This striking Lacanian contribution to discourse analysis is also a critique of contemporary psychological abstraction, as well as a reassessment of the radical opposition between psychology and psychoanalysis. This original introduction to Lacan's work bridges the gap between discourseanalytical debates in social psychology and the social-theoretical extensions of discourse theory. David Pavón Cuéllar provides a precise definition and a detailed explanation of key Lacanian concepts, and illustrates how they may be put to work on a concrete discourse, in this case (...) a fragment of an interview obtained by the author from the Mexican underground Popular Revolutionary Forces (EPR). Throughout the book, Lacanian concepts are compared to their counterparts in psychology. Such a comparison reveals insuperable incompatibilities between the two series of concepts. The author shows that Lacan's psychoanalytical terminology can neither be translated nor assimilated to the terms of current psychology. Among the notions in actual or potential competition with Lacanian concepts, the book deals with those proposed by semiology, Marxism, phenomenology, constructionism, deconstruction, and hermeneutics. Taking a stand on those theoretical positions, each chapter includes detailed discussion of the contribution of classical approaches to language; including Barthes, Bakhtin, Althusser, Politzer, Wittgenstein, Berger and Luckmann, Derrida, and Ricoeur. There is sustained reference in the body of the text to the arguments of Lacan and Lacanians, of Miller, Milner, Soler, and Zizek. At the same time, in the extensive notes accompanying the text, there is a systematic reappraisal and reinterpretation of debates and pieces of research work in social psychology, especially in a discursive and critical domain that has incorporated elements of psychoanalytic theory. (shrink)

Nicolas de Cues (1401-11 août 1464) assume pour l’essentiel la thèse érigénienne et alanienne de l’incognoscibilité de Dieu et de la quiddité des choses. Il développe et approfondit la conscience de la supériorité de la négation sur l’affirmation in divinis qui avait permis au Néoplatonisme Médiéval d’élaborer une théorie sémantique du langage en nette rupture avec le triptyque aristotélicien qui établit la nécessité d’une correspondance entre chose, pensée et signe : pour Nicolas de Cues, l’essence du langage est (...) dans la production d’un sens, et celui-ci peut être entièrement indépendant de la possibilité d’appréhension de son objet. La présente recherche entend démontrer que cette thèse de l’incognoscibilité divine est intimement liée à une autre thèse d’ordre épistémologique qui décrète radicalement que toute affirmation est une conjecture au sujet du réel et que notre esprit est dans l’impossibilité d’atteindre la vérité de façon adéquate. Il n’existe pas de connaissance humaine certaine, car la quiddité des choses qui détermine leurs essences véritables est inaccessible. (shrink)

Hookups are uncommitted sexual encounters that range from kissing to intercourse and occur between individuals in whom there is no current dating relationship and no expressed or acknowledged expectations of a relationship following the hookup. Research over the last decade has begun to focus on hooking up among adolescents and young adults with significant research demonstrating how alcohol is often involved in hooking up. Given alcohol’s involvement with hooking up behavior, the array of health consequences associated with this relationship, as (...) well as its increasing prevalence from adolescence to young adulthood, it is important to determine the predictors and consequences associated with alcohol-related hooking up. The current review extends prior reviews by adding more recent research, including both qualitative and experimental studies (i.e. expanding to review more diverse methods), research that focuses on the use of technology in alcohol-related hookups (i.e. emerging issues), further develops prevention and intervention potentials and directions, and also offers a broader discussion of hooking up outside of college student populations (i.e., expanding generalization). This article will review the operationalization and ambiguity of the phrase hooking up, the relationship between hooking up and alcohol use at both the global and event levels, predictors of alcohol-related hooking up, and both positive and negative consequences, including sexual victimization, associated with alcohol-related hookups. Throughout, commentary is provided on the methodological issues present in the field, as well as limitations of the existing research. Future directions for research that could significantly advance our understanding of hookups and alcohol use are provided. (shrink)

