Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
21
result(s) for
"Proulx, Travis"
Sort by:
Strength of socio-political attitudes moderates electrophysiological responses to perceptual anomalies
People with strong (vs. moderate) political attitudes have been shown to exhibit less phasic reactivity to perceptual anomalies, presumably to prevent their committed meaning systems from being challenged by novel experiences. Several researchers have proposed that (but not tested whether) firmly committed individuals also engage in more attentional suppression of anomalies, likely mediated by prestimulus alpha power. We expected participants with strong (vs. moderate) political attitudes to display increased pre-stimulus alpha power when processing perceptual anomalies. We recorded electrophysiological activity during the presentation of normal cards (control group) or both normal and anomalous playing cards (experimental group; total N = 191). In line with our predictions, the presence of anomalous playing cards in the stimulus set increased prestimulus alpha power only among individuals with strong but not moderate political attitudes. As potential markers of phasic reactivity, we also analyzed the late positive potential (LPP) and earlier components of the event-related potential, namely P1, N1, and P300. The moderating effect of extreme attitudes on ERP amplitudes remained inconclusive. Altogether, our findings support the idea that ideological conviction is related to increased tonic responses to perceptual anomalies.
Journal Article
The Five \A\s of Meaning Maintenance: Finding Meaning in the Theories of Sense-Making
Across eras and literatures, multiple theories have converged on a broad psychological phenomenon: the common compensation behaviors that follow from violations of our committed understandings. The meaning maintenance model (MMM) offers an integrated account of these behaviors, as well as the overlapping perspectives that address specific aspects of this inconsistency compensation process. According to the MMM, all meaning violations may bottleneck at neurocognitive and psychophysiological systems that detect and react to the experience of inconsistency, which in turn motivates compensatory behaviors. From this perspective, compensation behaviors are understood as palliative efforts to relieve the aversive arousal that follows from any experience that is inconsistent with expected relationships-whether the meaning violation involves a perceptual anomaly or an awareness of a finite human existence. In what follows, we summarize these efforts, the assimilation, accommodation, affirmation, abstraction and assembly behaviors that variously manifest in every corner of our discipline, and academics, more generally.
Journal Article
Threat-Compensation in Social Psychology: Is There a Core Motivation?
Social psychologists commonly demonstrate the following effect: threaten people's beliefs or goals, and they will engage in a typical array of compensation behaviors. Often, these behaviors involve the affirmation of alternative beliefs or goals, which may or may not be relevant to the commitments that were threatened. Just as often, an aversive state is assumed to follow from the experience of the threat, which is understood to motivate the compensation efforts. Despite the analogous qualities of these effects, there are many different theories within the \"threat-compensation\" literature purporting to explain some or all of the analogous phenomena. In this introduction to the special issue (\"Threat-Compensation in Social Psychology: Is There a Core Motivation?\"), I will outline the rationale for potentially understanding these effects as following from a common psychological mechanism. I will also introduce the contributors to the special issue, who represent several prominent \"threat-compensation\" perspectives. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]
Journal Article
Connections From Kafka: Exposure to Meaning Threats Improves Implicit Learning of an Artificial Grammar
In the current studies, we tested the prediction that learning of novel patterns of association would be enhanced in response to unrelated meaning threats. This prediction derives from the meaning-maintenance model, which hypothesizes that meaning-maintenance efforts may recruit patterns of association unrelated to the original meaning threat. Compared with participants in control conditions, participants exposed to either of two unrelated meaning threats (i.e., reading an absurd short story by Franz Kafka or arguing against one's own self-unity) demonstrated both a heightened motivation to perceive the presence of patterns within letter strings and enhanced learning of a novel pattern actually embedded within letter strings (artificial-grammar learning task). These results suggest that the cognitive mechanisms responsible for implicitly learning patterns are enhanced by the presence of a meaning threat.
Journal Article
The Case of the Transmogrifying Experimenter: Affirmation of a Moral Schema Following Implicit Change Detection
The meaning-maintenance model posits that threats to schemas lead people to affirm unrelated schemas. In two studies testing this hypothesis, participants who were presented with a perceptual anomaly (viz., the experimenter was switched without participants consciously noticing) demonstrated greater affirmation of moral beliefs compared with participants in a control condition. Another study investigated whether the schema affirmation was prompted by unconscious arousal. Participants witnessed the changing experimenter and then consumed a placebo. Those who were informed that the placebo caused side effects of arousal did not show the moral-belief affirmation observed in the previous studies, as they misattributed their arousal to the placebo. In contrast, those who were not informed of such side effects demonstrated moral-belief affirmation. The results demonstrate the functional interchangeability of different meaning frameworks, and highlight the role of unconscious arousal in prompting people to seek alternative schemas in the face of a meaning threat.
Journal Article
Death and Black Diamonds: Meaning, Mortality, and the Meaning Maintenance Model
The Meaning Maintenance Model (MMM; Heine,
Proulx, & Vohs, 2006
) proposes that human beings innately and automatically assemble mental representations of expected relations. The sense of global meaning that these relations provide is regularly disrupted by unrelated or unrelatable experiences, which elicit feelings of meaninglessness. People respond to these disruptions by engaging in meaning maintenance to reestablish their sense of symbolic unity. Meaning maintenance often involves the compensatory reaffirmation of alternative meaning structures through a process termed fluid compensation. The MMM proposes a fundamental reinterpretation of the social psychological literature, arguing that meaning maintenance is a general mechanism that underlies a host of diverse psychological motivations, including self-esteem needs, certainty needs, and the need for symbolic immortality. In particular, the MMM stands in contrast to Terror Management Theory in that mortality salience is explained by the MMM to be one of many specific instantiations of threats to meaning that engenders fluid compensation.
Journal Article