The Interrelations Between Social Class, Personal Relative Deprivation, and Prosociality.

We propose that personal relative deprivation (PRD)-the belief that one is worse off than similar others-plays a key role in the link between social class and prosociality. Across multiple samples and measures (total N = 2,233), people higher in PRD were less inclined to help others. When considered in isolation, neither objective nor subjective socioeconomic status (SES) was meaningfully associated with prosociality. However, because people who believe themselves to be at the top of the socioeconomic hierarchy are typically low in PRD, these variables act as mutual suppressors-the predictive validity of both is enhanced when they are considered simultaneously, revealing that both higher subjective SES and higher PRD are associated with lower prosociality. These results cast new light on the complex connections between relative social status and people's willingness to act for the benefit of others.

Social comparison, personal relative deprivation, and materialism.

Across five studies, we found consistent evidence for the idea that personal relative deprivation (PRD), which refers to resentment stemming from the belief that one is deprived of deserved outcomes compared to others, uniquely contributes to materialism. In Study 1, self-reports of PRD positively predicted materialistic values over and above socioeconomic status, personal power, self-esteem, and emotional uncertainty. The experience of PRD starts with social comparison, and Studies 2 and 3 found that PRD mediated the positive relation between a tendency to make social comparisons of abilities and materialism. In Study 4, participants who learned that they had less (vs. similar) discretionary income than people like them reported a stronger desire for more money relative to donating more to charity. In Study 5, during a windfall-spending task, participants higher in PRD spent more on things they wanted relative to other spending categories (e.g., paying off debts).

Eye Movements in Risky Choice.

We asked participants to make simple risky choices while we recorded their eye movements. We built a complete statistical model of the eye movements and found very little systematic variation in eye movements over the time course of a choice or across the different choices. The only exceptions were finding more (of the same) eye movements when choice options were similar, and an emerging gaze bias in which people looked more at the gamble they ultimately chose. These findings are inconsistent with prospect theory, the priority heuristic, or decision field theory. However, the eye movements made during a choice have a large relationship with the final choice, and this is mostly independent from the contribution of the actual attribute values in the choice options. That is, eye movements tell us not just about the processing of attribute values but also are independently associated with choice. The pattern is simple-people choose the gamble they look at more often, independently of the actual numbers they see-and this pattern is simpler than predicted by decision field theory, decision by sampling, and the parallel constraint satisfaction model. © 2015 The Authors. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Dynamics of an upland stream fish community over 40 years: trajectories and support for the loose equilibrium concept.

Previous theoretical models and empirical studies suggested that communities can exist in a "stochastic" or "loose" equilibrium, diverging transiently but eventually returning toward earlier or average structure, in what we call here the "loose equilibrium concept" (LEC). We sampled the fish communities at 12 local stream reaches spaced broadly throughout a relatively undisturbed watershed in the Ozark Mountains of northern Arkansas, USA, in 11 surveys from 1972 to 2012 at a scale of decades, and at a subset of five of these local sites in a total of 16 surveys, allowing tests of the LEC at different spatial and temporal scales. Multivariate analyses of the dynamics of communities over the 40-year period provided support for the LEC at both "global" and "local" scales within the watershed. At the broadest spatial scale, core species numerically dominated the community, and most common species remained so across all decades. In spite of two extraordinary floods, and interannual variation in abundance of some species, the 12-site and five-site global communities and eight of 12 local communities repeatedly returned toward average positions in multivariate space. Trajectories of the global and local fish communities varied relative to model hypothetical trajectories that were based on gradual vs. saltatory changes, and prevalence of returns toward average community structure. Beta diversity among sites was variable across time, but beta partitioning consistently showed that pure spatial turnover dominated over nestedness, because many common species were consistently distributed either upstream or downstream. This study suggests that vertebrate communities in relatively undisturbed environments may display dynamics consistent with the LEC. The LEC, combined with quantification of community trajectory patterns, can help to clarify whether systems are moving about within ranges of conditions that reflect expected noise, or, conversely, have moved so far out of previous bounds, as a result of climate change or human intervention, that they are permanently changed or "novel."

Temporal cognition: Connecting subjective time to perception, attention, and memory.

Time is a universal psychological dimension, but time perception has often been studied and discussed in relative isolation. Increasingly, researchers are searching for unifying principles and integrated models that link time perception to other domains. In this review, we survey the links between temporal cognition and other psychological processes. Specifically, we describe how subjective duration is affected by nontemporal stimulus properties (perception), the allocation of processing resources (attention), and past experience with the stimulus (memory). We show that many of these connections instantiate a "processing principle," according to which perceived time is positively related to perceptual vividity and the ease of extracting information from the stimulus. This empirical generalization generates testable predictions and provides a starting-point for integrated theoretical frameworks. By outlining some of the links between temporal cognition and other domains, and by providing a unifying principle for understanding these effects, we hope to encourage time-perception researchers to situate their work within broader theoretical frameworks, and that researchers from other fields will be inspired to apply their insights, techniques, and theorizing to improve our understanding of the representation and judgment of time. (PsycINFO Database Record

Predicting self-rated mental and physical health: the contributions of subjective socioeconomic status and personal relative deprivation.

Lower subjective socioeconomic status (SSS) and higher personal relative deprivation (PRD) relate to poorer health. Both constructs concern people's perceived relative social position, but they differ in their emphasis on the reference groups people use to determine their comparative disadvantage (national population vs. similar others) and the importance of resentment that may arise from such adverse comparisons. We investigated the relative utility of SSS and PRD as predictors of self-rated physical and mental health (e.g., self-rated health, stress, health complaints). Across six studies, self-rated physical and mental health were on the whole better predicted by measures of PRD than by SSS while controlling for objective socioeconomic status (SES), with SSS rarely contributing unique variance over and above PRD and SES. Studies 4-6 discount the possibility that the superiority of PRD over SSS in predicting health is due to psychometric differences (e.g., reliability) or response biases between the measures.

Can the effects of temporal grouping explain the similarities and differences between free recall and serial recall?

Temporal grouping can provide a principled explanation for changes in the serial position curves and output orders that occur with increasing list length in immediate free recall (IFR) and immediate serial recall (ISR). To test these claims, we examined the effects of temporal grouping on the order of recall in IFR and ISR of lists of between one and 12 words. Consistent with prior research, there were significant effects of temporal grouping in the ISR task with mid-length lists using serial recall scoring, and no overall grouping advantage in the IFR task with longer list lengths using free recall scoring. In all conditions, there was a general tendency to initiate recall with either the first list item or with one of the last four items, and then to recall in a forward serial order. In the grouped IFR conditions, when participants started with one of the last four words, there were particularly heightened tendencies to initiate recall with the first item of the most recent group. Moreover, there was an increased degree of forward-ordered transitions within groups than across groups in IFR. These findings are broadly consistent with Farrell's model, in which lists of items in immediate memory are parsed into distinct groups and participants initiate recall with the first item of a chosen cluster, but also highlight shortcomings of that model. The data support the claim that grouping may offer an important element in the theoretical integration of IFR and ISR.

Risk perception influences athletic pacing strategy.

