Knowledge that Transforms

Grapheme-color synaesthesia is a neurological phenomenon in which particular graphemes, such as the numeral 9, automatically induce the simultaneous perception of a particular color, such as the color red. To test whether the concurrent color sensations in grapheme-color synaesthesia are treated as meaningful stimuli, we recorded event-related brain potentials as 8 synaesthetes and 8 matched control subjects read sentences such as "Looking very clear, the lake was the most beautiful hue of 7." In synaesthetes, but not control subjects, congruous graphemes, compared with incongruous graphemes, elicited a more negative N1 component, a less positive P2 component, and a less negative N400 component. Thus, contextual congruity of synaesthetically induced colors altered the brain response to achromatic graphemes beginning 100 ms postonset, affecting pattern-recognition, perceptual, and meaning-integration processes. The results suggest that grapheme-color synaesthesia is automatic and perceptual in nature and also suggest that the connections between colors and numbers are bidirectional.

The following articles have been retracted from publication in Psychological Science: Ruys, K. I., & Stapel, D. A. (2008). The secret life of emotions. Psychological Science, 19, 385–391. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.02097.x Ruys, K. I., & Stapel, D. A. (2008). Emotion elicitor or emotion messenger? Subliminal priming reveals two faces of facial expressions. Psychological Science, 19, 593–603. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.02128.x The editors and publishers of Psychological Science have made the retractions following the results of an investigation into the work of Diederik A. Stapel ( https://www.commissielevelt.nl/ ). The Levelt Committee has determined that these articles contained data that were fabricated by author Stapel. His coauthor was unaware of his actions, was not in any way involved in the generation of the data, and agrees to the retraction of the articles. The following Psychological Science articles coauthored by Stapel have been cleared by the Levelt Committee, whose investigation into these articles found no evidence of fraudulent data or practices: Lammers, J., Stapel, D. A., & Galinsky, A. D. (2010). Power increases hypocrisy: Moralizing in reasoning, immorality in behavior. Psychological Science, 21, 737–744. doi:10.1177/0956797610368810 Lammers, J., Stoker, J. I., Jordan, J., Pollmann, M., & Stapel, D. A. (2011). Power increases infidelity among men and women. Psychological Science, 22, 1191–1197. doi:10.1177/0956797611416252 Lammers, J., Stoker, J. I., & Stapel, D. A. (2009). Differentiating social and personal power: Opposite effects on stereotyping, but parallel effects on behavioral approach tendencies. Psychological Science, 20, 1543–1549. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.2009.02479.x The five articles noted above are the only ones published in Psychological Science on which Stapel is listed as an author.

Bimodal bilinguals, fluent in a signed and a spoken language, provide unique insight into the nature of syntactic integration and language control. We investigated whether bimodal bilinguals who are conversing with English monolinguals produce American Sign Language (ASL) grammatical facial expressions to accompany parallel syntactic structures in spoken English. In ASL, raised eyebrows mark conditionals, and furrowed eyebrows mark wh-questions; the grammatical brow movement is synchronized with the manual onset of the clause. Bimodal bilinguals produced more ASL-appropriate facial expressions than did nonsigners and synchronized their expressions with the onset of the corresponding English clauses. This result provides evidence for a dual-language architecture in which grammatical information can be integrated up to the level of phonological implementation. Overall, participants produced more raised brows than furrowed brows, which can convey negative affect. Bimodal bilinguals suppressed but did not completely inhibit ASL facial grammar when it conflicted with conventional facial gestures. We conclude that morphosyntactic elements from two languages can be articulated simultaneously and that complete inhibition of the nonselected language is difficult.

