word and lemma levels), bigram and biphone frequency, orthographic similarity, orthographic and phonological structure, and syllable-based measures. It is designed for use by researchers in psycholinguistics, particularly those concerned with recognition of isolated words and morphology. In addition to providing standard orthographic and phonological neighborhood measures, the program can be used to obtain information about other forms of orthographic similarity, …
Acute psychosocial stress effects on memory performance: Relevance of age and sex.
2018
In recent decades, there has been a growing interest in investigating the effects of chronic and acute stress on cognitive processes, especially memory performance. However, research focusing on acute stress effects has reported contradictory findings, probably due to the many factors that can moderate this relationship. In addition to factors related to the individual, such as sex and age, other factors, such as the type of memory assessed, can play a critical role in the direction of these effects. This review summarizes the main findings of our research group and others about the effects of acute psychosocial stress on memory performance in young and older people of both sexes, taking in…