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Superstition exists in every culture, and particularly in sports. This study aimed to develop a reliable and valid Sports Superstition Attitude Scale (SSAS) and test the influences of superstition on athletes' behavior. Study #1 developed an initial SSAS draft and examined content validity and reliability. Study #2 examined SSAS factorial structure and construct validity. Study #3 tested hypothesized relationships among athletic identity, locus of control, superstition, and fear of failure. Results found by SSAS comprised three components: ritual and taboo, lucky charms, and folk culture, and showed appropriate construct validity and reliability. Theoretical model examination found that athletic identity and external control interact with superstition to predict fear of failure. We concluded that the 15-item three-factor SSAS is a reliable and valid sport-specific superstition measure that can be used in future studies. We suggest future studies examine how psychosocial factors influence athletes' behavior and superstition. Limitations and suggestions for future study are also discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite marketers' efforts to make consumers feel attractive in many sales and advertising contexts, little is known about how consumers' self-perceived physical attractiveness influences their decision making. The authors examine whether a boost in consumers' self-perceived attractiveness influences subsequent choices in domains unrelated to beauty. Across six studies, the authors find converging evidence that a boost in consumers' self-perceived attractiveness enhances their general self-confidence and reduces preference uncertainty, resulting in less reliance on the choice context and thus fewer choices of compromise, all-average, and default options. The findings further show that consumers use self-confidence as metacognitive information for inferring preference uncertainty in subsequent decisions. This process is a misattribution that can be attenuated when consumers attribute their self-confidence to the self-perceived attractiveness. The article concludes with a discussion of theoretical and managerial implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent research has begun to explore the specific social challenges experienced by persons with Tourette syndrome (TS); however, it does not specifically address the challenges that often arise interpersonally as part of people's communicative interactions and these interactions socially construct the individual and collective well-being of all involved. This study conducted semi-structured interviews with 18 adults who identified as having TS in order to investigate the ways in which others respond behaviorally to TS behaviors and the ways TS behaviors are misinterpreted within interpersonal interactions. Thematic analysis was used to identify themes common within participant responses. All participants reported receiving unwanted attention from others in response to their TS symptoms. Unwanted attention was further divided into six emergent subthemes, including verbal harassment, physical abuse, staring, general bullying, getting into trouble, and being kicked out. Three types of misunderstandings were also reported in interpersonal interactions: misunderstanding communicative intention, misunderstanding TS, and misunderstanding the cause of TS behaviors. Applying attribution theory, it is determined that it is ultimately the misattribution of communicative intent to TS behaviors that causes many misunderstandings reported by adults with TS and leads to a plethora of interpersonal, communicative challenges. Importantly, these misunderstandings are what ultimately contribute to much of the unwanted attention described by the participants in this study and documented in previous work, highlighting the value of a greater awareness of how misunderstandings take place with respect to TS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractEconomics games such as the Dictator and Public Goods Games have been widely used to measure ethnic bias in political science and economics. Yet these tools may fail to measure bias as intended because they are vulnerable to self-presentational concerns and/or fail to capture bias rooted in more automatic associative and affective reactions. We examine a set of misattribution-based approaches, adapted from social psychology, that may sidestep these concerns. Participants in Nairobi, Kenya completed a series of common economics games alongside versions of these misattribution tasks adapted for this setting, each designed to detect bias toward noncoethnics relative to coethnics. Several of the misattribution tasks show clear evidence of (expected) bias, arguably reflecting differences in positive/negative affect and heightened threat perception toward noncoethnics. The Dictator and Public Goods Games, by contrast, are unable to detect any bias in behavior toward noncoethnics versus coethnics. We conclude that researchers of ethnic and other biases may benefit from including misattribution-based procedures in their tool kits to widen the set of biases to which their investigations are sensitive.