Apart from positive priming effects, masked prime stimuli can impair responses to a subsequent target stimulus which shares response-critical features in contrast to a target assigned to the opposite response. This counterintuitive phenomenon is called inverse priming . Here we examine the generality of this phenomenon beyond priming of motor responses. We used a non-motor cue-priming paradigm to study the underlying mechanism of inverse priming for relevant features masks which include task-relevant stimulus features and for irrelevant masks which omit task-relevant (...) features. We found inverse cue-priming effects with both types of masks. With task-irrelevant masks inverse cue-priming was emphasized in those participants being unable to perceive the prime. The existence of inverse non-motor priming under conditions where simple perceptual interactions between the stimuli are ruled out as the source of inverse priming is at odds with the view that inverse priming reflects motor inhibition. Alternatives are discussed. (shrink)

Prior studies in business ethics highlight the role of philanthropy in shaping stakeholders’ perceptions of a firm’s underlying moral tendencies and values. Scholars argue that philanthropy-based character inferences influence whether and how stakeholders engage with firms. We extend this line of reasoning to examine the impact of philanthropy on firms’ contracting costs in the capital market. We posit that philanthropy-based character inferences reduce investors’ agency concerns, thereby reducing firms’ cost of capital. We also posit that the strength of the philanthropy–cost (...) of capital relationship is contingent on uncertainty regarding a firm’s character, visibility of a firm, and prevailing philanthropic norms. We test and find support for our arguments in a longitudinal study of philanthropy and the cost of capital. Our findings have implications for business ethics research on corporate philanthropy and corporate social performance and for organizational research on social judgment. (shrink)

It has been posited that persuasive cues impart Evolution Wars communications with persuasive force extending beyond the merits of their communicated arguments. Additionally, it has been observed that the array of cues displayed throughout proevolutionist materials is exceeded in both the number and nuance of Darwin-skeptic persuasion techniques. This study reassesses these findings by exploring how persuasive cues in the Evolution Wars are being articulated with reference to the Cultural Cognition Thesis and Moral Foundations Theory. Observations of (...) Institute for Creation Research, Answers in Genesis, and the Center for Science and Culture media are reevaluated. These findings are juxtaposed with data pertaining to Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science, National Center for Science Education, and BioLogos Foundation broadcasts. The outcomes reveal how values claims and morally charged language are concentrated within the works of antievolutionists and New Atheist media makers, who collectively promote some manner of religion-science conflict. (shrink)

Coffee and tea are two beverages commonly-consumed around the world. Therefore, there is much research regarding their physiological effects. However, less is known about their psychological meanings. Derived from a predicted lay association between coffee and arousal, we posit that exposure to coffee-related cues should increase arousal, even in the absence of actual ingestion, relative to exposure to tea-related cues. We further suggest that higher arousal levels should facilitate a concrete level of mental construal as conceptualized by Construal (...) Level Theory. In four experiments, we find that coffee cues prompted participants to see temporal distances as shorter and to think in more concrete, precise terms. Both subjective and physiological arousal explain the effects. We situate our work in the literature that connects food and beverage to cognition or decision-making. We also discuss the applied relevance of our results as coffee and tea are among the most prevalent beverages globally. (shrink)

A word often expresses many different morphological functions. Which part of a word contributes to which part of the overall meaning is not always clear, which raises the question as to how such functions are learned. While linguistic studies tacitly assume the co-occurrence of cues and outcomes to suffice in learning these functions (Baer-Henney, Kügler, & van de Vijver, 2015; Baer-Henney & van de Vijver, 2012), error-driven learning suggests that contingency rather than contiguity is crucial (Nixon, 2020; Ramscar, Yarlett, (...) Dye, Denny, & Thorpe, 2010). In error-driven learning, cues gain association strength if they predict a certain outcome, and they lose strength if the outcome is absent. This reduction of association strength is called unlearning. So far, it is unclear if such unlearning has consequences for cue–outcome associations beyond the ones that get reduced. To test for such consequences of unlearning, we taught participants morphophonological patterns in an artificial language learning experiment. In one block, the cues to two morphological outcomes—plural and diminutive—co-occurred within the same word forms. In another block, a single cue to only one of these two outcomes was presented in a different set of word forms. We wanted to find out, if participants unlearn this cue's association with the outcome that is not predicted by the cue alone, and if this allows the absent cue to be associated with the absent outcome. Our results show that if unlearning was possible, participants learned that the absent cue predicts the absent outcome better than if no unlearning was possible. This effect was stronger if the unlearned cue was more salient. This shows that unlearning takes place even if no alternative cues to an absent outcome are provided, which highlights that learners take both positive and negative evidence into account—as predicted by domain general error-driven learning. (shrink)

ABSTRACTRemembering to perform a behaviour in the future, prospective memory, is essential to ensuring that people fulfil their intentions. Prospective memory involves committing to memory a cue to action, and later recognising and acting upon the cue in the environment. Prospective memory performance is believed to be influenced by the emotionality of the cues, however the literature is fragmented and inconsistent. We conducted a systematic search to synthesise research on the influence of emotion on prospective memory. Sixty-seven effect sizes (...) were extracted from 17 articles and hypothesised effects tested using three meta-analyses. Overall, prospective memory was enhanced when positively-valenced rather than neutral cues were presented. In contrast, negatively-valenced cues did not enhance prospective memory overall, but this effect was moderated by the timing of the emotional manipulation. Prospective memory performance was improved when negatively-valenced... (shrink)

The ambiguous-cue task is composed of two-choice simultaneous discriminations involving three stimuli: positive (P), ambiguous (A) and negative (N). Two different trial types are presented: PA and NA. The ambiguous cue (A) served as an S- in PA trials, but as an S+ in NA trials. When using this procedure, it is typical to observe a less accurate performance in PA trials than in NA trials. This is called the ambiguous-cue effect. Recently, it was reported in starlings that the ambiguous-cue (...) effect decreases when the stimuli are presented on an angled (120°) panel. The hypothesis is that the angled panel facilitates that the two cues from each discrimination are perceived as a compound, precluding value transfer via a second-order conditioning mechanism. In this experiment, we used pigeons and a flat panel. Nevertheless, our data were quite similar to the previous data in starlings. We conclude that the form of the panel cannot explain the ambiguous-cue effect. Several alternatives to be explored in future experiments are suggested. The riddle of the ambiguous-cue problem still remains unsolved. (shrink)

We extend prior research of deceitful behavior by studying the reactions of those who are targets of deception and how a specific attribute of communication media, cue multiplicity , influences such reactions. We report on a laboratory experiment involving dyads asked to engage in a stock share purchase exercise. We find that when a broker is perceived to act deceitfully by the buyer, the buyer reacts with negative affect (anger) which provokes subsequent acts of revenge against the broker. Importantly, we (...) find that media with higher cue multiplicity attenuate buyer anger as well as lessen the propensity for the buyer to seek retaliatory acts of revenge. We further find that moral anger mediates the effect of buyers’ perceived deception on revenge. (shrink)

An important factor in judging whether two retinal images arise from the same object viewed from different positions may be the presence of certain properties or cues that are 'qualitative invariants' with respect to the natural transformations, particularly affine transformations, associated with changes in viewpoint. To test whether observers use certain affine qualitative cues such as concavity, convexity, collinearity, and parallelism of the image elements, a 'same-different' discrimination experiment was carried out with planar patterns that were defined by (...) four points either connected by straight line segments (line patterns) or marked by dots (dot patterns). The first three points of each pattern were generated randomly; the fourth point fell on their diagonal bisector. According to the position of that point, the patterns were concave, triangular (three points being collinear), convex, or parallel sided. In a 'same' trial, an affine transformation was applied to one of two identical patterns; in a 'different' trial, the affine transformation was applied after the point lying on the diagonal bisector was perturbed a short, fixed distance along the bisector, inwards for one pattern and outwards for the other. Observers' ability to discriminate 'same' from 'different' pairs of patterns depended strongly on the position of the fourth, displaced, point: performance varied rapidly when the position of the displaced point was such that the patterns were nearly triangular or nearly parallel sided, consistent with observers using the hypothesised qualitative cues. The experimental data were fitted with a simple probabilistic model of discrimination performance that used a combination of these qualitative cues and a single quantitative cue. (shrink)

