Journal of General Psychology

It is difficult to obtain adequate power to test a small effect size with a set criterion alpha of 0.05. Probably an inferential test will indicate non-statistical significance and not be published. Rarely, statistical significance will be obtained, and an exaggerated effect size calculated and reported. Accepting all inferential probabilities and associated effect sizes could solve exaggeration problems. Graphs, generated through Monte Carlo methods, are presented to illustrate this. The first graph presents effect sizes (Cohen's d) as lines from 1 to 0 with probabilities on the Y axis and the number of measures on the X axis...

It is an open question whether social stereotype activation can be distinguished from nonsocial semantic activation. To address this question, gender stereotype activation (GSA) and lexical semantic activation (LSA) were directly compared. EEGs were recorded in 20 participants as they identified the congruence between prime-target word pairs under four different conditions (stereotype congruent, stereotype incongruent, semantic congruent, and semantic incongruent). We found that congruent targets elicited faster and more accurate responses and reduced N400 amplitudes irrespective of priming category types...

The present study reports on the relations between multicultural personality and ethnic tolerance via associations with cross-group friendship in a sample of Portuguese university students (n = 270). It was found that the multicultural personality dimensions, particularly cultural empathy, open-mindedness, social initiative, and flexibility, were significantly correlated with ethnic tolerance. At the same time, a mediation model demonstrated that the relationship between open-mindedness and ethnic tolerance was partially mediated by cross-group friendship...

This study attempts to explain the relationship between job satisfaction and the Big Two, Stability and Plasticity, which are the higher-order traits of Big Five. Occupational Project, a narrative construct, was considered a mediator variable in this relationship. Occupational Project consists of affective and cognitive evaluations of an individual's work life as a project in terms of the completed (past), the ongoing (present) and the prospective (future) parts. The survey method was applied to a sample of 253 participants...

The effects of letter substitutions have been linked to their position within a word (letter position effects). The current study expanded upon previous research by examining letter-position effects for letter substitutions using forward- and reverse-spelled word primes. Often substituting a letter on one side of a word will have a stronger impact on performance than substituting a letter on the other side of a word. In three experiments it was revealed that the letter-position effects of substitutions changed places when words were spelled backwards...

The aim of the current study was to examine if recollection and familiarity decline in nondemented Parkinson's patients. To do so we compared a sample of older people with Parkinson's disease (n = 32) to a control sample of healthy older people (n = 32) on an associative recognition task in which we manipulated the repetition of the pairs during the study phase (half of the pairs were presented once and half twice) to obtain corrected estimates of recollection, familiarity, and false recognition based on the logic of the process-dissociation procedure...

The aim of this study is to investigate psychopathologies and the temperament-character profile of Alopecia Areata patients and to compare them with healthy controls. Patients and controls who presented at a dermatology clinic were selected by convenience sampling to respond to Temperament and Character Inventory (TCI), SCL-90-R, and a checklist about the demographic data and their dermatologic and psychiatric history. Patients reported higher harm avoidance and reward dependence than controls (Cohen's d = ...

In two studies, we tested the hypothesis that the effect of feeling powerful on willingness to sacrifice for the preservation of shared resources depends on whether such willingness is expressed publically or privately. Participants were randomly assigned to either a power priming condition or a control condition and then completed measures assessing their attitudes, future intentions, and willingness to sacrifice for environmental conservation. Consistent with our hypothesis, the psychological experience of power decreased people's environmental attitudes and willingness to sacrifice for the environment, but only when these responses were made privately...

The reality of illusory conjunctions in perception has been sometimes questioned, arguing that they can be explained by other mechanisms. Most relevant experiments are based on migrations along the space dimension. But the low rate of illusory conjunctions along space can easily hide them among other types of errors. As migrations over time are a more frequent phenomenon, illusory conjunctions can be disentangled from other errors. We report an experiment in which series of colored letters were presented in several spatial locations, allowing for migrations over both space and time...

