PubMed İndeksli Yayınlar Koleksiyonu / PubMed Indexed Publications Collection
Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11779/1928
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Article Citation - WoS: 18Citation - Scopus: 20Working Memory Regulates Trait Anxiety-Related Threat Processing Biases(Amer Psychological Assoc, 2017-06-01) Booth, Robert W; Sharma, Dinkar; Mackintosh, BundyHigh trait anxious individuals tend to show biased processing of threat. Correlational evidence suggests that executive control could be used to regulate such threat-processing. On this basis, we hypothesized that trait anxiety-related cognitive biases regarding threat should be exaggerated when executive control is experimentally impaired by loading working memory. In Study 1, 68 undergraduates read ambiguous vignettes under high and low working memory load; later, their interpretations of these vignettes were assessed via a recognition test. Trait anxiety predicted biased interpretation of social threat vignettes under high working memory load, but not under low working memory load. In Study 2, 53 undergraduates completed a dot probe task with fear-conditioned Japanese characters serving as threat stimuli. Trait anxiety predicted attentional bias to the threat stimuli but, again, this only occurred under high working memory load. Interestingly however, actual eye movements toward the threat stimuli were only associated with state anxiety, and this was not moderated by working memory load, suggesting that executive control regulates biased threat-processing downstream of initial input processes such as orienting. These results suggest that cognitive loads can exacerbate trait anxiety-related cognitive biases, and therefore represent a useful tool for assessing cognitive biases in future research. More importantly, since biased threat-processing has been implicated in the etiology and maintenance of anxiety, poor executive control may be a risk factor for anxiety disorders.Article Citation - WoS: 31Citation - Scopus: 28Drivers of Cultural Success: the Case of Sensory Metaphors(Amer Psychological Assoc, 2015-07-01) Berger, Jonah; Akpınar, EzgiWhy do some cultural items catch on and become more popular than others? Language is one of the basic foundations of culture. But what leads some phrases to become more culturally successful? There are multiple ways to convey the same thing and phrases with similar meanings often act as substitutes, competing for usage. A not so friendly person, for example, can be described as unfriendly or cold. We study how the senses shape cultural success, suggesting that compared with their semantic equivalents (e.g., unfriendly person), phrases which relate to senses in metaphoric ways (e.g., cold person) should be more culturally successful. Data from 5 million books over 200 years support this prediction: Sensory metaphors are used more frequently over time than are their semantic equivalents. Experimental evidence demonstrates that sensory metaphors are more memorable because they relate more to the senses and have more associative cues. These findings shed light on how senses shape language and the psychological foundations of culture more broadly.