Participants maneuvered a rat image through a circular region on the computer screen to find a hidden target platform, blending aspects of two well-known spatial tasks. Like the Morris water maze task, participants first experienced a series of learning trials before having to navigate to the hidden target platform from different locations and orientations. Like the dot-location task, they determined the location of a position within a two-dimensional circular region. This procedure provided a way to examine how the number of (...) surrounding cues (1, 2, or 3) affects the memory for spatial location in navigation. Memory performance was better when there were more cues and when targets were close to cues, consistent with the idea that cues bolster fine-grain memory, especially in proximal regions. Early and late measures of bias in memory reflected biases in a direction toward the nearest cue, implicating a cue-based category structure of the navigational space. Collectively, results suggest cue-based spatial memory representations that have been inferred from the dot-location task generalize to a navigation task within a simple, computer-based environment, as demonstrated by the good fits of the spatial model developed for the dot-location task (Fitting, Wedell, & Allen, 2005, 2007). (shrink)

We used Chinese prenominal relative clauses to test the predictions of two competing accounts of sentence comprehension difficulty: the experience-based account of Levy () and the Dependency Locality Theory. Given that in Chinese RCs, a classifier and/or a passive marker BEI can be added to the sentence-initial position, we manipulated the presence/absence of classifiers and the presence/absence of BEI, such that BEI sentences were passivized subject-extracted RCs, and no-BEI sentences were standard object-extracted RCs. We conducted two self-paced reading experiments, using (...) the same critical stimuli but somewhat different filler items. Reading time patterns from both experiments showed facilitative effects of BEI within and beyond RC regions, and delayed facilitative effects of classifiers, suggesting that cues that occur before a clear signal of an upcoming RC can help Chinese comprehenders to anticipate RC structures. The data patterns are not predicted by the DLT, but they are consistent with the predictions of experience-based theories. (shrink)

Arginine vasopressin (AVP) is a powerful regulator of various social behaviors across many species. However, seemingly contradictory effects of AVP have been found in both animal and human studies, e.g., promoting aggression on one hand and facilitating social bonding on the other hand. Therefore, we hypothesize that the role of AVP in social behaviors is context-dependent. To this end, we examined the modulatory effect of AVP on male’s behavioral and neural responses to infant and adult cues. After intranasal and (...) double-blind treatment of AVP or placebo, male participants were asked to rate their subjective approaching willingness to infant and adult faces in specific contexts informed by cue words while EEG recording. Our results showed that AVP treatment increased approaching ratings to neutral and positive other-gender adult faces compared to emotional matched same-gender adult faces, and to negative girl faces compared to negative boy faces. Furthermore, compared to placebo treatment, AVP treatment induced larger N1 amplitudes to neutral cues associated with both adults and infants, whereas AVP treatment only sustained pronounced late positive potential (LPP) amplitudes to neutral cues of infants but not adults. Those findings implicate differential roles of AVP in the processing of adult- and infant-related cues and thus lend support to the context-dependent account. (shrink)

Recent genetic manipulations have revealed that the cytoplasm of the early Drosophila embryo contains localized information that specifies the future embryonic axes. It is the restricted distribution or activity of particular gene products, either messenger RNA or protein, that is crucial for this specification. While some of the genes responsible for this information have been seqenced and the nature and distribution of their products examined, it is not known how this localization is established or maintained. The actin‐based cytoskeleton is a (...) likely candidate for the formation of a cytomatrix that would allow such distributions and yet no direct evidence has yet been found that implicates actin in positional cue localization. In this review I summarize what is known about actin filament behavior. in Drosophila embryos and compare it to the distribution of positional cues. My purpose is to juxtapose these two bodies of information such that the relationship between them may be revealed. (shrink)

English summary: Nicolas Cusanus' position on Islam is not easily discerned. While in De Pace Fidei he seems to present an Irenic vision of the different religions and the dialog that could be established amongst them, in the Cribratio Alkorani, according to numerous interpretations, he seems more rigid, precluding any constructive dialog between Christianity and Islam. However, as this volume shows, matters are not quite that black and white: the contributions allow us to form a better idea of the coherence (...) of Cusanus' position on dialog and the relationship between the Cribratio Alkorani and his general theological views. French description: La position de Nicolas de Cues sur l'islam n'est pas facile... cerner. Dans le De Pace Fidei, il semble presenter une vision irenique des differentes religions et du dialogue qui pourrait s'etablir entre elles et ce discours general vaut en particulier pour l'islam, tandis que dans la Cribratio Alkorani, Nicolas, aux dire de nombreux interpretes, se montrerait beaucoup plus incisif, au point que ce livre ne pourrait absolument pas constituer le fondement d'un dialogue constructif entre le christianisme et l'islam. Mais un certain nombre de travaux du present volume, montre que les choses ne sont pas si tranchees. Certes, Nicolas de Cues ignorait pas mal de choses sur l'Islam et les documents qu'il utilise l'induisent dans un certain nombre de cas en erreur. Mais, par de l... la lettre, il ressort qu'il a remarquablement compris l'esprit coranique et que ces textes meritent... cet egard plus d'attention qu'ils n'en ont generalement recue. Le present recueil permet de se faire une idee plus precise de la coherence de la position de Nicolas de Cues sur le dialogue entre christianisme et islam et des liens entre les theses de la Cribatio Alkorani et la pensee globale du grand cardinal. Le livre est issu d'un Colloque tenu sur ce theme... l'Universite de Rennes le 9 avril et rassemble des contributions de Walter Andreas Euler, Tom Kerger, Genevieve Gobillot (deux textes), Susan Gottlober, Graziella Federici Vescovini Herve Pasqua.et Jean-Michel Counet. (shrink)

Examining the quality perceptions of consumers has often been recommended as an international research paradigm. This study is grounded in the Pakistani consumer market to evaluate the impact of food packaging cues on perceived product quality. The moderating effect of consumer knowledge was also taken into consideration in the study. A signaling theory was used in the study for its established predictive power in consumer behavior, marketing, and various fields of research. Based on the essence of the signaling theory, (...) this study hypothesized that food packaging cues cast a positive impact on perceived product quality and consumer knowledge moderates these relationships. By using the sample of 504 consumers, data were gathered using the mall intercept method following a multi-stage sampling technique. The responses were analyzed using Statistical Package for Social sciences and Smart Partial Least Square. The findings of this study unveil that the extrinsic cues' brand name, price, nutritional labels, and precautionary labels were positively and significantly related to the perceived product quality. However, the country of origin cast no impact on the perceived product quality. Consumer knowledge reflected a moderation effect on the relationships between brand name and country of origin with the perceived product quality whereas it exerted no moderation impact on the relationships of price, nutritional labels, and precautionary labels with the perceived product quality. As the results exhibit that Pakistani consumers rely on food packaging cues for perceiving a product, hence it is recommended that marketers and policymakers develop appropriate marketing strategies focused on the significance of food packaging cues. (shrink)

