Dominant Response Tendencies Research Articles

Personal control and cognitive flexibility: Does uncontrollability reduce flexible shifting of attention?

Acting and learning in unpredictable and volatile environments requires cognitive flexibility. However, the ability to flexibly adapt to the changing task environment can be reduced when people experience uncontrollability due to exposure to action – outcome non-contingency. In this research, we propose that flexible shifting of attention is affected by experiences of uncontrollability. In two studies, a lack of control was experimentally induced and subsequently cognitive flexibility was assessed either with a Wisconsin Card Sorting Task (Study 1) or a cognitive set-shifting paradigm (Study 2). Results showed a reduced tendency to flexibly shift attention and to overcome dominant response tendencies amongst participants who experienced uncontrollability. Modulation of the stability-flexibility balance by situationally induced experiences of uncontrollability is discussed.

Are there dominant response tendencies for social reactions? Trust trumps mistrust-evidence from a Dominant Behavior Measure (DBM).

The question of whether individuals are more prone to trust or to mistrust has increasingly interested economists and psychologists in recent years. To investigate whether people have an initial response tendency to trust versus mistrust, we developed a novel paradigm-the Dominant Behavior Measure (DBM). Capitalizing on decades of meticulous research in basic cognitive psychology (i.e., bilingual studies, Stroop paradigm), we designed a task to measure the dominance of reactions in the social realm. Participants engaged in a series of trust games that involved switching between trusting and mistrusting two trustworthy counterparts and two untrustworthy counterparts, identified by color (while ignoring a distractor name) or by name (when no color was presented). Like other dominant response tendencies (e.g., participant's first language), trust is faster, harder to switch to, and more interfering/facilitating than mistrust (Experiments 1-7). The dominance of trust holds in various social contexts-certainty of counterpart's un/trustworthiness (Experiments 4a-4c), unfamiliar counterparts (Experiments 5 and 6), counterparts from one's in-group versus out-group (Experiment 6), and negative framing of trust (Experiment 7)-showing that the dominant tendency to trust people (but not nonsocial objects, Experiment 8) is context-independent and robust. We rule out alternative explanations such as asymmetric payoff (Experiments 2 and 4b), familiarity and strength of association (Experiments 5 and 6), demand characteristics (Experiment 7), and positivity bias (Experiment 8). Introducing the DBM as a novel paradigm, we show that trust dominates mistrust and discuss the potential of this paradigm to determine dominant responses in manifold social domains. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Supplemental Material for Are There Dominant Response Tendencies for Social Reactions? Trust Trumps Mistrust—Evidence From a Dominant Behavior Measure (DBM)

Supplemental Material for Are There Dominant Response Tendencies for Social Reactions? Trust Trumps Mistrust—Evidence From a Dominant Behavior Measure (DBM)

Self-control and its influence on global/local processing: An investigation of the role of frontal alpha asymmetry and dispositional approach tendencies.

People often inhibit or override their dominant response tendencies in order to complete tasks successfully. Exerting such self-control has been shown to influence attentional breadth differently depending on approach-motivated tendencies, as indexed by individuals' behavioral activation system (BAS) scores. Approach motivation and attentional breadth have previously been associated with frontal alpha asymmetry (i.e., lateralized cortical activity in the frontal regions) where greater left-frontal activation is associated with greater approach motivation and reduced attentional breadth. The process model of self-control posits that exercising self-control leads to a subsequent increase in approach behavior in high BAS individuals, and this could be due to a shift towards left-hemisphere-frontal processing. This was the first study to examine both frontal asymmetry and attentional breadth before and after exercising self-control in low and high BAS individuals. Greater BAS, and greater difficulty exercising self-control, both positively related to more narrowed attentional breadth after completing the manipulation relative to before, but only after exercising self-control. However, breadth of attention and changes in attentional breadth were unrelated to frontal asymmetry, suggesting that the influence of self-control on individuals' attentional breadth was not due to changes in frontal activation patterns.

Noninvasive stimulation over the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex facilitates the inhibition of motivated responding.

