Knowledge that Transforms

The theory of emotion was a centerpiece of William James’ Principles of Psychology. It introduced the notion that complex phenomena, such as the experience of emotion, could be derived (constructed) from a combination of more basic processes or behaviors. Despite their shortcomings, James’ views on emotion shaped research on emotion for the succeeding century, and laid the groundwork for constructivist approaches in psychological theory.

One of the psychologists’ great methodological difficulties is how they can make the events they wish to study publicly observable, countable, measurable. It is significant to note that the device most often used for conversion from private to public is language. Thus speech is a crucial problem for psychology. None of their other activities gives the same sort of insight into another person as does their language. Since people spend so many of their waking hours generating and responding to words, and since speech is such a typically human mode of adjustment, no general theory of psychology will be adequate if it does not take account of language.

Musical acculturation from infancy to adulthood was studied by testing the abilities of Western 6-month-olds and adults to notice mistunings in melodies based on native Western major, native Western minor, and non-native Javanese pelog scales. Results indicated that infants were similarly able to perceive native and non-native scales. Adults, however, were generally better perceivers of native than non-native scales. These findings suggest that infants are born with an equipotentiality for the perception of scales from a variety of cultures and that subsequent culturally specific experience substantially influences music perception.

Two university varsity swimming teams took the Attributional Style Questionnaire (ASQ) at the start of the season. Swimmers with a pessimistic explanatory style went on to show more unexpected poor performances during competition than optimistic swimmers. We then tested the purported mechanism of this effect by experimentally simulating defeat, giving each swimmer falsely negative times. Performance deteriorated for those swimmers with a pessimistic explanatory style for bad events on their next swim, whereas performance for those swimmers with an optimistic style did not.

How do people recognize an object in different orientations? One theory is that the visual system describes the object relative to a reference frame centered on the object, resulting in a representation that is invariant across orientations. Chronometric data show that this is true only when an object can be identified uniquely by the arrangement of its parts along a single dimension. When an object can only be distinguished by an arrangement of its parts along more than one dimension, people mentally rotate it to a familiar orientation. This finding suggests that the human visual reference frame is tied to egocentric coordinates.

A visual preference procedure was used to examine 6- and 41/2-monthold infants’ sensitivity to phrase structure in music. Sections of Mozart minuets were divided into segments that either did or did not correspond to the phrase structure of the music. Infants in both age groups listened significantly longer to the appropriately segmented versions. Their behavior accorded well with judgments of the same materials made by adults, suggesting that protracted musical experience may not be necessary to perceive phrase structure in music. Strong correlations were found between certain musical variables and the infants’ preferences for the musical passages, pointing to acoustic properties that may be important for defining musical phrases.

If a long series of gambles is subjectively structured into units each consisting of a string of consecutive losses followed by a win, positive valued strings will be short and negative valued strings will be long. Long negative strings will be temporally discounted more than short positive strings, increasing the gamble's subjective value. People, therefore, may gamble because even games of objectively negative expected value may be subjectively positive. People may keep gambling despite heavy losses because reduction of degree of discounting and expansion of the behavioral unit, characteristics of selfcontrol in other areas, fail to significantly decrease a gamble's subjective value.

The role of genetic and environmental factors in the expression of religious interests, attitudes, and values was examined using data from adult twins reared apart and adult twins reared together. The Religious Values scale of the Allport-Vernon-Lindzey Study of Values, a Religious Interest scale from the Strong Campbell Interest Inventory, the Wiggins Religious Fundamentalism scale from the MMPI, a Leisure Time Religious Interest scale, and a second measure of Occupational Religious Interest were administered to 53 identical and 31 fraternal twin pairs who had been reared apart. The Leisure Time Religious Interest Scale and the second measure of Occupational Religious Interest were also administered to 458 identical and 363 fraternal twin pairs who had been reared together. Biometric model fitting indicated that approximately 50% of the observed variance of all five measures is genetically influenced.

Observers viewed pairs of alternating photographs of a human body in different positions. Shortest-path motion solutions were pitted against anatomically possible movements. With short stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs), observers tended to report the shortest path despite violations of anatomical constraints. However, with longer SOAs observers became increasingly likely to report the anatomically possible, but longer, paths. This finding, in conjunction with those from a second study, challenges the accepted wisdom that apparent motion paths are independent of the object. Instead, our findings suggest that when given enough time and appropriate stimuli, the visual system prefers at least some object-appropriate apparent motion paths.

Two hypotheses have been offered to explain the relation between testosterone and antisocial behavior in delinquent and criminal populations. One is that testosterone leads directly to antisocial behavior. The other is that a constellation of dominance, competitiveness, and sensation seeking associated with testosterone leads to either antisocial or prosocial behavior, depending upon an individual's resources and background. Analysis of archival data from 4,462 U.S. military veterans supported the first hypothesis: Testosterone was correlated with a variety of antisocial behaviors among all individuals. However, socioeconomic status (SES) proved to be a moderating variable, with weaker testosterone-behavior relationships among high SES subjects.