Hearing laughter: a prescription for anxiety relief.

Anxiety can have adverse effects on cognition such as impairing test performance or restricting working memory. One way of reducing anxiety is through humor, and the present research investigated if the perception of laughter, which is often seen as a reaction to humor, could impact self-reported anxiety. Participants completed the STAI battery containing subscales for both state and trait anxiety before and after one of three manipulations: a laughter sounds rating task, a neutral sounds rating task, or a working memory span task. Results showed that perceiving laughter decreased both state and trait anxiety, taking a working memory test increased state anxiety, and perceiving neutral sounds had no effect on either type of anxiety. These findings are interpreted as evidence that the positive emotions induced by hearing laughter help to regulate anxiety by undoing arousal, even when negative emotions are not present.

The Influence of Substance Use on Engagement in Non-Suicidal Self-Injury (NSI) in Adults.

Background: Adults engaging in non-suicidal self-injurious (NSI) behaviors often report the use of substances; however, little research explores the relationship between substance abuse and NSI. Thus, this study examined the influence of substance use on patterns of NSI among adults. Objectives: This study seeks to answer the following questions: (a) Is AOD use predictive of more frequent self-injurious behaviors? and (b) Does the use of AODs predict injuring more severely than expected? Methods: An observational cross-sectional design was used to examine the relationship between drug use and NSI behaviors. Participants were recruited through Amazon Mechanical Turk (Mturk). Results: Results indicated opiates, barbiturates and sedatives all had a small but statistically significant influence on the frequency of NSI behaviors, while marijuana, PCP and anti-anxiety medications had a small but statistically significant relationship to severity. Conclusion/Importance: This study indicates that future research should take into account substance use patterns in adults engaging in NSI behaviors.

Classifying retrieval strategies as a function of working memory.

Strategy selection may help explain performance differences between individuals with high working memory capacity (HWMs) and low working memory capacity (LWMs) (Budd, Whitney, & Turley, (Memory & Cognition, 23, 735-748 1995); Cokely, Kelley, & Gilchrist, (Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 13, 991-997 2006). We compared the independent and spontaneous strategy use of HWMs and LWMs during a category fluency (retrieval) task that required participants to retrieve animal names. HWMs were more successful at the fluency task under normal conditions, but under increased cognitive load, there were no WM-related performance differences. One strategy (i.e., retrieving animals according to their scientific classification) significantly aided performance, irrespective of cognitive load. Under normal conditions, HWMs were more likely to use the effective strategy; however, under load, WM did not predict strategy use. Use of the classification strategy was more strongly related to retrieval performance than was WM. These results suggest that retrieval strategy use is related to WM capacity, and that employing a successful strategy may make up for WM disadvantages during a demanding retrieval task.

The role of color diagnosticity in object recognition and representation.

The role of color diagnosticity in object recognition and representation was assessed in three Experiments. In Experiment 1a, participants named pictured objects that were strongly associated with a particular color (e.g., pumpkin and orange). Stimuli were presented in a congruent color, incongruent color, or grayscale. Results indicated that congruent color facilitated naming time, incongruent color impeded naming time, and naming times for grayscale items were situated between the congruent and incongruent conditions. Experiment 1b replicated Experiment 1a using a verification task. Experiment 2 employed a picture rebus paradigm in which participants read sentences one word at a time that included pictures of color diagnostic objects (i.e., pictures were substituted for critical nouns). Results indicated that the "reading" times of these pictures mirrored the pattern found in Experiment 1. In Experiment 3, an attempt was made to override color diagnosticity using linguistic context (e.g., a pumpkin was described as painted green). Linguistic context did not override color diagnosticity. Collectively, the results demonstrate that color information is regularly utilized in object recognition and representation for highly color diagnostic items.

Verb aspect and perceptual simulations.

Two experiments investigate the influence of verb aspect on situation representations. The results demonstrate that comprehenders use verb aspect as a cue to regulate the activation of ongoing simulations of situations over time. Experiment 1 measured word-by-word reading as well as sensibility judgements on sentences in which a target object word had been replaced by a picture. For the past imperfective sentences, participants were faster to process the picture, the two words following the picture, and the sensibility judgements when objects were pictured in use rather than not in use. However, this in-use facilitation was limited to processing of the picture for the past perfect sentences. Experiment 2 served as a control to ensure that the use effect and its interaction with verb aspect were a result of contextual manipulations rather than surface features of the pictures themselves. The results are interpreted within the framework of perceptual simulations during language comprehension.

Assessing the influence of dimensional focus during situation model construction.

According to Zwaan, Langston, and Graesser's (1995) event-indexing model, when comprehending text, readers monitor changes in a series of critical dimensions: space, time, protagonist, causality, and intentionality. In this study, the influence of dimensional focus was assessed during situation-model construction. Participants read narratives and were instructed to specifically monitor a single dimension while their sentence reading times were recorded. Critical sentence reading times were then analyzed for all shift types. Results support the general prediction that at least the time and protagonist dimensions are resistant to task demands, demonstrating that comprehenders routinely perform dimensional updating processes that are context independent. These results are discussed in the context of the event-indexing model.

Perception of motion affects language processing.

Recently developed accounts of language comprehension propose that sentences are understood by constructing a perceptual simulation of the events being described. These simulations involve the re-activation of patterns of brain activation that were formed during the comprehender's interaction with the world. In two experiments we explored the specificity of the processing mechanisms required to construct simulations during language comprehension. Participants listened to (and made judgments on) sentences that described motion in a particular direction (e.g. "The car approached you"). They simultaneously viewed dynamic black-and-white stimuli that produced the perception of movement in the same direction as the action specified in the sentence (i.e. towards you) or in the opposite direction as the action specified in the sentence (i.e. away from you). Responses were faster to sentences presented concurrently with a visual stimulus depicting motion in the opposite direction as the action described in the sentence. This suggests that the processing mechanisms recruited to construct simulations during language comprehension are also used during visual perception, and that these mechanisms can be quite specific.