Why the cognitive approach in psychology would profit from a functional approach and vice versa

Cognitively oriented psychologists often define behavioral effects in terms of mental constructs (e.g., classical conditioning as a change in behavior that is due to the formation of associations in memory) and thus effectively treat those effects as proxies for mental constructs. This practice can, however, hamper scientific progress. I argue that if psychologists would consistently define behavioral effects only in terms of the causal impact of elements in the environment (e.g., classical conditioning as a change in behavior that is due to the pairing of stimuli), they would adopt a functional approach that not only reveals the environmental causes of behavior but also optimizes cognitive research. The cognitive approach in turn strengthens the functional approach by facilitating the discovery of new causal relations between the environment and behavior. I thus propose a functional-cognitive framework for research in psychology that capitalizes on the mutually supportive nature of the functional and cognitive approaches in psychology

Implicit bias Is behavior : a functional-cognitive perspective on implicit bias

Implicit bias is often viewed as a hidden force inside people that makes them perform inappropriate actions. This perspective can induce resistance against the idea that people are implicitly biased and complicates research on implicit bias. I put forward an alternative perspective that views implicit bias as a behavioral phenomenon. more specifically, it is seen as behavior that is automatically influenced by cues indicative of the social group to which others belong. This behavioral perspective is less likely to evoke resistance because implicit bias is seen as something that people do rather than possess and because it clearly separates the behavioral phenomenon from its normative implications. Moreover, performance on experimental tasks such as the Implicit Association Test is seen an instance of implicitly biased behavior rather than a proxy of hidden mental biases. Because these tasks allow for experimental control, they provide ideal tools for studying the automatic impact of social cues on behavior, for predicting other instances of biased behavior, and for educating people about implicitly biased behavior. The behavioral perspective not only changes the way we think about implicit bias but also shifts the aims of research on implicit bias and reveals links with other behavioral approaches such as network modeling

Stop what you are not doing! Emotional pictures interfere with the task not to respond

Previous research has shown that emotional stimuli interfere with ongoing activities One explanation is that these stimuli draw attention away from the primary task and thereby hamper the correct execution of the task Another explanation is that emotional stimuli cause a temporary freezing of all ongoing activity We used a go/no-go task to differentiate between these accounts According to the attention account, emotional distractors should impair performance on both go and no-go trials According to the freezing account, the presentation of emotional stimuli should be detrimental to performance on go trials, but beneficial for performance on no-go trials Our findings confirm the former prediction Pictures high in emotional arousal impaired performance on no-go trials

Contingency learning tracks with stimulus-response proportion no evidence of misprediction costs

We investigate the processes involved in human contingency learning using the color-word contingency learning paradigm. In this task, participants respond to the print color of neutral words. Each word is frequently presented in one color. Results show that participants respond faster and more accurately to words presented in their expected color. In Experiment 1, we observed better performance for high-relative to medium-frequency word-color pairs, and for medium-relative to low-frequency pairs. Within the medium-frequency condition, it did not matter whether the word was predictive of a currently-unpresented color, or the color was predictive of a currently-unpresented word. We conclude that a given word facilitates each potential response proportional to how often they co-occurred. In contrast, there was no evidence for costs associated with violations of high-frequency expectancies. Experiment 2 further introduced a novel word baseline condition, which also provided no evidence for competition between retrieved responses