1,721,016 research outputs found
Food color is in the eye of the beholder: the role of human trichromatic vision in food evaluation
Full text linkNon-human primates evaluate food quality based on brightness of red and green shades of color, with red signaling higher energy or greater protein content in fruits and leafs. Despite the strong association between food and other sensory modalities, humans, too, estimate critical food features, such as calorie content, from vision. Previous research primarily focused on the effects of color on taste/flavor identification and intensity judgments. However, whether evaluation of perceived calorie content and arousal in humans are biased by color has received comparatively less attention. In this study we showed that color content of food images predicts arousal and perceived calorie content reported when viewing food even when confounding variables were controlled for. Specifically, arousal positively co-varied with red-brightness, while green-brightness was negatively associated with arousal and perceived calorie content. This result holds for a large array of food comprising of natural food - where color likely predicts calorie content - and of transformed food where, instead, color is poorly diagnostic of energy content. Importantly, this pattern does not emerged with nonfood items. We conclude that in humans visual inspection of food is central to its evaluation and seems to partially engage the same basic system as non-human primates
Do emotions or gender drive our actions? A study of motor distractibility
No full textPeople's interaction with the social environment depends on the ability to attend social cues with human faces being a key vehicle of this information. This study explores whether directing the attention to gender or emotion of a face interferes with ongoing actions. In two experiments, participants reached for one of two possible targets by relying on one of two features of a face, namely, emotion (Experiment 1) or gender (Experiment 2) of a non-target stimulus (a task-relevant distractor). Participants' reaching movements deviated toward the task-relevant distractor in both experiments. However, when attending to the gender of the face the distractor effect was modulated by both gender (task-relevant feature) and emotion (task-irrelevant feature), with the largest movement deviation being observed toward angry male faces. Endogenous allocation of attention toward faces elicits a competing motor response to the ongoing action and the emotional content of the face contributes to this process at a more automatic and implicit level. © 2015 Taylor & Francis
When the mask falls: The role of facial muscle resonance in memory for emotional language
No full texthe recognition and interpretation of emotional information (e.g., about happiness) has been shown to elicit, amongst other bodily reactions, spontaneous facial expressions occurring in accordance to the relevant emotion (e.g. a smile). Theories of embodied cognition act on the assumption that such embodied simulations are not only an accessorial, but a crucial factor in the processing of emotional information. While several studies have con- firmed the importance of facial motor resonance during the initial recognition of emotional information, its role at later stages of processing, such as during memory for emotional content, remains unexplored. The present study bridges this gap by exploring the impact of facial motor resonance on the retrieval of emotional stimuli. In a novel approach, the specific effects of embodied simulations were investigated at different stages of emotional memory processing (during encoding and/or retrieval). Eighty participants underwent a memory task involving emotional and neutral words consisting of an encoding and retrieval phase. Depending on the experimental con- dition, facial muscles were blocked by a hardening facial mask either during encoding, during retrieval, during both encoding and retrieval, or were left free to resonate (control). The results demonstrate that not only initial recognition but also memory of emotional items benefits from embodied simulations occurring during their encoding and retrieval. © 2014 Elsevier B.V
Automatic dehumanization across menstrual cycle
No full textn the current study we address the role of hormonal fluctuations across menstrual cycle in female dehumanization of women and men. Using a sequential priming procedure in a lexical decision task, we test whether increased levels of conception risk lead to dehumanization of other women and men on both animal and human dimensions. Results showed that
raise the question of whether hormonal shifts might also affect mate-attraction goal relevant processes␣␣Differently
from Macrae' study, which has addressed gender-category accessibility across menstrual cycle, we here focus on the dehumanization processes (i.e., tendency of perceiving a given target as lacking of human qualities) during menstrual cycle phases. Specifically, in this study we take advantage of previous work by Piccoli and colleagues (2013), which shows that increased levels of explicit dehumanization of women as whole during the high conception risk phase is a product of the activation of women’s mate-attraction goal. Based on a sequential semantic priming paradigm in a lexical decision task (Blair & Banaij, 1996), we intend to investigate whether women automatically dehumanize other women, but not men, in the high, but not in the low conception risk phase.
Method
Participants
Thirty-five normally ovulating female students from the University of Trieste participated in the current study.
Procedure
Participants took part into a lexical decision task (see Blair & Banaji, 1996 for similar procedure).␣The task included two experimental primes ('woman' and 'man') and two control primes. Targets were 20 words: ten words were associated with animal concepts, and ten words were related to human concepts (for the material, see Viki et al., 2006). An equal number of non-words were included in the experiment.
Results
Determination of conception risk. We relied on the forward-counting method (Gangestad & Thornhill, 1998) to define the day in which the experimental task took place during menstrual cycle (see, Piccoli et al., 2013).
Lexical decision task. A differential score (i.e., correct target categorizations) was computed, subtracting individual reactions times for both the prime man and the prime woman to the individual average reaction times for the control primes. This differential score was calculated separately for human and animal words. Hence, positive scores that differed from zero pointed to accessibility,
for word woman as the prime, animal words were more
accessible in the high than in the low conception risk of the
menstrual cycle; whereas human words were more inhibited
in the high compared to the low conception risk. As for word
man prime, no difference in terms of accessibility was found
between the high and the low conception risk on both animal-
and human-words.
This study demonstrates that dehumanization of women is automatically elicited by
menstrual cycle–related processes and associated with women’s mate-attraction goals
Generalisation of Roma onto Romanians: Evidence of the Outgroup Projection Effect
Full text linkOutgroup projection is the tendency to generalise among members of different outgroups as if their members were all alike. The present study analysed this almost unexplored phenomenon and tested whether intergroup threat enhances the tendency to generalise the members of a negatively-valued outgroup (i.e., Roma) onto another larger (partially) inclusive outgroup (i.e., Romanians). Evidence showed that Roma are generalised to Romanians to a higher extent under realistic and symbolic threat conditions. Outgroup projection is discussed in relation to the ingroup projection bias and the ingroup over-exclusion effect
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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