The medial temporal lobe and striatum have both been implicated as brain substrates of memory and learning. Here, we show dissociation between these two memory systems using a same/different matching task, in which subjects judged whether four-letter strings were the same or different. Different RT was determined by the left-to-right location of the first letter different between the study and test string, consistent with a left-to-right comparison of the study and test strings, terminating when a difference was found...

Resilience represents coping with adversity and is in line with a more positive paradigm for viewing responses to adversity. Most research has focused on resilience as coping-a state-based response to adversity. However, a competing hypothesis views resilience or resiliency as a trait that exists across time and types of adversity. We tested undergraduates enrolled in social work classes at a large southern university at two time periods during a single semester using measures of adversity, positive and negative affect, and trait-based resiliency...

Sound symbolism suggests a non-arbitrary relationship between speech sounds and the concepts to which those sounds refer (Hinton, Nichols, & Ohala, 2006 ). Supporting evidence comes primarily from studies investigating how speech sounds relate to semantically compatible visual concepts. The present study therefore attempted to examine sound symbolism in the context of tactile perception. Contrary to the propositions of sound symbolism, participants in Experiment 1 did not consistently assign names with plosive consonant to objects with curved frames...

Contemporary research on survival-related defensive behaviors has identified physiological markers of freeze/flight/fight. Our research focused on cognitive factors associated with freeze-like behavior in humans. Study 1 tested if an explicit decision to freeze is associated with the psychophysiological state of freezing. Heart rate deceleration occurred when participants chose to freeze. Study 2 varied the efficacy of freezing relative to other defense options and found "freeze" was responsive to variations in the perceived effectiveness of alternative actions...

Second- through fourth-grade students were read a storybook that described a typical boy who interacted with an obese boy for one of four reasons (sympathy, curiosity, teacher instructed, or no reason) to explore the manner in which a typical storybook character's reason for associating with an obese storybook character influences children's responses to both characters. Results revealed that the children responded more favorably to the obese storybook character after than before learning about the typical storybook character's association with him, especially when the typical storybook character's reason for association was presented as internally motivated (sympathy or curiosity)...

Based on theoretical and empirical similarities between Construal level theory of psychological distance and the Need for cognitive closure (NFC) theory, it could be hypothesized that psychological distance and NFC represent constructs that overlap to some degree. Since both theories describe judgmental behavior in terms of schematic processing, we hypothesized that primacy effect, a schema-driven phenomenon, is strengthened under the heightened NFC and psychological distance. We tested this hypothesis in an impression formation experiment while manipulating psychological distance and measuring NFC...

Demonstrations of non-speech McGurk effects are rare, mostly limited to emotion identification, and sometimes not considered true analogues. We presented videos of males and females singing a single syllable on the same pitch and asked participants to indicate the true range of the voice-soprano, alto, tenor, or bass. For one group of participants, the gender shown on the video matched the gender of the voice heard, and for the other group they were mismatched. Soprano or alto responses were interpreted as "female voice" decisions and tenor or bass responses as "male voice" decisions...

Two experiments were conducted to investigate how linguistic information influences attention allocation in visual search and memory for words. In Experiment 1, participants searched for the synonym of a cue word among five words. The distractors included one antonym and three unrelated words. In Experiment 2, participants were asked to judge whether the five words presented on the screen comprise a valid sentence. The relationships among words were sentential, semantically related or unrelated. A memory recognition task followed...

We examined the extent to which individual relationships with mother and father, social support from partner, and quality of the relationship with the partner, are related to work orientation and work ethic. Survey data were obtained from 3841 respondents from the Netherlands Kinship Panel Study (wave 2). The results showed that, overall, people with a more positive relationship with their parents had a more positive work orientation and a stronger work ethic. A positive relationship with the father had a greater influence on these work aspects than a positive relationship with the mother, particularly for men...

In this study, investigating answerability judgments, 123 participants judged whether each of 46 general knowledge questions could currently be answered by themselves, by someone else, or by no one. There were 26 consensus questions (high expected consensus about their answerability) and 20 non-consensus questions. Before each question, half of the participants rated the extent of their knowledge related to the question. Results showed that answering consensus questions compared with non-consensus led to a lower proportion of "No one knows" answers...

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