PURPOSE: The objective of this study is to examine risk taking and risk perception associations with perceived exertion, pacing, and performance in athletes. METHODS: Two experiments were conducted in which risk perception was assessed using the domain-specific risk taking (DOSPERT) scale in 20 novice cyclists (experiment 1) and 32 experienced ultramarathon runners (experiment 2). In experiment 1, participants predicted their pace and then performed a 5-km maximum effort cycling time trial on a calibrated Kingcycle mounted bicycle. Split times and perceived exertion were recorded every kilometer. In experiment 2, each participant predicted their split times before running a 100-km ultramarathon. Split times and perceived exertion were recorded at seven checkpoints. In both experiments, higher and lower risk perception groups were created using median split of DOSPERT scores. RESULTS: In experiment 1, pace during the first kilometer was faster among lower risk perceivers compared with higher risk perceivers (t(18) = 2.0, P = 0.03) and faster among higher risk takers compared with lower risk takers (t(18) = 2.2, P = 0.02). Actual pace was slower than predicted pace during the first kilometer in both the higher risk perceivers (t(9) = -4.2, P = 0.001) and lower risk perceivers (t(9) = -1.8, P = 0.049). In experiment 2, pace during the first 36 km was faster among lower risk perceivers compared with higher risk perceivers (t(16) = 2.0, P = 0.03). Irrespective of risk perception group, actual pace was slower than predicted pace during the first 18 km (t(16) = 8.9, P < 0.001) and from 18 to 36 km (t(16) = 4.0, P < 0.001). In both experiments, there was no difference in performance between higher and lower risk perception groups. CONCLUSIONS: Initial pace is associated with an individual's perception of risk, with low perceptions of risk being associated with a faster starting pace. Large differences between predicted and actual pace suggest that the performance template lacks accuracy, perhaps indicating greater reliance on momentary pacing decisions rather than preplanned strategy.

Time perception: the surprising effects of surprising stimuli.

The effects of stimulus repetition often increase when repetitions are more common (i.e., when repeats become more predictable), consistent with the idea that repetition effects reflect expectations about the recurrence of recent items. In contrast, the present experiments found a surprising pattern in which the compressed subjective duration of repeated items was reduced, eliminated, and even reversed when the frequency of repetitions was increased. Experiments 1-4b found that this pattern generalized across tasks, durations, and stimulus types; Experiments 5-9 investigated the mechanisms underlying these effects and suggest that recent exposure produces a short-lived contraction of subjective time consistent with a low-level process, such as neural fatigue, whereas elevating the predictability of a repeat produces a subjective time expansion that may result from more efficient perceptual processing. These findings (a) establish the important point that first-order repetition and second-order repetition expectations can have opposing functional effects, a possibility that has received little attention in general treatments of repetition effects, (b) run contrary to existing accounts of repetition effects in time perception, and suggest that there may be no simple mapping between apparent duration and the overall magnitude of the neural response, and (c) suggest a framework in which subjective time depends on the interplay between bottom-up signal strength and top-down gain control.

Excess success for psychology articles in the journal science.

This article describes a systematic analysis of the relationship between empirical data and theoretical conclusions for a set of experimental psychology articles published in the journal Science between 2005-2012. When the success rate of a set of empirical studies is much higher than would be expected relative to the experiments' reported effects and sample sizes, it suggests that null findings have been suppressed, that the experiments or analyses were inappropriate, or that the theory does not properly follow from the data. The analyses herein indicate such excess success for 83% (15 out of 18) of the articles in Science that report four or more studies and contain sufficient information for the analysis. This result suggests a systematic pattern of excess success among psychology articles in the journal Science.

Time perception: the bad news and the good.

Time perception is fundamental and heavily researched, but the field faces a number of obstacles to theoretical progress. In this advanced review, we focus on three pieces of 'bad news' for time perception research: temporal perception is highly labile across changes in experimental context and task; there are pronounced individual differences not just in overall performance but in the use of different timing strategies and the effect of key variables; and laboratory studies typically bear little relation to timing in the 'real world'. We describe recent examples of these issues and in each case offer some 'good news' by showing how new research is addressing these challenges to provide rich insights into the neural and information-processing bases of timing and time perception. WIREs Cogn Sci 2014, 5:429-446. doi: 10.1002/wcs.1298 This article is categorized under: Psychology > Perception and Psychophysics Neuroscience > Cognition.

Why do participants initiate free recall of short lists of words with the first list item? Toward a general episodic memory explanation.