What are the factors that contribute to (or inhibit) diachronic sound change? While acoustically motivated sound changes are well documented, research on the articulatory and audiovisual-perceptual aspects of sound change is limited. This paper investigates the interaction of articulatory variation and audiovisual speech perception in the Northern Cities Vowel Shift (NCVS), a pattern of sound change observed in the Great Lakes region of the United States. We focus specifically on the maintenance of the contrast between the vowels /ɑ/ and /ɔ/, (...) both of which are fronted as a result of the NCVS. We present results from two experiments designed to test how the NCVS is produced and perceived. In the first experiment, we present data from an articulatory and acoustic analysis of the production of fronted /ɑ/ and /ɔ/. We find that some speakers distinguish /ɔ/ from /ɑ/ with a combination of both tongue position and lip rounding, while others do so using either tongue position or lip rounding alone. For speakers who distinguish /ɔ/ from /ɑ/ along only one articulatory dimension, /ɑ/ and /ɔ/ are acoustically more similar than for speakers who produce multiple articulatory distinctions. While all three groups of speakers maintain some degree of acoustic contrast between the vowels, the question is raised as to whether these articulatory strategies differ in their perceptibility. In the perception experiment, we test the hypothesis that visual speech cues play a role in maintaining contrast between the two sounds. The results of this experiment suggest that articulatory configurations in which /ɔ/ is produced with unround lips are perceptually weaker than those in which /ɔ/ is produced with rounding, even though these configurations result in acoustically similar output. We argue that these findings have implications for theories of sound change and variation in at least two respects: 1) visual cues can shape phonological systems through misperception-based sound change, and 2) phonological systems may be optimized not only for auditory but also for visual perceptibility. (shrink)

Prospective memory (PM) enables people to remember to complete important tasks in the future. Failing to do so can result in consequences of varying severity. Here, we investigated how PM error-consequence severity impacts the neural processing of relevant cues for triggering PM and the ramification of that processing on the associated prospective task performance. Participants role-played a cafeteria worker serving lunches to fictitious students and had to remember to deliver an alternative lunch to students (as PM cues) who (...) would otherwise experience a moderate or severe aversive reaction. Scalp-recorded, event-related potential (ERP) measures showed that the early-latency frontal positivity, reflecting the perception-based neural responses to previously learned stimuli, did not differ between the severe versus moderate PM cues. In contrast, the longer-latency parietal positivity, thought to reflect full PM cue recognition and post retrieval processes, was elicited earlier by the severe than the moderate PM cues. This faster instantiation of the parietal positivity to the severe-consequence PM cues was then followed by faster and more accurate behavioral responses. These findings indicate how the relative importance of a PM can be neurally instantiated in the form of enhanced and faster PM cue recognition and processing and culminate into better PM. (shrink)

There are several models of the use of geometric and feature cues in reorientation. The adaptive combination approach posits that people integrate cues with weights that depend on cue salience and learning, or, when discrepancies are large, they choose between cues based on these variables. In a new paradigm designed to evaluate integration and choice, disoriented participants attempted to return to a heading direction, in a trapezoidal enclosure in which feature and geometric cues both unambiguously specified (...) a heading, but later the feature was moved. With discrepancies greater than 90 degrees, participants choose geometry. With smaller discrepancies, integration appeared in three of five situations; otherwise, participants used geometry alone. Variation depended on direction of feature movement and whether the nearest corner was acute or obtuse. The results have implications for contrasting adaptive combination and modularity theory, and for future research, offering a new paradigm for reorientation research, and for testing cue integration more broadly. (shrink)

Animal vocalizations convey important information about the emitter, including sex, age, biological quality, and emotional state. Early on, Darwin proposed that sex differences in auditory signals and vocalizations were driven by sexual selection mechanisms. In humans, studies on the association between male voice attributes and physical formidability have thus far reported mixed results. Hence, with a view to furthering our understanding of the role of human voice in advertising physical formidability, we sought to identify acoustic attributes of male voices associated (...) with physical formidability proxies. Mean fundamental frequency, formant dispersion, formant position, and vocal tract length data from a sample of 101 male voices was analyzed for potential associations with height, weight, and maximal handgrip strength. F0 correlated negatively with HGS; Pf showed negative correlations with HGS, height and weight, whereas VTL positively correlated with HGS, height and weight. All zero-order correlations remained significant after controlling for false discovery rate with the Benjamini–Hochberg method. After controlling for height and weight—and controlling for FDR—the correlation between F0 and HGS remained significant. In addition, to evaluate the ability of human male voices to advertise physical formidability to potential mates, 151 heterosexual female participants rated the voices of the 10 strongest and the 10 weakest males from the original sample for perceived physical strength, and given that physical strength is a desirable attribute in male partners, perceived attractiveness. Generalized linear mixed model analyses—which allow for generalization of inferences to other samples of both raters and targets—failed to support a significant association of perceived strength or attractiveness from voices alone and actual physical strength. These results add to the growing body of work on the role of human voices in conveying relevant biological information. (shrink)