Self-control involves the inhibition of dominant response tendencies. Most research on self-control has examined the inhibition of appetitive tendencies, and recent evidence suggests that stimulation to increase right frontal cortical activity helps to inhibit approach-motivated responses. The current experiment paired an approach-avoidance joystick task with transcranial DC stimulation to test the effects of brain stimulation on the inhibition of both approach and avoidance response tendencies. Anodal stimulation over the right/cathodal stimulation over the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (compared to the opposite pattern of stimulation or sham stimulation) caused participants to initiate motive-incongruent movements more quickly, thereby suggesting a shared neural mechanism for the self-control of both approach- and avoidance-motivated impulses. (PsycINFO Database Record

A preliminary investigation of sex differences in associations between emotion regulation difficulties and higher-order cognitive abilities

The present study sought to clarify the cognitive correlates of emotion regulation difficulties (ERD). Further, because prior evidence suggests sex differences in emotion regulation, sex was examined as a moderator of associations between cognitive abilities and ERD. Participants (N=154) completed self-report measures of ERD, and were administered neuropsychological tests assessing crystallized and fluid intelligence, as well as various components of executive functioning. Bivariate correlations and results from regression analyses suggested sex-dependent associations among cognitive processes and ERD. For men, inhibition of dominant response tendencies was associated with lower ERD, whereas for women, a host of executive abilities (e.g., greater inhibition, cognitive flexibility, semantic processing, abstract reasoning) were associated with greater ERD. Implications for the neurocognitive conceptualization of emotion dysregulation will be discussed.

How minimal grade goals and self-control capacity interact in predicting test grades

The present research examined the prediction of school students' grades in an upcoming math test via their minimal grade goals (i.e., the minimum grade in an upcoming test one would be satisfied with). Due to its significance for initiating and maintaining goal-directed behavior, self-control capacity was expected to moderate the relation between students' minimal grade goals and their actual grades. Self-control capacity was defined as the dispositional capacity to override or alter one's dominant response tendencies. Prior to a scheduled math test, 172 vocational track students indicated their minimal grade goal for the test and completed a measure of self-control capacity. The test grade was assessed at a second time of measurement. As expected, minimal grade goals more strongly predicted the actual test grades the higher the students' self-control capacity. Implications can be seen in terms of optimizing the prediction and advancement of academic performance.

The inhibition of imitative and overlearned responses: a functional double dissociation

Neuropsychological research has established that the inhibition of dominant response tendencies is a function of the prefrontal cortex. These inhibitory mechanisms are tested using tasks like the Stroop task, in which the prepotency of the dominant response is based on a learned relationship of stimulus and response. However, it has also been reported that patients with prefrontal lesions may have problems inhibiting imitative responses. The question arises of whether the inhibition of overlearned and imitative responses entails the same or different functional mechanisms and cortical networks. In a recent neuropsychological study with prefrontal patients we found first evidence for such a dissociation. The present fMRI study further investigated this question by directly comparing brain activity in the inhibition of overlearned and imitative response tendencies. It emerges that response inhibition in the two tasks involves different neural networks. While the inhibition of overlearned responses requires a fronto-parietal network involved in interference control and task management, the inhibition of imitative responses involves cortical areas that are required to distinguish between self-generated and externally triggered motor representations. The only frontal brain area that showed an overlap was located in the right inferior frontal gyrus and is probably related to the generation of the stop signal.

Disorganisation in schizophrenia need not result from a failure to inhibit dominant response tendencies

Schizophrenic disorganisation syndrome is usually considered to be associated with poor performance on frontal lobe tasks, specifically those that require suppression of dominant responses. Two cases are presented who do not fulfil this expectation Despite severe disorganisation of speech and behaviour these patients performed well on several executive tasks in which dominant responses had to be suppressed. One of the patients showed significantly less interference on the Stroop task than normal controls. In contrast, both patients performed badly on a sentence completion task in which production of the dominant response was appropriate. These observations imply that these patients were able to exert ‘‘top-down’’ supervisory control in situations where it was necessary to inhibit dominant response tendencies. We propose that, although many patients with schizophrenia and intellectual deficits do show disorganised behaviour associated with a defective supervisory system, there are others in whom this behaviour is a consequence of the failure of ‘‘bottom-up’’ control by context. Our cases indicate that disorganisation in schizophrenia may be associated with different underlying cognitive deficits.

Major League Baseball Performance as a Function of Being Traded

The proposition that increased generalized drive interferes with complex task performance by enhancing a dominant response tendency (Zajonc, 1965) was tested in a nonreactive, real-life setting involving a natural and meaningful task. Batting performance (batting average and slugging percentage) of 59 major league baseball players was examined under four different motivational or drive conditions caused by being traded. A pattern of statistically significant performance changes in directions consistent with drive theory predictions (low drive-increased performance; high drive-decreased performance) emerged. The quality of the players and teams involved was unrelated to the magnitude of this effect, although a predicted interaction with player experience was borne out and supports a drive theory analysis. Several less viable interpretations of the data (e.g., statistical regression) are considered. Implications for sports psychology and applications to professional baseball are discussed.

Social facilitation: A self-presentational view.

