Frontiers in psychology
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Frontiers in psychology · Jan 2015
'Right Now, Sophie (∗)Swims in the Pool?!': Brain Potentials of Grammatical Aspect Processing.
We investigated whether brain potentials of grammatical aspect processing resemble semantic or morpho-syntactic processing, or whether they instead are characterized by an entirely distinct pattern in the same individuals. We studied aspect from the perspective of agreement between the temporal information in the context (temporal adverbials, e.g., Right now) and a morpho-syntactic marker of grammatical aspect (e.g., progressive is swimming). Participants read questions providing a temporal context that was progressive (What is Sophie doing in the pool right now?) or habitual (What does Sophie do in the pool every Monday?). ⋯ The aspect-related Negativity obtained for aspect agreement mismatches reflects a violated expectation concerning verbal inflection (in the example above, the expected verb phrase was Sophie is X-ing rather than Sophie X-s in condition d). The absence of an additional P600 for aspect processing suggests that the mismatch did not require additional reintegration or processing costs. This is consistent with participants' post hoc grammaticality judgements of the same sentences, which overall show a high acceptability of aspect mismatch sentences.
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Frontiers in psychology · Jan 2015
Influence of Music on Anxiety Induced by Fear of Heights in Virtual Reality.
Music is a potent mood regulator that can induce relaxation and reduce anxiety in different situations. While several studies demonstrate that certain types of music have a subjective anxiolytic effect, the reported results from physiological responses are less conclusive. Virtual reality allows us to study diverse scenarios of real life under strict experimental control while preserving high ecological validity. ⋯ The scenario produced significant changes in subjective and physiological measures, confirming its efficacy as a stressor. A significant increase in state anxiety was found between pre and post-assessment in the silence group, but not in the music group, indicating that post-stress recovery was faster in the musical group. Results suggest that music can ameliorate the subjective anxiety produced by fear of heights.
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Frontiers in psychology · Jan 2015
Is experiential-intuitive cognitive style more inclined to err on conjunction fallacy than analytical-rational cognitive style?
In terms of prediction by Epstein's integrative theory of personality, cognitive-experiential self-theory (CEST), those people with experiential-intuitive cognitive style are more inclined to induce errors than the other people with analytical-rational cognitive style in the conjunction fallacy (two events that can occur together are seen as more likely than at least one of the two events). We tested this prediction in a revised Linda problem. The results revealed that rational and experiential cognitive styles do not statistically influence the propensity for committing the conjunction fallacy, which is contrary to the CEST's predictions. Based on the assumption that the rational vs. experiential processing is a personality trait with comparatively stabile specialities, these findings preliminarily indicate that those people who are characterized by "rational thinking" are not more inclined to use Bayes' deduction than the other people who are labeled by "intuitive thinking" or by "poor thinking."