Participants who are presented with a short list of words for immediate free recall (IFR) show a strong tendency to initiate their recall with the 1st list item and then proceed in forward serial order. We report 2 experiments that examined whether this tendency was underpinned by a short-term memory store, of the type that is argued by some to underpin recency effects in IFR. In Experiment 1, we presented 3 groups of participants with lists of between 2 and 12 words for IFR, delayed free recall, and continuous-distractor free recall. The to-be-remembered words were simultaneously spoken and presented visually, and the distractor task involved silently solving a series of self-paced, visually presented mathematical equations (e.g., 3 + 2 + 4 = ?). The tendency to initiate recall at the start of short lists was greatest in IFR but was also present in the 2 other recall conditions. This finding was replicated in Experiment 2, where the to-be-remembered items were presented visually in silence and the participants spoke aloud their answers to computer-paced mathematical equations. Our results necessitate that a short-term buffer cannot be fully responsible for the tendency to initiate recall from the beginning of a short list; rather, they suggest that the tendency represents a general property of episodic memory that occurs across a range of time scales.

Examining the relationship between immediate serial recall and immediate free recall: common effects of phonological loop variables but only limited evidence for the phonological loop.

We examined the contribution of the phonological loop to immediate free recall (IFR) and immediate serial recall (ISR) of lists of between one and 15 words. Following Baddeley (1986, 2000, 2007, 2012), we assumed that visual words could be recoded into the phonological store when presented silently but that recoding would be prevented by concurrent articulation (CA; Experiment 1). We further assumed that the use of the phonological loop would be evidenced by greater serial recall for lists of phonologically dissimilar words relative to lists of phonologically similar words (Experiments 2A and 2B). We found that in both tasks, (a) CA reduced recall; (b) participants recalled short lists from the start of the list, leading to enhanced forward-ordered recall; (c) participants were increasingly likely to recall longer lists from the end of the list, leading to extended recency effects; (d) there were significant phonological similarity effects in ISR and IFR when both were analyzed using serial recall scoring; (e) these were reduced by free recall scoring and eliminated by CA; and (f) CA but not phonological similarity affected the tendency to initiate recall with the first list item. We conclude that similar mechanisms underpin ISR and IFR. Critically, the phonological loop is not strictly necessary for the forward-ordered recall of short lists on both tasks but may augment recall by increasing the accessibility of the list items (relative to CA), and in so doing, the order of later items is preserved better in phonologically dissimilar than in phonologically similar lists.

The language of magnitude comparison.

When 2 objects differ in magnitude, their relation can be described with a "smaller" comparative (e.g., less, shorter, lower) or a "larger" comparative (e.g., more, taller, higher). We show that, across multiple dimensions and tasks, English speakers preferentially use the latter. In sentence completion tasks, this higher use of larger comparatives (HULC) effect is more pronounced when the larger item is presented on the left (for simultaneous presentation) or second (for sequential presentation). The HULC effect is not diminished by making the 2 items more similar, but it is somewhat lessened when both objects are of low magnitude. These results illuminate the processes underlying the judgment and representation of relative magnitudes.

Do changes in the pace of events affect one-off judgments of duration?

Five experiments examined whether changes in the pace of external events influence people's judgments of duration. In Experiments 1a-1c, participants heard pieces of music whose tempo accelerated, decelerated, or remained constant. In Experiment 2, participants completed a visuo-motor task in which the rate of stimulus presentation accelerated, decelerated, or remained constant. In Experiment 3, participants completed a reading task in which facts appeared on-screen at accelerating, decelerating, or constant rates. In all experiments, the physical duration of the to-be-judged interval was the same across conditions. We found no significant effects of temporal structure on duration judgments in any of the experiments, either when participants knew that a time estimate would be required (prospective judgments) or when they did not (retrospective judgments). These results provide a starting point for the investigation of how temporal structure affects one-off judgments of duration like those typically made in natural settings.

Disturbance and trajectory of change in a stream fish community over four decades.