This article offers a self-presentat ional account of performance in others' presence. The account attributes social facilitation to the performer's active regulation of a public image, and it attributes social impairment to embarrassment following loss of public esteem. Individuals lose esteem by making numerous errors on difficult tasks. This self-presentational analysis is tested in a study of context effects in verbal learning. Two tasks are studied: a difficult task that includes a few simple items and an easy task that includes a few complex items. Consistent with the self-presentational analysis (but not with drive theories of social facilitation), the presence of an observer impairs the learning of simple items if those items are embedded within a difficult task. Also, an observer's presence does not impair the learning of complex items if those items are embedded within an easy task. Questionnaire responses suggest a naturally occurring confound between task difficulty and perceived failure. The influence of the presence of others on individual behavior, a classic topic in social psychology, was studied extensively in the early 1900s (Dashiell, 1935). Contemporary interest in the topic derives from Zajonc's proposal (1965) that the presence of others acts as a source of generalized drive (Spence, 1956), and energizes the dominant response tendency to the exclusion of competing responses. Cottrell (1972) amended Zajonc's theory, contending that the presence of others arouses apprehension over evaluations. He claimed evaluation apprehension as a source of generalized drive. This article proposes an alternative analysis of behavior in others' presence. Following Cottrell, the analysis attributes the influence of others' presence to the potential that presence gives them for evaluation. But Cottrell seemed to ignore the fact that the object of evaluation is the individual's perThis article is based on a dissertation submitted to Duke University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the PhD. I am grateful to Alan Levy, my dissertation adviser, for his guidance and to Mike Gottesman for help with this research.

Visual evoked potential correlates of information processing deficits in chronic alcoholics.

Chronic alcohol abuse has been postulated to lead to brain dysfunction. Neuropsychological tests have indicated that alcohol affects some intellectual abilities more than others (Goodwin and Hill, 1975; Kleinknecht and Goldstein, 1972); specifically visuo-spatial and visual-motor skills are impaired, while verbal skills appear to remain intact. In addition, alcoholics are reported to have difficulty in tasks requiring abstract reasoning. They have difficulty extracting the relevant dimensions of a stimulus array, particularly if the relevance of these dimensions changes (Oscar-Berman, 1973; 1978) and hence they are known to perseverate dominant response tendencies. These characteristics have been reported in patients with frontal brain damage (Oscar-Berman, 1973; 1978; Parsons, 1975; Luria, 1966; 1973; Pribram, 1973; 1975).

Passive avoidance deficit with septal lesions: Disturbance of response inhibition or response acquisition?

Interference with septal function by injection of a local anaesthetic (lidocaine hydrochloride) bilaterally into the lateral septal area of male rats impaired acquisition of a passive avoidance response to an electrified water spout. This effect does not appear to be due to an impairment of performance since injections of lidocaine into the lateral septum of rats which had previously acquired the passive avoidance tendency did not impair avoidance behaviour. In another experiment, injections of lidocaine during passive avoidance training did attenuate the tendency of rats to avoid the spout 24 hr later even though tere was no impairment of septal function at the time of testing. These results are interpreted as indicating that the septal area is involved in learning, and specifically in the establishment of inhibitory processes responsible for preventing a previously dominant response tendency from expressing itself behaviourally.

Children's two-choice learning of predominantly alternating and repeating sequences

Sixty-four nursery Ss and 64 kindergarten Ss guessed which of two lights would come on for 100 acquisition and 100 transfer trials. There were four groups in acquisition, differing in repetition probability ( π 1) level (.1 or .9) and age. For transfer, π 1 was reversed for half the Ss in each acquisition group, resulting in four groups at each age level (nonreversed .1-.1, non-reversed .9-.9, reversed .1-.9, and reversed .9-.1). Both nursery and kindergarten Ss exhibited dominant response tendencies; the nursery Ss had a tendency to repeat their response, while the kindergarten Ss had a tendency to alternate theirs. The nursery Ss' responses were more dependent upon the event sequence than previous findings have indicated. While both age groups were able to follow the highly predictable event sequence, the kindergarten Ss followed both the repeating and alternating patterns better than the nursery Ss. For all Ss, a repeating sequence was easier to follow than an alternating one. Response tendencies established during acquisition were extremely resistant to change; except for the .1-.9 kindergarten group, the effect of previous experience was not overcome in the 100 transfer trials. It was suggested that the kindergarten Ss performed better than the nursery Ss because they were superior to the nursery Ss in response inhibition. Since a repeating response tendency requires fewer inhibitory responses than an alternating one, it was further suggested that a dominant response tendency is an indicator of the level of response complexity a child can handle when processing information.