The effect of background music and noise on the cognitive test performance of Chinese introverts and extraverts

Previous research has shown that background auditory distractors (music and sound/noise) have a more severe impact on introverts’ performances on complex cognitive tasks than extraverts (Dobbs, Furnham, & McClelland, 2011). The present study is a partial replication of Dobbs et al., but involving Chinese rather than English participants. Ninety-two Chinese participants (59 female) carried out three cognitive tasks with the presence of Chinese pop songs, background office noise, and silence. The results did not reveal any differences in performance as a function of the distraction condition, nor was there a difference in performance between extraverts and introverts. The failure to replicate is explained in terms of habituation to noisy environments among Chinese participants

Allocating a scarce mental health treatment to the underweight and overweight

Background: This is one of a number of programmatic studies on the allocation of scarce medical resources. Aims: This study investigated whether certain characteristics about patients influence the priority they are assigned for a scarce mental health treatment. Similar studies for physical treatments have found that young, poor, and mentally healthy patients are given the highest priority. / Method: Each participant completed one questionnaire where they ranked a list of 8 hypothetical patients in order of priority for treatment for anorexia or obesity. The patients varied on three dimensions: age, social class and mental health history. This was a ranking of prioritization for treatment. / Results: Participants gave the young patients, from a low social class background, who had a mental health history the highest priority for treatment. This is in contrast to previous studies indicating that the mentally unwell are discriminated against. / Conclusions: Participants seemed to be using social class as a proxy measure of ability to pay which they weighted very highly

The effects of programme context on memory for humorous television commercials

This study investigated the effects of programme context on memory for humorous television advertisements in South Korean participants. Humorous and nonhumorous Korean advertisements were embedded within two programme contexts: humorous and nonhumorous. When the programme ratings of humour, enjoyment and involvement were higher, unaided recall was poorer. In addition, unaided recall of the advertisements was better when they were embedded within a nonhumorous programme. However, there was no significant programme-advertisement interaction effect. Overall, both free and cued recall were higher for humorous advertisements than for the nonhumorous advertisements. The findings are discussed in terms of cultural differences and changes in television programmes and advertising over time

Interference of spoken word recognition through phonological priming from visual objects and printed words

Item does not contain fulltextThree cross-modal priming experiments examined the influence of preexposure to pictures and printed words on the speed of spoken word recognition. Targets for auditory lexical decision were spoken Dutch words and nonwords, presented in isolation (Experiments 1 and 2) or after a short phrase (Experiment 3). Auditory stimuli were preceded by primes, which were pictures (Experiments 1 and 3) or those pictures' printed names (Experiment 2). Prime-target pairs were phonologically onset related (e.g., pijl-pijn, arrow-pain), were from the same semantic category (e.g., pijl-zwaard, arrow-sword), or were unrelated on both dimensions. Phonological interference and semantic facilitation were observed in all experiments. Priming magnitude was similar for pictures and printed words and did not vary with picture viewing time or number of pictures in the display (either one or four). These effects arose even though participants were not explicitly instructed to name the pictures and where strategic naming would interfere with lexical decision making. This suggests that, by default, processing of related pictures and printed words influences how quickly we recognize spoken words.11 p