Past research suggests that people continue believing retracted misinformation more when it is consistent versus inconsistent with their attitudes. However, the psychological mechanism responsible for this phenomenon remains unclear. We predicted that retractions of attitude-consistent misinformation produce greater feelings of discomfort than retractions of attitude-inconsistent misinformation and that this discomfort predicts continued belief in and use of the misinformation. We report combined analyses across 10 studies testing these predictions. Seven studies (total N = 1,323) used a mediational framework and found that the more consistent misinformation was with participants' attitudes, the more discomfort was elicited by a retraction of the misinformation. Greater discomfort then predicted greater continued belief in the misinformation, which, in turn, predicted greater use of the misinformation when participants made relevant inferences. Three additional studies (total N = 574) utilized misattribution paradigms to demonstrate that the relation between discomfort and belief in misinformation is causal in nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The notion of metacognitive myopia refers to a conspicuous weakness of the quality control of memory and reasoning processes. Although people are often remarkably sensitive even to complex samples of information when making evaluative judgments and decisions, their uncritical and naive tendency to take the validity of sampled information for granted constitutes a major obstacle to rational behavior. After illustrating this phenomenon with reference to prominent biases (base-rate neglect, misattribution, perseverance), we decompose metacognitive myopia into two distinct but intertwined functions, monitoring and control. We offer explanations for why effectively monitoring the biases resulting from information sampling in an uncertain world is so difficult and why the control function is severely restricted by the lack of volitional control over mental actions. Because of these and other difficulties, metacognitive myopia constitutes a major obstacle to rational judgment and decision making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Repeated experience of events promotes schema formation. Later activation of the schema facilitates recall of the general structure of the events, whereas attribution of details to instances requires systematic decision-making based on detail characteristics. For repeated events, source monitoring may be less effective due to the similarity and interference of details across instances and consequently result in source attribution errors. To date, researchers have examined aggregated misattributions across instances and have found that misattributions are more frequent in the middle than in the boundary instances. In this study, we investigated the trajectories of misattributions using data from six studies (N = 633), where participants recalled repeated interactive marketing-themed events (Study 1), mock-crime filmed events (Study 2), stories (Study 3), and categorized word lists (Studies 4–6). The patterns confirmed the expected primacy and recency effects, showing fewer misattributions from and to the boundary instances relative to the middle instances. In addition, the patterns indicated proximity effects: Confusions more frequently occurred across adjacent instances and gradually decreased for instances that were further apart from the source. Our findings suggest that detail characteristics that form the basis of source attribution decisions provide information about the relative position of instances in repeated events, where the boundary instances serve as anchors, and where confusion relatively easily occurs across neighbouring instances. In line with context-based models of memory, our findings indicate that a higher-level organization of repeated events that emerges at encoding guides retrieval and source monitoring decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present research introduces the minimal deviation effect. We propose that numbers that are slightly above a numerical category boundary (e.g. 1,001 in comparison to 1,000), representing a salient violation of coherent numerical categories, are arousal-inducing, and that the heightened arousal can be misattributed to the incentive value of the focal product, thus increasing consumers' wanting but not liking. Results from nine experiments provide converging evidence to support our proposition. Specifically, we show that consumers are more likely to choose and willing to pay more for products associated with a number with minimal deviation from a categorical border, regardless of whether the number represents product quantity, brand name, or model series. Moreover, we find that the minimal deviation effect diminishes when people are already aroused or when they attribute the arousal to other sources. Finally, we demonstrate that the effect can be reversed when minimal deviation is embedded in certain attribute dimensions (e.g. price), shedding more light on the circumstances under which the minimal deviation effect will occur. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Feeling left out has been shown to trigger primal, automatic responses in an attempt to compensate for threats to social belongingness. Such responses typically involve reconnection with other human beings. However, four experiments provide evidence that exposure to or interaction with anthropomorphic consumer products (i.e., products featuring characteristics of being alive through design, interaction, intelligence, responsiveness, and/or personality) can also satisfy (at least partially) social needs, ultimately mitigating previously documented effects of social exclusion. Specifically, interacting with anthropomorphic (vs. nonanthropomorphic) products following social exclusion reduces (1) the need to exaggerate the number of one's current social connections, (2) the anticipated need to engage with close others in the future, and (3) the willingness to engage in prosocial behavior. These effects are driven by a need for social assurance, rather than positive affect. Moreover, an important boundary condition exists: drawing attention to the fact that an anthropomorphic product is not actually alive (i.e., the product does not provide genuine human interaction) limits its ability to fulfill social needs. Thus, in a time when consumer products are becoming increasingly anthropomorphic in design and function, the results reveal potentially important consequences for human-to-human relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Memory serves critical functions in everyday life, but it is also vulnerable to error and illusion. Two decades ago, I proposed that memory errors could be classified into seven basic categories or "sins": transience, absent-mindedness, blocking, misattribution, suggestibility, bias, and persistence. I argued that each of the seven sins provides important insights concerning the fundamentally constructive nature of human memory, while at the same time reflecting its adaptive features. In this article I briefly summarise some key developments during the past two decades that have increased our understanding of the nature, consequences, and adaptive functions of the memory sins. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The positivity-familiarity effect refers to the phenomenon that positive affect increases the likelihood that people judge a stimulus as familiar. Drawing on the assumption that positivity-familiarity effects result from a common misattribution mechanism that is shared with conceptually similar effects (e.g. fluency-familiarity effects), we investigated whether positivity-familiarity effects are qualified by three known moderators of other misattribution phenomena: (a) conceptual similarity between affect-eliciting prime stimuli and focal target stimuli, (b) relative salience of affect-eliciting prime stimuli, and (c) explicit warnings about the effects of affect-eliciting prime stimuli on familiarity judgments of the targets. Counter to predictions, three experiments obtained robust positivity-familiarity effects that were unaffected by the hypothesised moderators. The findings pose a challenge for misattribution accounts of positivity-familiarity effects, but they are consistent with alternative accounts in terms of affective monitoring. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers Borges's central role in the Argentine literary tradition of misattribution and false citations. It reassesses his subversion of normative perceptions of traditional literary values and practices such as originality and plagiarism and contextualizes his now familiar views on the relative merits of translation and 'creative' writing (reminiscent of his elevation of the reader above the writer) and investigates his preference for collaborative production over individual authorship. The essay reminds the reader of Borges's joyful view of literature and ends by considering two contemporary Argentine writers (Tomás Eloy Martínez and Ricardo Piglia) whose largely divergent outputs find some common ground in their gravitation towards distinctively Borgesian motifs and techniques. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social cognition abilities are significantly impaired in serious mental illnesses. Facial emotion recognition deficits (FERD) have been consistently reported in schizophrenia (SCZ), while the respective findings in bipolar disorder (BPD) are mixed. Assessment of FERD using a task that imposes a time restriction on the stimulus presentation and response may be more akin to real-life situations. We examined FERD, misattribution patterns, and response times in SCZ (n=24) and BPD (n=26) patients and healthy controls (HC; n=26) on: (i) a conventional emotion recognition task using a forced-choice response task, and (ii) a computerized task with the time-restricted presentation of stimuli and recording of the response times. Patients with BPD had a lower duration of illness compared to SCZ patients. Both SCZ and BPD groups showed significantly lower emotion recognition accuracy scores in both tasks, as compared to the HC. The BPD group had significantly higher overidentification than the HC one. On imposing the time restriction, both patient groups gave a significantly higher percentage of the erroneous responses. There were no significant differences in the reaction times. The ratio of accuracy scores vs. response time showed a differential pattern, with a significantly lower ratio for fear in SCZ and that for anger in BPD. The BPD group showed FERDs comparable to those in SCZ patients though the duration of illness in the former was shorter than that in the latter. The study highlights the need for early initiation of the social cognition intervention in patients with serious mental illnesses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: Attribution of neuropsychiatric symptoms in systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) relies heavily on clinician assessment. Limited clinic time, variable knowledge, and symptom under-reporting contributes to discordance between clinician assessments and patient symptoms. We obtained attributional data directly from patients and clinicians in order to estimate and compare potential levels of direct attribution to SLE of multiple neuropsychiatric symptoms using different patient-derived measures., Methods: Quantitative and qualitative data analysed included: prevalence and frequency of neuropsychiatric symptoms, response to corticosteroids, and concurrence of neuropsychiatric symptoms with non-neuropsychiatric SLE disease activity. SLE patients were also compared with controls and