Are psychotherapists' first clinical impressions fundamentally biased? An experimental approach.

Fifty years ago, the Rosenhan experiment was one of the most impactful psychological studies across decades. One of the main claims of the experiment was that clinicians could be negatively biased in their first clinical impressions, which would negatively impact further clinical decisions. We conducted two experiments ( = 56 and 64) in which psychotherapists were asked to give their first clinical impressions in two consecutive cases after a brief presentation of the case (case description and video excerpt) and a short recall task of the information provided.

Valence sound symbolism facilitates classification of vowels and emotional facial expressions.

Research on iconicity or sound symbolism chronicles associations between aspects of word meaning and word form. In valence sound symbolism, specifically, vowels were demonstrated to be associated with valence, so that the vowel /i/ (as in English sea) is judged to fit positively valenced stimuli, whereas the vowel /o/ (as in German ) is judged to fit negatively valenced stimuli. However, because previous findings were based on judgments or name invention tasks, they may reflect deliberate strategies.

Early ERP indices of gender-biased processing elicited by generic masculine role nouns and the feminine-masculine pair form.

In most gender-marked languages, the masculine form is used to refer to male people specifically as well as to people of any gender generically. This dual functionality was shown in behavioral studies to lead to male-biased mental representations. Here, using EEG, we targeted the neurophysiological basis of this bias by investigating whether and how the generic masculine influences the early perceptual and cognitive processing of anaphoric references to men and women.

What is preferred in the in-out effect: articulation locations or articulation movement direction?

Words whose consonant articulation locations move inward (from the front to the back of the mouth) are preferred over words with the opposite consonant articulation location direction, a phenomenon termed the in-out effect. Recently, an alternative explanation for the in-out effect has been proposed based on position-weighted consonant preferences instead of articulation location movement preferences. However, this explanation has only been tested with word fragments.

Articulation contributes to valence sound symbolism.

Vowels are sound-symbolically associated with valence. Specifically, words containing /i/ (vs. /o/) are judged more suitable to denote positive (vs.

Null and Void? Errors in Meta-analysis on Perceptual Disfluency and Recommendations to Improve Meta-analytical Reproducibility.

In the 2018 meta-analysis of entitled "Null effects of perceptual disfluency on learning outcomes in a text-based educational context" by Xie, Zhou, and Liu, we identify some errors and inconsistencies in both the methodological approach and the reported results regarding coding and effect sizes. While from a technical point of view the meta-analysis aligns with current meta-analytical guidelines (e.g.

Open-Book Versus Closed-Book Tests in University Classes: A Field Experiment.

The present field study compared open-book testing and closed-book testing in two (parallel) introductory university courses in cognitive psychology. The critical manipulation concerned seven lessons. In these lessons, all students received two to three questions concerning the content of the respective lesson.

Talking emotions: vowel selection in fictional names depends on the emotional valence of the to-be-named faces and objects.

One prestudy based on a corpus analysis and four experiments in which participants had to invent novel names for persons or objects (N = 336 participants in total) investigated how the valence of a face or an object affects the phonological characteristics of the respective novel name. Based on the articulatory feedback hypothesis, we predicted that /i:/ is included more frequently in fictional names for faces or objects with a positive valence than for those with a negative valence. For /o:/, the pattern should reverse.

Is testing a more effective learning strategy than note-taking?

The testing effect is both robust and generalizable. However, most of the underlying studies compare testing to a rather ineffective control condition: massed repeated reading. This article therefore compares testing with note-taking, which has been shown to be more effective than repeated reading.

Does verbatim sentence recall underestimate the language competence of near-native speakers?

Verbatim sentence recall is widely used to test the language competence of native and non-native speakers since it involves comprehension and production of connected speech. However, we assume that, to maintain surface information, sentence recall relies particularly on attentional resources, which differentially affects native and non-native speakers. Since even in near-natives language processing is less automatized than in native speakers, processing a sentence in a foreign language plus retaining its surface may result in a cognitive overload.

Mood is linked to vowel type: the role of articulatory movements.

This study investigates the relation between vowel identity and emotional state. In Experiment 1, (pseudo)words were invented and articulated in a positive or negative mood condition. Subjects in a positive mood produced more words containing /i:/, a vowel involving the same muscle that is used in smiling--the zygomaticus major muscle (ZMM).

Two Modality Effects in Verbal Short-Term Memory: Evidence from Sentence Recall.

This paper investigates the mechanisms underlying the standard modality effect (i.e., better recall performance for auditorily presented than for visually presented materials), and the modality congruency effect (i.

Semantic and phonological information in sentence recall: converging psycholinguistic and neuropsychological evidence.

We present one experiment and a neuropsychological case study to investigate to what extent phonological and semantic representations contribute to short-term sentence recall. We modified Potter and Lombardi's (1990) intrusion paradigm, in which retention of a list interferes with sentence recall such that on the list a semantically related lure is presented, which is expected to intrude into sentence recall. In our version, lure words are either semantically related to target words in the sentence or semantically plus phonologically related.

The perceptual basis of the modality effect in multimedia learning.

Various studies have demonstrated an advantage of auditory over visual text modality when learning with texts and pictures. To explain this modality effect, two complementary assumptions are proposed by cognitive theories of multimedia learning: first, the visuospatial load hypothesis, which explains the modality effect in terms of visuospatial working memory overload in the visual text condition; and second, the temporal contiguity assumption, according to which the modality effect occurs because solely auditory texts and pictures can be attended to simultaneously. The latter explanation applies only to simultaneous presentation, the former to both simultaneous and sequential presentation.

Beyond sentence boundaries: grammatical gender information in short-term recall of texts.

In the context of text recall it is often stated that surface representations are quickly forgotten. Jarvella (1971) and Sachs (1967) argued that what is retained beyond sentence boundaries is meaning information, whereas lexical and syntactic information is only available for the most recent constituent. We based a text recall experiment on Jarvella's paradigm, in order to demonstrate that both meaning and grammatical gender information contribute to the recall of short text passages.

Evidence for a modality effect in sentence retention.

It is well known that an acoustic-sensory code supports retention of linguistic materials whose storage is particularly based on phonological information (e.g., unrelated word lists).

Immediate and delayed recall of visually presented sentences: evidence for the involvement of phonological information.

The lure intrusion effect refers to the observation that lexical priming affects recall of sentences. This effect is taken as evidence against the contribution of surface information, even with immediate sentence recall. Recently, Rummer and Engelkamp (2003a) demonstrated that this effect, which is usually observed under rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP), does not appear under immediate recall of auditorily presented sentences.

Short-term sentence recall: evidence for the contribution of acoustic-sensory information.

To demonstrate that short-term sentence recall is based on conceptual and lexico-semantic information, Potter and Lombardi [J. Memory Lang. 29 (1990) 633] conducted a series of experiments using the intrusion paradigm, which combines short-term sentence recall and lexical priming.

Phonological information in immediate and delayed sentence recall.

Potter and Lombardi (1990) state in their conceptual regeneration hypothesis that immediate sentence recall is only based on conceptual and lexical information; phonological information does not contribute. As experimental evidence for this hypothesis, they reported that if a sentence is followed by a word list that included a lure word similar to one of the content words of the sentence (target word), the lure word frequently intrudes into sentence recall. We demonstrated that Potter and Lombardi did not observe any influence of phonological information because list presentation followed sentence presentation, and phonological information was discarded.