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This study investigated whether task instruction affected comprehension of multiple conflicting-view texts after controlling for a number of individual difference variables and whether the effects of task instruction varied as a result of post-reading assessment tasks. Recruited from a First-Year Composition course, 64 participants received a task instruction that set the goal of seeking an alternative explanation and reframed argument as a process of conversation and exploration. Multiple-text comprehension was measured by a synthesis writing task and an argument writing task. The results showed that participants given the instruction outperformed participants in the control condition, as reflected in their argument writing. Among the control variables, beliefs about argumentation, need for cognition and topic interest were positively correlated with comprehension measures. These results highlight the importance of cultivating divergent thinking of multiple perspectives rather than dichotomous thinking of pros and cons. Pedagogical implications are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Are there individual differences in the tendency to enjoy tasks regardless of the tasks' contents or situational determinants? To answer this question, we constructed and validated the six-item Trait Task Enjoyment Scale (TTES). In Study 1, it had an internally consistent one-factor structure (pooled N = 997); good test-retest reliabilities over 1 and 4 months; measurement invariance regarding gender (strong) and time (partial strong); and was not redundant with respect to a large number of theoretically related constructs. In Studies 2 and 3, the TTES predicted self-reported momentary task enjoyment, one of its opposites, boredom, and voluntary persistence in a free-choice paradigm. It did so for various tasks, including thirty diverse tasks presented in vignettes and a memory task in the lab. Results suggest that the TTES may predict momentary task enjoyment regardless of objective task aversiveness or, in this case, equally well for tasks with boring or enjoyable contents. The TTES addresses an important gap in current research on task enjoyment and is an adequately valid and reliable research tool. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Judgments of liking and beauty appear to be expressions of a common hedonic state, but they differ in how they engage cognitive processes. We hypothesised that beauty judgments place greater demands on limited executive resources than judgments of liking. We tested this hypothesis by asking two groups of participants to judge works of visual art for their beauty or liking while having to remember the location of 1, 3, or 5 dots in a 4 by 4 matrix. We also examined the effect of individual differences in working memory capacity. Our results show that holding information about the location of the dots in working memory delayed judgments of beauty but not of liking. Also, the greater participants' working memory capacity, the faster they completed the working memory task when judging liking, but not when judging beauty. Our study provides evidence that judging beauty draws more on working memory resources than judging liking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Individual differences in reading skill have frequently been related to variability in working memory capacity; however, it is unclear what drives this relation. The present study investigated two attentional control mechanisms that may contribute to this relation: proactive control and online filtering. To examine how the neural mechanisms of these processes relate to individual differences in reading, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data collected during a novel working memory paradigm was correlated with measures of reading skill. Results indicated that skilled readers deployed greater proactive control resources, as evidenced by more activation in left anterior prefrontal regions, when cued proactively about task-relevant features than less-skilled readers. Additionally, high-vocabulary individuals showed online filtering benefits. These findings provide novel contributions to our understanding about the relation between working memory and reading and suggest that proactive control and attentional filtering mechanisms may play a key role in driving this relation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prospective memory (PM) performance suffers when individuals collaborate, consistent with findings of "collaborative inhibition" in episodic recall. However, prior research indicates strong individual differences, such that some collaborative groups are more effective than others. To identify successful and unsuccessful collaborative processes, we examined dialogue of 20 stranger dyads and intimate couples who worked together to complete an interactive PM task, "Virtual Week." Ten were the highest-performing dyads, and 10 were the lowest-performing dyads. We coded each transcript of their dialogue during the task for cognitive processes, social processes, and generalized conversational skills. A Principal Components Analysis indicated that processes clustered into four factors, with some processes (e.g., task division, monitoring, sociability) being beneficial for both couples and stranger dyads, and others (e.g., demands, critical dialogue) being detrimental for couples only. We conclude that the best strategies to enhance collaborative PM might depend on who is collaborating. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Decades of research show that people are susceptible to developing false memories. But if they do so in one task, are they likely to do so in a different one? The answer: "No". In the current research, a large number of participants took part in three well-established false memory paradigms (a misinformation task, the Deese-Roediger-McDermott [DRM] list learning paradigm, and an imagination inflation exercise) as well as completed several individual difference measures. Results indicate that many correlations between false memory variables in all three inter-paradigm comparisons are null, though some small, positive, significant correlations emerged. Moreover, very few individual difference variables significantly correlated with false memories, and any significant correlations were rather small. It seems likely, therefore, that there is no false memory "trait". In other words, no one type of person seems especially prone, or especially resilient, to the ubiquity of memory distortion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The alternate uses task (AUT) is one of the most commonly utilized measures of divergent thinking within the creativity research literature. Some participants respond to the AUT by describing the possibility of using various common objects in a violent way (e.g., beat someone with a book), and this unsolicited inclination is termed malevolent creativity. In this study, participant responses on the AUT were systematically coded for malevolent uses, and the relations among malevolence and various individual differences including sex, ideational fluency, and originality, were examined. Results revealed that male participants generated significantly more malevolent responses to the AUT than did women, despite no significant sex differences on originality or fluency. In addition, participant originality significantly predicted malevolence, although ideational fluency did not. Taken together, these findings suggest that malevolent responses on the AUT do not arise simply when very many uses are generated (i.e., when fluency is high) but may represent a particular inclination, disproportionately displayed by males, toward utilizing divergent thinking in a potentially violent way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a classic semantic priming study (Beeman et al., 1994), participants showed a naming advantage for strongly related targets compared to weakly related targets in the left hemisphere, whereas no difference in naming advantage was found between strongly and weakly related targets in the right hemisphere. However, it is unclear how the type of task and individual differences influence this hemispheric activation. In the current study participants completed a lexical decision task when presented with strongly, weakly, and unrelated words in each visual field-hemisphere. A left hemisphere advantage was evident for strongly and weakly related words compared to unrelated words and a right hemisphere advantage was evident for strongly related words compared to weakly related and unrelated words. Additionally, high working memory capacity participants responded more accurately to strongly related words than weakly or unrelated words in the right hemisphere, whereas low working memory capacity participants showed no difference between these conditions in the right hemisphere. Thus, the type of semantic priming task and working memory capacity seem to influence the hemispheric processing of strongly and weakly related information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]