inflammatory arthritis (IA) patients to explore attributability of neuropsychiatric symptoms to the direct disease effects on the brain/nervous system., Results: We recruited 2,817 participants, including 400 clinicians. SLE patients (n = 609) reported significantly higher prevalences of neuropsychiatric symptoms than controls (n = 463) and IA patients (n = 489). SLE and IA patients' quantitative data demonstrated multiple neuropsychiatric symptoms relapsing/remitting with other disease symptoms such as joint pain. Over 45% of SLE patients reported resolution/improvement of fatigue, positive sensory symptoms, severe headache, and cognitive dysfunction with corticosteroids. Evidence of direct attributability in SLE was highest for hallucinations and severe headache. SLE patients had greater reported improvement from corticosteroids (p= 0.008), and greater relapsing-remitting with disease activity (p< 0.001) in the comparisons with IA patients for severe headache. Clinician and patients reported insufficient time to discuss patient-reported attributional evidence. Symptoms viewed as indirectly related/non-attributable were often less prioritised for discussion and treatment., Conclusion: We found evidence indicating varying levels of direct attributability of both common and previously unexplored neuropsychiatric symptoms in SLE patients, with hallucinations and severe headache assessed as the most directly attributable. There may also be-currently under-estimated-direct effects on the nervous system in IA and other systemic rheumatological diseases., (© The Author(s) 2024. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the British Society for Rheumatology.)

Consumers often feel schadenfreude, an emotion reflecting an experience of pleasure over misfortunes of another. Schadenfreude has found wide use in advertising, but its actual consequences for consumers have not been thoroughly documented. The present research investigates the effect of schadenfreude on consumers' satisfaction with choices they have made. Building on the feelings‐as‐information theory, the authors posit that consumers take their positive feelings of schadenfreude over another's unrelated bad purchase as positive information about their own choices, and through such misattribution become more satisfied with their own choices. Three experiments show that feeling schadenfreude over another consumer's bad purchase makes consumers more satisfied with their own choices (Study 1), regardless of whether the other's bad purchase is in the same or in a different product category as one's own choice (Study 2), but only so long as consumers are not aware that they are engaging in misattribution (Study 3). The present research contributes to the literature on schadenfreude and feelings‐as‐information theory. Its findings may be used by marketers aiming to exert an unconscious influence on consumer satisfaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent research in moral psychology has highlighted how the current internal states of observers can influence their moral judgments of others’ actions. In this article, we argue that an important internal state that serves such a function is the sense of control one has over one’s own actions. Across four studies, we show that an individual’s own current sense of control is positively associated with the intensity of moral judgments of the actions of others. We also show that this effect extends not only to judgments of rightness and wrongness (Study 1), but also to assignments of reward and punishment (Study 2). Finally, we demonstrate that this effect is based on the current experience of control by showing a moderation of the effect via motivational states (promotion; prevention) that either lead one to incorporate or disregard internal states when making judgments (Study 3) and by subtly manipulating participants’ sense of control (Study 4).

The positivity-familiarity effect suggests that people use positive affect as a cue to answer the question of whether they have encountered a stimulus before. Five experiments investigated this effect under various conditions. Positivity-familiarity effects were obtained irrespective of whether the task context suggested a correct answer to the question of whether a given target stimulus is familiar or unfamiliar. However, effects were less reliable when participants had a basis to assume that they had been presented with the target stimuli earlier in the same study and when they were asked to indicate whether the targets had been presented before (instead of judging them as familiar or unfamiliar). Positivity-familiarity effects were also obtained irrespective of whether affective primes were presented for short, moderate, or long durations. However, effects were less reliable for short compared to moderate and long prime presentations. Implications for the positivity-familiarity effect and other misattribution phenomena are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The nocebo effect is a concerning phenomenon in which adverse outcomes are triggered by the treatment context. Faasse (2019) summarises recent evidence on mechanisms of the nocebo effect, proposes an updated model, and describes emerging techniques for reducing the nocebo effect. Faasse's model marks an important advance over prior models focussing only on expectancy and classical conditioning by incorporating the role of anxiety, which emerging evidence indicates can mediate the nocebo effect. The review also emphasises the importance of preventing the nocebo effect, given its resistance to extinction, as well as the need for translational research, both of which are timely points. However, the review also raises two challenges for nocebo research. The first concerns the conceptualisation of expectancy, with Faasse's model appearing to combine expectancy and verbal information into a single node. Such an approach suggests that verbal information necessarily and only elicits nocebo effects via expectancy, which may not hold true. The second concerns distinguishing genuine nocebo effects from misattribution. Faasse's review intentionally focuses only on the former, but it is argued that understanding the latter is necessary to accurately estimate the true cost of the nocebo effect as well as for prioritising interventions to minimise non‐medication side effects. As such, in addition to Faasse's call for translational research—which I fully support—I propose that key nocebo research goals should be to understand how verbal information elicits nocebo effects outside of expectancy and to tease apart genuine nocebo effects and misattributed adverse symptoms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent research in moral psychology has highlighted how the current internal states of observers can influence their moral judgments of others' actions. In this article, we argue that an important internal state that serves such a function is the sense of control one has over one's own actions. Across four studies, we show that an individual's own current sense of control is positively associated with the intensity of moral judgments of the actions of others. We also show that this effect extends not only to judgments of rightness and wrongness (Study 1), but also to assignments of reward and punishment (Study 2). Finally, we demonstrate that this effect is based on the current experience of control by showing a moderation of the effect via motivational states (promotion; prevention) that either lead one to incorporate or disregard internal states when making judgments (Study 3) and by subtly manipulating participants' sense of control (Study 4). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We hypothesized that aversion to ambiguous situations and overreliance on bodily cues are positively related to people's tendency to make erroneous attributions of internal experiences. To test this prediction, we examined the relationship between the priming effect in the Affect Misattribution Procedure (AMP) and two personality traits: need for cognitive closure (NFCC) and body awareness (BA). Across four studies (total n = 3,538), priming in the AMP was weakly but reliably related to NFCC and BA. Further, direct ratings of the primes used in the AMP were positively related to NFCC and BA, and might partially explain the relation between the personality traits and priming in the AMP. The results advance knowledge about the AMP and the personality traits related to it, as well as about misattribution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When judging the value of a good, people may be overly influenced by the state in which they previously consumed it. For example, someone who tries out a new restaurant while very hungry may subsequently rate it as high quality, even if the food is mediocre. We produce a simple framework for this form of attribution bias that embeds a standard model of decision making as a special case. We test for attribution bias across two consumer decisions. First, we conduct an experiment in which we randomly manipulate the thirst of participants prior to consuming a new drink. Second, using data from thousands of amusement park visitors, we explore how pleasant weather during their most recent trip affects their stated and actual likelihood of returning. In both of these domains, we find evidence that people misattribute the influence of a temporary state to a stable quality of the consumption good. We provide evidence against several alternative accounts for our findings and discuss the broader implications of attribution bias in economic decision making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: Neuropsychiatric lupus (NPSLE) is challenging to diagnose. Many neuropsychiatric symptoms, such as headache and hallucinations, cannot be verified by tests or clinician assessment. We investigated prioritisations of methods for diagnosing NPSLE and attributional views., Methods: Thematic and comparative analyses were used to investigate how clinicians prioritise sources of evidence from a 13-item list, and explore discordances in clinician and patient perspectives on attribution., Results: We identified high levels of variability and uncertainty in clinicians' assessments of neuropsychiatric symptoms in SLE patients. In attributional decisions, clinicians (surveys n = 400, interviews n = 50) ranked clinicians' assessments above diagnostic tests (many of which they reported were often unenlightening in NPSLE). Clinicians ranked patient opinion of disease activity last, and 46% of patients reported never/rarely having been asked if their SLE was flaring, despite experienced patients often having "attributional insight". SLE Patients (surveys n = 676, interviews n = 27) estimated higher attributability of neuropsychiatric symptoms to the direct effects of SLE on the nervous system than clinicians (p < 0.001 for all symptoms excluding mania), and 24% reported that their self-assessment of disease activity was never/rarely concordant with their clinicians. Reports of misattributions were common, particularly of non-verifiable diffuse symptoms. Terminology differed between clinicians and influenced attribution estimates., Conclusion: NPSLE diagnostic tests and clinician assessments have numerous limitations, particularly in detecting diffuse neuropsychiatric symptoms that can be directly attributable and benefit from immunosuppression. Our findings suggest that incorporating patient attributional insights-although also subject to limitations-may improve attribution decision-making. Consensus regarding terminology and interpretations of "direct attributability" is required., (© The Author(s) 2023. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the British Society for Rheumatology.)

Introduction: Misattribution of motivational salience to non-salient (neutral) stimuli could be viewed as a hallmark of psychosis in schizophrenia. Studies have recently revealed increased subjective experience of emotional arousal (EA) to neutral social stimuli in paranoid schizophrenia psychosis, suggesting a misattribution of emotional salience to them. We examined this phenomenon directly by quantifying the level of EA subjectively attributed to low-arousal, neutral-valenced faces., Subjects and Methods: A task for EA attribution to neutral (in the context of affective) facial expressions was applied to 44 actively psychotic paranoid schizophrenia inpatients and 44 well-matched healthy controls., Results: Psychotic patients, compared with healthy controls, rated the neutral faces as more aroused (t (86) = 3.15, p =.001) thus misattributing emotional salience to them., Discussion: This finding supports the hypothesis that over-assignment of EA to neutral faces could be viewed as a subclinical affective mechanism of the clinically manifested experience of delusional perception., Conclusion: The study provides the first direct empirical evidence for misattribution of emotional salience in terms of over-attribution of EA to neutral faces during acute paranoid schizophrenia psychosis.

People make sense of their internal experiences by attributing them to objects (I am excited because he is here). This attribution decision influences one's opinion of the object (I like him). Misattribution occurs when the internal experience is triggered by one object (a prime), but attributed to another (a target). The present research used the Affect Misattribution Procedure to examine the influence of conceptual overlap between the prime and the target on misattribution of valenced internal experiences. For instance, would people misattribute the pleasure activated by a flower prime to a target flower more than to a person? We argue that the valence of the internal experience does not enter the attribution process alone, but is rather accompanied by semantic properties related to the object that generated the experience. Consequently, misattribution occurs more when prime and target are conceptually similar. Four experiments (Total N = 3183) supported that prediction, using diverse primes and targets. The results suggest that the semantic properties of the internal experience help guide the attribution process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Feelings and cognitions influence judgment through attribution. For instance, the attribution of positive feelings and cognitions to a stimulus leads to a positive judgment of that stimulus. We examined whether misattribution is moderated by the applicability of a distractor to the judgment question. For instance, when are people more likely to attribute to a target person the affective and cognitive experiences triggered by a kitten – when trying to judge the person's cuteness or trustworthiness? The kitten triggers experiences specifically relevant to cuteness, but people might more easily suspect the kitten's potential influence when judging cuteness rather than trustworthiness. Using the Affect Misattribution Procedure, we found that applicability increases the effect of misattribution on valenced judgments. The results emphasise the importance of specific information (rather than only general valence) in attribution and suggest that high applicability of distractors to the judgment question does not elicit effective correction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: There is ongoing debate regarding the degree to which, and the conditions under which, physiological, affect‐related (i.e., embodied) processes contribute to emotion information processing. Whereas most studies focus on clearly visible and intentional processing conditions, the present study targeted this issue by studying the implicit processing of emotional (angry, fearful, joyful, neutral) faces in a masked emotion misattribution procedure. That is, participants had to categorize neutral‐looking faces with regard to the allegedly felt emotion, which were preceded by a very briefly presented emotional expression. In addition to behavioral measures, facial muscle responses were obtained as an index of physiological, affect‐related processes. Linear mixed‐model mediation analyses confirmed that facial muscle responses partially mediated the behavioral responses to the masked primes in the misattribution task. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Post-stroke sensorimotor deficits impair voluntary movements. This impairment may alter a person’s sense of agency, which is the awareness of controlling one’s actions. A previous study showed that post-stroke patients incorrectly aligned themselves with others’ movements and proposed that their misattributions might be associated with their sensorimotor deficits. To investigate this hypothesis, the present study compared the agency dynamics in a post-stroke patient A (PA) with sensorimotor deficits, who rarely used her paretic upper limbs in her daily life to patient B (PB), who had a paretic upper limb with almost normal functions and activity. At the second, fourth, and eighth weeks following their strokes, PA and PB completed experiments where they performed horizontal movements while receiving visual feedback, and analyzed if the visual feedback represented their own or another’s movements. Consequently, PB made no misattributions each week; whereas, PA made incorrect self-attributions of other’s movements at the fourth week. Interestingly, this misattribution noticeably decreased at the eighth week, where PA, with an improved paretic upper limb, used her limb almost as much as before her stroke. These results suggest that the sense of agency alters according to the sensorimotor deficit severity and paretic upper limb activity.

Although the literature on the influence of memory on decisions is well developed, research on the effects of decision making on memory is rather sparse and scattered. Choice-supportive misremembering (i.e., misremembering choice-related information that boosts the chosen option and/or demotes the foregone options) has been observed in several studies and has the potential to affect future choices. Nonetheless, no attempt has been made to review the relevant literature, categorize the different types of choice-supportive misremembering observed, and critically appraise the existing evidence and proposed explanations. Thus, starting from a new theoretically motivated and empirically grounded taxonomy, we review the current research. Our taxonomy classifies choice-supportive misremembering into four conceptually distinct types: misattribution is when information is attributed to the wrong source, fact distortion when the facts are remembered in a distorted manner, false memory when items that were not part of the original decision scenarios are remembered as presented and, finally, selective forgetting is when information is selectively forgotten. After assessing the impact of various potentially moderating factors, we evaluate the evidence for each type of misremembering and conclude that the support for the phenomenon is solid in relation to misattribution when recognition memory is assessed, but significantly weaker for the other three types, and when other memory tests are used to assess memory. Finally, we review the cognitive and emotional explanations proposed for choice-supportive misremembering in the light of the available evidence and identify the main gaps in the current knowledge and the more promising avenues for future research.

Background: Clinical trials that test food-based interventions frequently suffer from ineffective blinding of study participants which can reduce the statistical power of reported outcomes, and can lead to poor compliance. This study used descriptive sensory analysis with highly trained evaluators, and well-validated statistical techniques to develop a protocol to mask the consumption of phytochemical-rich broccoli sprout extracts (BSEs) for the use in clinical studies seeking to address a variety of conditions. Methods: A trained sensory team identified foods and beverages that, when mixed with a BSE, showed promise in masking the extract’s flavors. Established sensory evaluation techniques were then implemented by a group of seven trained descriptive analysis panelists to deconstruct the sensory profile of each sample (BSE suspended in a delivery vehicle). The sensory characteristics were then clustered into dimensions based upon factor analysis and principal component analysis, followed by a test-retest protocol, to match complementary flavors from liquid-based food sources that would be readily available in the cultural context of our clinical test sites. Results: Clustering of sensory attributes (dimensions) was identified and was both negatively and positively associated with the perception of glucoraphanin-rich and sulforaphane-rich BSE. Four dimensions were able to explain 73% of the sample set variability. Pineapple juice was identified as a complementary flavor that was most effective in masking broccoli complex attributes, and lime and ginger were effective in masking other “harsh” or objectionable flavor components of the BSE. Conclusion: Effective beverages worked by invoking “flavor misattribution”, wherein a food (broccoli extract) with an objectionable sensory characteristic was paired with a vector in which that characteristic was an acceptable component of the vector’s flavor profile. Further development of this concept with an unlimited palate could be used to develop optimal carriers for food product development and/or to refine the approach for clinical trials based upon local taste preferences.