Communities can change gradually or abruptly, and directionally (to an alternate state) or non-directionally. We briefly review the history of theoretical and empirical perspectives on community change, and propose a new framework for viewing temporal trajectories of communities in multivariate space. We used a stream fish dataset spanning 40 years (1969-2008) in southern Oklahoma, USA, emphasizing our own 1981-2008 collections which included well-documented, extreme drought and flood events, to assess dynamics of and environmental factors affecting the fish community. We evaluated the trajectory of the Brier Creek community in multivariate space relative to trajectories in 27 published studies, and for Brier Creek fish, tested hypotheses about gradual versus event-driven changes and persistence of shifts to alternate states. Most species were persistent, qualitatively, across the four decades, but varied widely in abundance, with some having unusually strong reproduction after extreme droughts. The community had an early period of relatively gradual and directional change, but greater displacement than predicted at random after two consecutive extreme droughts midway through the study (1998 and 2000). But, the community subsequently returned toward its former state in the last decade. This fish community is characterized by species that are tolerant of environmental extremes, and have life history traits that facilitate population recovery. The community appears "loosely stable" about a long-term average condition, but the impacts of the two consecutive droughts were substantial, and may foretell future dynamics of this or other communities in a changed global climate if disturbance events become more frequent or severe.

Empirical validation and the importance of testable theory: a paradigm shift in psychotherapy?

In response to the recent special issue of the American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis (Vol. 54, No. 4, "Cognitive Hypnotherapy: Twenty Years Later"), this commentary discusses: (1) the weak connection between cognitive science and cognitive behavioral therapy, and (2) the importance of coherent and testable theoretical underpinnings to the practice of psychotherapy. The author briefly introduces Relational Frame Theory (RFT), which postulates that strategies to control, manage, or extinguish language based internal experience are unlikely to be successful. Acceptance Commitment Therapy (ACT) is a mindful and acceptance based empirically supported approach to creating client psychological flexibility. ACT underpinned by RFT is suggestive of a paradigm shift in psychotherapy to a mindfulness and acceptance approach to internal experience.

How does sequence structure affect the judgment of time? Exploring a weighted sum of segments model.

This paper examines the judgment of segmented temporal intervals, using short tone sequences as a convenient test case. In four experiments, we investigate how the relative lengths, arrangement, and pitches of the tones in a sequence affect judgments of sequence duration, and ask whether the data can be described by a simple weighted sum of segments model. The model incorporates three basic assumptions: (i) the judgment of each segment is a negatively accelerated function of its duration, (ii) the judgment of the overall interval is produced by summing the judgments of each segment, and (iii) more recent segments are weighted more heavily. We also assume that higher-pitched tones are judged to last longer. Empirically, sequences with equal-sized segments were consistently judged longer than those with accelerating or decelerating structures. Furthermore, temporal structure interacted with duration, such that accelerating sequences were judged longer than decelerating ones at short durations but the effect reversed at longer durations. These effects were modulated by the number of tones in the sequence, the rate of acceleration/deceleration, and whether the sequence had ascending or descending pitch, and were well-described by the weighted sum model. The data provide strong constraints on theories of temporal judgment, and the weighted sum of segments model offers a useful basis for future theoretical and empirical investigation.

Relatively random: context effects on perceived randomness and predicted outcomes.

This article concerns the effect of context on people's judgments about sequences of chance outcomes. In Experiment 1, participants judged whether sequences were produced by random, mechanical processes (such as a roulette wheel) or skilled human action (such as basketball shots). Sequences with lower alternation rates were judged more likely to result from human action. However, this effect was highly context-dependent: A moderate alternation rate was judged more likely to indicate a random physical process when encountered among sequences with lower alternation rates than when embedded among sequences with higher alternation rates. Experiment 2 found the same effect for predictions of the next outcome following a streak: A streak of 3 at the end of the sequence was judged less likely to continue by participants who had encountered shorter terminal streaks in previous trials than by those who had encountered longer ones. These contrast effects (a) help to explain variability in the types of sequences that are judged to be random and that elicit the gambler's fallacy, and urge caution about attempts to establish universal parameterizations of these effects; (b) are congruent with theories of sequence judgment that emphasize the importance of people's actual experiences with sequences of different kinds; (c) provide a link between models of sequence judgment and broader accounts of psychophysical/economic judgment; and (d) may offer new insight into individual differences in randomness judgments and sequence predictions.