To clarify the role of labels in early induction, we compared 16-month-old infants' (n=114) generalization of target properties to test objects when objects were introduced by the experimenter in one of the following ways: (a) with a general attentional phrase, (b) highlighted with a flashlight and a general attentional phrase, (c) via a recorded voice that labeled the objects using a naming phrase, (d) with a label consisting of a count noun embedded within a naming phrase, (e) with a label consisting of a single word that was not marked as belonging to a particular grammatical form class, and (f) with a label consisting of an adjective. Infants relied on object labels to guide their inductive inferences only when the labels were presented referentially, embedded within an intentional naming phrase, and marked as count nouns. These results suggest that infants do not view labels as attributes of objects; rather, infants understand that count-noun labels are intentional markers denoting category membership.

Control over interference is a pervasive feature of cognitive life. Central to research on interference control has been the identification of its underlying mechanisms. Investigations have focused on processes that filter out distracting perceptual information, leading to negative priming, and processes that discard intruding memories that cause proactive interference. Theories differ regarding whether or not a single process during episodic retrieval underlies both negative priming and the resolution of proactive interference. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we combined both phenomena into a single paradigm and found that occipital cortex shows activation uniquely related to negative priming, whereas activation increases in left lateral prefrontal cortex are uniquely associated with proactive interference. This pattern of results contradicts theories that rely on a single process to account for both phenomena. However, results also showed common recruitment of right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and parietal regions and therefore suggest that some control processes are shared.

People sometimes report recovering long-forgotten memories of childhood sexual abuse. The memory mechanisms that lead to such reports are not well understood, and the authenticity of recovered memories has often been challenged. We identified two subgroups of people reporting recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse. These subgroups differed dramatically in their cognitive profiles: People who recovered memories of abuse through suggestive therapy exhibited a heightened susceptibility to the construction of false memories, but showed no tendency to underestimate their prior remembering. Conversely, people who recovered memories of abuse spontaneously showed a heightened proneness to forget prior incidences of remembering, but exhibited no increased susceptibility to false memories. This double dissociation points to mechanisms that underlie recovered-memory experiences and indicates that recovered memories may at times be fictitious and may at other times be authentic.

How observers distribute limited processing resources to regions of a scene is based on a dynamic balance between current goals and reflexive tendencies. Past research showed that these reflexive tendencies include orienting toward objects that expand as if they were looming toward the observer, presumably because this signal indicates an impending collision. Here we report that during visual search, items that loom abruptly capture attention more strongly when they approach from the periphery rather than from near the center of gaze (Experiment 1), and target objects are more likely to be attended when they are on a collision path with the observer rather than on a near-miss path (Experiment 2). Both effects are exaggerated when search is performed in a large projection dome (Experiment 3). These findings suggest that the human visual system prioritizes events that are likely to require a behaviorally urgent response.

This study examined the associations between older adults' daily physical symptoms (e.g., chest pain or difficulty breathing) and 2-year changes in chronic health problems (e.g., cardiovascular disease or cancer) and in functional problems (e.g., difficulty dressing or moving around at home). We reasoned that these associations depend on a person's active control processes aimed at counteracting physical health problems (i.e., health-engagement control strategies, or HECS). In particular, we hypothesized that high levels of HECS buffer the adverse effect of daily physical symptoms on increases in chronic and functional health problems. We found that daily physical symptoms were associated with declines in chronic and functional health among older adults who were not engaged in addressing their health problems, but not among their counterparts who reported high levels of HECS. These findings suggest that active control strategies play an important role in the maintenance of older adults' physical health.

According to terror management theory, the annihilation of people who threaten one's worldview should serve the function of defending that worldview. The present research assessed this hypothesis. A sample of Christian participants read either a worldview-threatening news article reporting on the Muslimization of Nazareth or a nonthreatening article about the aurora borealis. Half of the participants in the worldview-threat condition were informed at the end of the article that a number of Muslims had died in a plane crash on their way to Nazareth. Although reading the threatening news article increased death-thought accessibility and worldview defense relative to reading the neutral article, these increases were not observed among participants who learned that a number of Muslims were dead. Implications for understanding protracted intergroup conflict are discussed.