During embryogenesis, the basic axon scaffold of the nervous system is formed by special axons that pioneer pathways between groups of cells. To find their way, the pioneer growth cones detect specific cues in their extracellular environment. One of these guidance cues is netrin. Observations and experimental manipulations in vertebrates and nematodes have shown that netrin is a bifunctional guidance cue that can simultaneously attract and repel axons. During the formation of this basic axon scaffold in Caenorhabditis elegans, (...) the netrin UNC‐6 is expressed by neuroglia and pioneer neurons, providing hierarchical guidance cues throughout the animal. Each cue has a characteristic role depending on the cell type, its position and the developmental stage. These roles include activities as global, decussation and labeled‐pathway cues. This hierarchical model of UNC‐6 netrin‐mediated guidance suggests a method by which guidance cues can direct formation of basic axon scaffolds in developing nervous systems. (shrink)

The aim of this study was to explore the role of voices as cues to adults of children’s needs for potential caregiving during early childhood. To this purpose, 74 college students listened to pairs of 5-year-old versus 10-year-old children verbalizing neutral-content sentences and indicated which voice was better associated with each of 14 traits, potentially meaningful in interactions between young children and adults. Results indicated that children with immature voices were perceived more positively and as being more helpless than (...) children with mature voices. Children’s voices, regardless of the content of speech, seem to be a powerful source of information about children’s need for caregiving for parents and others during the first six years of life. (shrink)

Facial attributes such as race, sex, and age can interact with emotional expressions; however, only a couple of studies have investigated the nature of the interaction between facial age cues and emotional expressions and these have produced inconsistent results. Additionally, these studies have not addressed the mechanism/s driving the influence of facial age cues on emotional expression or vice versa. In the current study, participants categorised young and older adult faces expressing happiness and anger or sadness by their (...) age and their emotional expression. Age cues moderated categorisation of happiness vs. anger and sadness in the absence of an influence of emotional expression on age categorisation times. This asymmetrical interaction suggests that facial age cues are obligatorily processed prior to emotional expressions. Finding a categorisation advantage for happiness expressed on young faces relative to both anger and sadness which are negative in valence but different in their congruence with old age stereotypes or structural overlap with age cues suggests that the observed influence of facial age cues on emotion perception is due to the congruence between relatively positive evaluations of young faces and happy expressions. (shrink)

Gaze cueing effect (GCE) refers to attention orienting towards the gazed-at location, characterised by faster responses to gazed-at than non-gazed-at stimuli. A previous study investigated the effects of affective priming on GCE and reported that threatening primes enhanced GCE. However, it remains unknown whether the threat or heightened arousal potentiated GCE. We investigated how highly arousing threatening and positive primes, compared to low arousing neutral primes modulate GCE. After a brief exposure to an affective prime (pictures of threat or erotica) (...) or a neutral prime, participants detected an asterisk validly or invalidly cued by the gaze direction of a neutral face. The results showed that the threatening primes diminished the magnitude of GCE. The highly arousing positive primes did not have an effect on GCE. Further analyses showed that, as compared to neutral priming, the reaction times after threatening primes were shortened on invalid trials. This finding was interpreted to suggest that the threatening primes enhanced goal-directed target detection and attenuated attention orienting by irrelevant gaze cues via improving executive control. In sum, the present findings indicate that threat priming modulates GCE, not because of heightened arousal but because of the threat. (shrink)