• Affective incoherence: when affective concepts and embodied reactions clash

      Centerbar, David B.; Schnall, Simone; Clore, Gerald L.; Garvin, Erika D. (2008-03-26)
      In five studies, the authors examined the effects on cognitive performance of coherence and incoherence between conceptual and experiential sources of affective information. The studies crossed the priming of happy and sad concepts with affective experiences. In different experiments, these included approach or avoidance actions, happy or sad feelings, and happy or sad expressive behaviors. In all studies, coherence between affective concepts and affective experiences led to better recall of a story than did affective incoherence. The authors suggest that the experience of such experiential affective cues serves as evidence of the appropriateness of affective concepts that come to mind. The results suggest that affective coherence has epistemic benefits and that incoherence is costly in terms of cognitive performance.
    • Relational learning in children with deafness and cochlear implants

      Almeida-Verdu, Ana Claudia; Huziwara, Edson M.; de Souza, Deisy das GraCas; de Rose, Julio C.; Bevilacqua, Maria Cecilia; Lopes, Jair Jr.; Alves, Christiane O.; McIlvane, William J. (2008-05-11)
      This four-experiment series sought to evaluate the potential of children with neurosensory deafness and cochlear implants to exhibit auditory-visual and visual-visual stimulus equivalence relations within a matching-to-sample format. Twelve children who became deaf prior to acquiring language (prelingual) and four who became deaf afterwards (postlingual) were studied. All children learned auditory-visual conditional discriminations and nearly all showed emergent equivalence relations. Naming tests, conducted with a subset of the children, showed no consistent relationship to the equivalence-test outcomes. This study makes several contributions to the literature on stimulus equivalence. First, it demonstrates that both pre- and postlingually deaf children can acquire auditory-visual equivalence relations after cochlear implantation, thus demonstrating symbolic functioning. Second, it directs attention to a population that may be especially interesting for researchers seeking to analyze the relationship between speaker and listener repertoires. Third, it demonstrates the feasibility of conducting experimental studies of stimulus control processes within the limitations of a hospital, which these children must visit routinely for the maintenance of their cochlear implants.