In a forced compliance situation, Scheier and Carver have shown that making high private self-consciousness salient through exposure to a mirror inhibits the arousal of dissonance and the subsequent attitude change. Based on these results, the aim of our study is to examine an alternate theoretical interpretation of the absence of attitude change. From our point of view, the mirror could have the status of a misattribution cue, thus maintaining the arousal. To test this hypothesis within the induced hypocrisy paradigm, participants first completed the private self-consciousness scale. Then they took part in one of the following conditions: (1) no mirror/no hypocrisy, (2) no mirror/hypocrisy, and (3) mirror/hypocrisy. Behavioral change and psychological discomfort were measured. Results indicated that participants in the mirror/hypocrisy condition were the most inclined to change and reported the greatest psychological discomfort. These results revealed that participants experienced dissonance when exposed to the mirror and support the hypothesis of misattribution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although implicit tests of positive and negative affect exist, implicit measures of distinct emotional states are scarce. Three experiments examined whether a novel implicit emotion-assessment task, the rating of emotion expressed in abstract images, would reveal distinct emotional states. In Experiment 1, participants exposed to a sadness-inducing story inferred more sadness, and less happiness, in abstract images. In Experiment 2, an anger-provoking interaction increased anger ratings. In Experiment 3, compared to neutral images, spider images increased fear ratings in spider-fearful participants but not in controls. In each experiment, the implicit task indicated elevated levels of the target emotion and did not indicate elevated levels of non-target negative emotions; the task thus differentiated among emotional states of the same valence. Correlations also supported the convergent and discriminant validity of the implicit task. Supporting the possibility that heuristic processes underlie the ratings, group differences were stronger among those who responded relatively quickly. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Objective: 1. To describe insight in a large sample of schizophrenia subjects from a multidimensional point of view, including unawareness of general insight dimensions as well as unawareness and misattribution of particular symptoms. 2. To explore the relationship between unawareness and clinical and socio-demographic variables.Methods: 248 schizophrenia patients were assessed with the Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale (PANSS, five factor model of Lindenmayer) and the full Scale of Unawareness of Mental Disorder (SUMD). Bivariate associations and multiple linear regression analyses were used to investigate the relationship between unawareness, symptoms and socio-demographic variables.Results: Around 40% of the sample showed unawareness of mental disorder, of the need for medication and of the social consequences. Levels of unawareness and misattribution of particular symptoms varied considerably. General unawareness dimensions showed small significant correlations with positive, cognitive and excitement factors of psychopathology, whereas these symptom factors showed higher correlations with unawareness of particular symptoms. Similarly, regression models showed a small significant predictive value of positive symptoms in the three general unawareness dimensions while a moderate one in the prediction of particular symptoms. Misattribution showed no significant correlations with any symptom factors.Conclusions: Results confirm that insight in schizophrenia is a multi-phased phenomenon and that unawareness into particular symptoms varies widely. The overlap between unawareness dimensions and psychopathology is small and seems to be restricted to positive and cognitive symptoms, supporting the accounts from cognitive neurosciences that suggest that besides basic cognition poor insight may be in part a failure of self-reflection or strategic metacognition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the misattribution of organs in traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) and the communication problems this creates when discussing Chinese medicine with patients or non-TCM healthcare professionals. This mainly involves confusion around such organs as the pancreas, spleen, adrenal glands, gonads and the kidneys. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Context: The implicit association test (IAT), a new tool for yoga research is presented. Implicit measures could be used in those situations where (1) The construct is difficult to self-report, (2) there is a threat of social desirability. Clinically, we can assess cognitive dissonance by evaluating incongruence between implicit and explicit measures. Explicit preferences are self-reported. Implicit preferences are what we inherently believe, often without our conscious awareness. Aims: The primary objective of this study is to provide a bird′s eye view of the field, implicit cognition, with emphasis on the IAT and the secondary objective is to illustrate through an example of our study to develop an implicit tool to assess implicit preference toward yoga. Settings and Design: A total of 5 independent samples of total 69 students undergoing short and long-term yoga courses in a Yoga University were assessed for their implicit and explicit preferences towards yoga. Materials and Methods: The yoga-IAT (Y-IAT), explicit self-rating scale was administered through computers using the Inquisit program by Millisecond Software. Experimental and scoring materials are provided. Statistical Analysis Used: Data were extracted using recommended scoring algorithm and descriptive statistics highlighting basic psychometric properties of Y-IAT are presented along with its congruence with explicit self-measure. Results: A moderate preference toward yoga was detected, with a lower implicit-explicit congruence, reflecting possible confound of social desirability in the self-report of preference toward yoga. Conclusions: Implicit measures may be used in the yoga field to assess constructs, which are difficult to self-report or may have social desirability threat. Y-IAT may be used to evaluate implicit preference toward yoga.