This research tests whether the perception of red in an achievement context evokes avoidance behavior without conscious awareness and also examines the context specificity of the hypothesized red effect. In Experiment 1, participants were briefly shown red or green on the cover of an analogies test that they would ostensibly take (an achievement context) or rate on likability of (a nonachievement context) in an adjacent lab. Those shown red, relative to those shown green, knocked fewer times on the door of the adjacent lab in the achievement context; no red-green difference in knocking was observed in the nonachievement context. In Experiment 2, participants were briefly shown red, green, or gray on the cover of an IQ test that they would ostensibly take. Those shown red moved their body away from the test cover to a greater degree than did those shown green or gray. This research contributes to incipient work on color psychology and to the more established literature on the automatic link between evaluation and behavior.

Interoception is the sense of the physiological condition of the entire body. Impaired interoception has been associated with aberrant activity of the insula in major depressive disorder (MDD) during heartbeat perception tasks. Despite clinical relevance, studies investigating interoceptive impairments in MDD have never been reviewed systematically according to the guidelines of the PRISMA protocol, and therefore we collated studies that assessed accuracy in detecting heartbeat sensations (interoceptive accuracy, IAc) in MDD (databases: PubMed/Medline, PsycINFO, and PsycARTICLES). Out of 389 records, six studies met the inclusion criteria. The main findings suggest that (i) moderately depressed samples exhibit the largest interoceptive deficits as compared with healthy adults. (ii) difficulties in decision making and low affect intensity are correlated with low IAc, and (iii) IAc seems to normalize in severely depressed subjects. These associations may be confounded by sex, anxiety or panic disorder, and intake of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors. Our findings have implications for the development of interoceptive treatments that might relieve MDD-related symptoms or prevent relapse in recurrent depression by targeting the interoceptive nervous system.

Practitioners and researchers alike face the challenge that different sources report inconsistent information regarding child maltreatment. The present study capitalizes on concordance and discordance between different sources and probes applicability of a multisource approach to data from three perspectives on maltreatment-Child Protection Services (CPS) records, caregivers, and children. The sample comprised 686 participants in early childhood (3- to 8-year-olds; n = 275) or late childhood/adolescence (9- to 16-year-olds; n = 411), 161 from two CPS sites and 525 from the community oversampled for psychosocial risk. We established three components within a factor-analytic approach: the shared variance between sources on presence of maltreatment (convergence), nonshared variance resulting from the child's own perspective, and the caregiver versus CPS perspective. The shared variance between sources was the strongest predictor of caregiver- and self-reported child symptoms. Child perspective and caregiver versus CPS perspective mainly added predictive strength of symptoms in late childhood/adolescence over and above convergence in the case of emotional maltreatment, lack of supervision, and physical abuse. By contrast, convergence almost fully accounted for child symptoms for failure to provide. Our results suggest consistent information from different sources reporting on maltreatment is, on average, the best indicator of child risk.

Zusammenfassung. Lob nach Erfolg und eine neutrale Reaktion nach Misserfolg können der Person, auf die dieses Verhalten gerichtet ist, nahe legen, dass die sanktionierende Person ihre Begabung als gering einschätzt. Dagegen können neutrale Reaktionen nach Erfolg und Tadel nach Misserfolg zur Annahme führen, dass man sich als begabt wahrgenommen fühlt (s. Meyer, 1992 ). In zwei Studien wurden Bedingungen solcher scheinbar paradoxen Auswirkungen von Lob und Tadel untersucht. Im ersten Experiment wurden Annahmen über die Ursachen und Gründe von Lob und Tadel erfasst. Lob und Tadel führt bei Individuen, die Sanktionsverhalten als Ausdruck von Sympathie betrachteten, seltener zu “paradoxen Auswirkungen“ als bei Personen, die Sanktionen als fähigkeitsthematisch einstuften. Studie 2 benutzte eine Priming-Prozedur. Versuchspersonen, die vor der Erfassung der Fähigkeitsperzeptionen mit einem Bild mit sozialer Thematik konfrontiert waren, zeigten seltener “paradoxe“ Fähigkeitseinschätzungen als Individuen, die sich vorausgehend mit einem leistungsthematischen Bild auseinandergesetzt hatten.

An external criterion was assessed to test whether depressives have distorted perceptions of covariation information and whether their attributions are consistent with this information. Students’ actual and self-perceived grades, depression status, and attributions for failures were assessed. Furthermore, partici pants estimated average grades. Generally, self-perceived own past grades were inflated. Depressed students and those with low grades distorted their own grades (but not the average grade) more to their favor than individuals low in depression and those with high grades. Depression went along with lower actual grades and with internal, stable, and global failure attributions. Mood differences in attributions were not due to differences in previous grades. Depressed individuals drew (unrealistically) more depressogenic causal inferences when they perceived average grades to be low than when average grades were perceived to be high. However, they (realistically) attributed failure more in a depressogenic fashion than did nondepressives when their own grade history was low.