How Has the Wenchuan Earthquake Influenced People's Intertemporal Choices?

On May 12, 2008, a major magnitude-8.0 earthquake shook Wenchuan, China. An opportunity sample of 104 college students was obtained to conduct a within-subject study investigating the influence of the earthquake on intertemporal choices. The findings indicated that after the earthquake, delayed gains were discounted significantly more steeply than before it, and that delayed losses tended to be discounted more steeply after the earthquake, although this tendency did not reach statistical significance. These results suggest that after the disaster, people might be more shortsighted when they make decisions with intertemporal tradeoffs. Implications of these findings for intervention and management in the aftermath of disasters are discussed

Emotional response in a disjunction condition

This study investigated the emotional response in a disjunction condition. Participants were presented with a hypothetical three-condition scenario in which they imagined that they had submitted their application for admission to two universities. In the two conditions of certainty, the participants imagined that they were either accepted by University A or rejected by University A. In the uncertain condition, the participants imagined that they did not know whether they had been accepted or rejected by University A. These three conditions formed a disjunction condition. The results suggested that the participants felt less happy under the uncertain condition than under the two conditions of certainty, regardless of whether the information presentation was non-transparent (Experiment 1A) or transparent (Experiment 1B) and regardless of whether the options in the two conditions of certainty were similar (Experiment 2A) or substantially discrepant (Experiment 26 and Experiment 3). Experiment 3 further demonstrated that, consistent with the hedonic hypothesis, preferential choices (which constitutes a disjunction effect) are based on emotional responses in the disjunction condition. The underlying processes of the emotional response in the disjunction condition and its relation to the literature on risk and uncertainty aversion are discussed. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved

CULTURE, DISTANCE, AND THREAT PERCEPTION: COMMENT ON STAMPS (2011)

Stamps found that the effects of visual cues on the perception of threat decrease with distance, even when the range of distance is extended to 45 m. The present comment suggests that the findings Stamps obtained in a Western culture may not hold in other cultures. The robustness of these findings might be improved by using real targets at actual physical distances and "necessarily high" threats. Further studies are needed to examine whether other dimensions of psychological distance have the same effect on threat perception as does spatial distance. There is also a need to examine whether perceived threats have a significant effect on the perception of spatial distance

Neural competition as a developmental process: Early hemispheric specialization for word processing delays specialization for face processing

Little is known about the impact of learning to read on early neural development for word processing and its collateral effects on neural development in non-word domains. Here, we examined the effect of early exposure to reading on neural responses to both word and face processing in preschool children with the use of the Event Related Potential (ERP) methodology. We specifically linked children's reading experience (indexed by their sight vocabulary) to two major neural markers: the amplitude differences between the left and right N170 on the bilateral posterior scalp sites and the hemispheric spectrum power differences in the gamma band on the same scalp sites. The results showed that the left-lateralization of both the word N170 and the spectrum power in the gamma band were significantly positively related to vocabulary. In contrast, vocabulary and the word left-lateralization both had a strong negative direct effect on the face right-lateralization. Also, vocabulary negatively correlated with the right-lateralized face spectrum power in the gamma band even after the effects of age and the word spectrum power were partialled out. The present study provides direct evidence regarding the role of reading experience in the neural specialization of word and face processing above and beyond the effect of maturation. The present findings taken together suggest that the neural development of visual word processing competes with that of face processing before the process of neural specialization has been consolidated. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved