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The present study adapted the General Attitudes toward Artificial Intelligence Scale (GAAIS) to Turkish and investigated the impact of personality traits, artificial intelligence anxiety, and demographics on attitudes toward artificial intelligence. The sample consisted of 259 female (74%) and 91 male (26%) individuals aged between 18 and 51 (Mean = 24.23). Measures taken were demographics, the Ten-Item Personality Inventory, the Artificial Intelligence Anxiety Scale, and the General Attitudes toward Artificial Intelligence Scale. The Turkish GAAIS had good validity and reliability. Hierarchical Multiple Linear Regression Analyses showed that positive attitudes toward artificial intelligence were significantly predicted by the level of computer use (β = 0.139, p = 0.013), level of knowledge about artificial intelligence (β = 0.119, p = 0.029), and AI learning anxiety (β = −0.172, p = 0.004). Negative attitudes toward artificial intelligence were significantly predicted by agreeableness (β = 0.120, p = 0.019), AI configuration anxiety (β = −0.379, p < 0.001), and AI learning anxiety (β = −0.211, p < 0.001). Personality traits, AI anxiety, and demographics play important roles in attitudes toward AI. Results are discussed in light of the previous research and theoretical explanations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Acceptance of Artificial Intelligence (AI) may be predicted by individual psychological correlates, examined here. Study 1 reports confirmatory validation of the General Attitudes towards Artificial Intelligence Scale (GAAIS) following initial validation elsewhere. Confirmatory Factor Analysis confirmed the two-factor structure (Positive, Negative) and showed good convergent and divergent validity with a related scale. Study 2 tested whether psychological factors (Big Five personality traits, corporate distrust, and general trust) predicted attitudes towards AI. Introverts had more positive attitudes towards AI overall, likely because of algorithm appreciation. Conscientiousness and agreeableness were associated with forgiving attitudes towards negative aspects of AI. Higher corporate distrust led to negative attitudes towards AI overall, while higher general trust led to positive views of the benefits of AI. The dissociation between general trust and corporate distrust may reflect the public's attributions of the benefits and drawbacks of AI. Results are discussed in relation to theory and prior findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Valence-specific laterality effects have been frequently obtained in facial emotion perception but not in vocal emotion perception. We report a dichotic listening study further examining whether valence-specific laterality effects generalise to vocal emotions. Based on previous literature, we tested whether valence-specific laterality effects were dependent on blocked presentation of the emotion conditions, on the naturalness of the emotional stimuli, or on listener sex. We presented happy and sad sentences, paired with neutral counterparts, dichotically in an emotion localisation task, with vocal stimuli being preceded by verbal labels indicating target emotions. The measure was accuracy. When stimuli of the same emotion were presented as a block, a valence-specific laterality effect was demonstrated, but only in original stimuli and not morphed stimuli. There was a separate interaction with listener sex. We interpret our findings as suggesting that the valence-specific laterality hypothesis is supported only in certain circumstances. We discuss modulating factors, and we consider whether the mechanisms underlying those factors may be attentional or experiential in nature. (Contains 1 table and 2 figures.)

The valence hypothesis suggests that the right hemisphere is specialised for negative emotions and the left hemisphere is specialised for positive emotions (Silberman & Weingartner, 1986). It is unclear to what extent valence-specific effects in facial emotion perception depend upon the gender of the perceiver. To explore this question 46 participants completed a free view lateralised emotion perception task which involved judging which of two faces expressed a particular emotion. Eye fixations of 24 of the participants were recorded using an eye tracker. A significant valence-specific laterality effect was obtained, with positive emotions more accurately identified when presented to the right of centre, and negative emotions more accurately identified when presented to the left of centre. The valence-specific laterality effect did not depend on the gender of the perceiver. Analysis of the eye tracking data showed that males made more fixations while recognising the emotions and that the left-eye was fixated substantially more than the right-eye during emotion perception. Finally, in a control condition where both faces were identical, but expressed a faint emotion, the participants were significantly more likely to select the right side when the emotion label was positive. This finding adds to evidence suggesting that valence effects in facial emotion perception are not only caused by the perception of the emotion but by other processes. (Contains 2 tables and 5 figures.)

There have been inconsistent findings regarding emotion identification abilities in people with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Some researchers have found global or emotion-specific impairments, while others have not. The present work reports findings from an experiment testing the ability of children with ASD (primarily Asperger syndrome) to identify basic vocal emotions. Participants identified the emotion present in pseudo-sentences spoken with affective prosody (anger, fear, happiness, sadness). Participants with ASD, at secondary school, showed a modest, non-significant performance deficit compared to typically developing controls. This minor deficit was dependent on a difference in verbal ability. There was no evidence that children with ASD had emotion-specific or valence-specific deficits. By-items correlations showed that stimuli whose emotions were difficult to identify for children with ASD were also difficult to identify for controls, while confusion matrices showed similar error patterns across groups. The results are discussed in relation to the amygdala theory of autism. (Contains 2 tables.)

The majority of studies have demonstrated a right hemisphere (RH) advantage for the perception of emotions. Other studies have found that the involvement of each hemisphere is valence specific, with the RH better at perceiving negative emotions and the LH better at perceiving positive emotions [Reuter-Lorenz, P., & Davidson, R.J. (1981) Differential contributions of the 2 cerebral hemispheres to the perception of happy and sad faces. "Neuropsychologia," 19, 609-613]. To account for valence laterality effects in emotion perception we propose an "expectancy" hypothesis which suggests that valence effects are obtained when the top-down expectancy to perceive an emotion outweighs the strength of bottom-up perceptual information enabling the discrimination of an emotion. A dichotic listening task was used to examine alternative explanations of valence effects in emotion perception. Emotional sentences (spoken in a happy or sad tone of voice), and morphed-happy and morphed-sad sentences (which blended a neutral version of the sentence with the pitch of the emotion sentence) were paired with neutral versions of each sentence and presented dichotically. A control condition was also used, consisting of two identical neutral sentences presented dichotically, with one channel arriving before the other by 7 ms. In support of the RH hypothesis there was a left ear advantage for the perception of sad and happy emotional sentences. However, morphed sentences showed no ear advantage, suggesting that the RH is specialised for the perception of genuine emotions and that a laterality effect may be a useful tool for the detection of fake emotion. Finally, for the control condition we obtained an interaction between the expected emotion and the effect of ear lead. Participants tended to select the ear that received the sentence first, when they expected a "sad" sentence, but not when they expected a "happy" sentence. The results are discussed in relation to the different theoretical explanations of valence laterality effects in emotion perception.

This study comprised two experiments to examine the distracting effects of advertisement familiarity, location, and onset on the performance of a selective attention task. In Exp. 1, familiar advertisements presented in peripheral vision disrupted selective attention when the attention task was more demanding, suggesting that the distracting effect of advertisements is a product of task demands and advertisement familiarity and location. In Exp. 2, the onset of the advertisement shortly before, or after, the attention task captured attention and disrupted attentional performance. The onset of the advertisement before the attention task reduced target response time without an increase in errors and therefore facilitated performance. Despite being instructed to ignore the advertisements, the participants were able to recall a substantial proportion of the familiar advertisements. Implications for the presentation of advertisements during human--computer interaction were discussed. DOI 10.2466/PMS.110.3.941-960

Masturbation is a common human behaviour. Compared to other unimanual behaviours it has unique properties, including increased sexual and emotional arousal, and privacy. Self-reported hand preference for masturbation was examined in 104 left-handed and 103 right-handed women, and 100 left-handed and 99 right-handed men. Handedness (modified Edinburgh Handedness Inventory, EHI), footedness, eyedness, and cheek kissing preferences were also measured. Seventy nine percent used their dominant hand (always/usually) for masturbation, but left-handers (71.5%) were less consistently lateralized to use their dominant hand than right-handers (86.5%). Hand preference for masturbation correlated more strongly with handedness (EHI), than with footedness, eyedness, or cheek preference. There was no difference in masturbation frequency between left- and right-handers, but men masturbated more frequently than women, and more women (75%) than men (33%) masturbated with sex aids. For kissing the preferred cheek of an emotionally close person from the viewer's perspective, left-handers showed a left-cheek preference, and right-handers a weaker right-cheek preference. The results suggest that hemispheric asymmetries in emotion do not influence hand preference for masturbation but may promote a leftward shift in cheek kissing. In all, masturbation is lateralized in a similar way to other manual motor behaviours in left-handed and right-handed men and women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Warning signals enhance psychomotor performance by optimising preparation for the arrival of an event. Recent evidence, however, suggests that a warning signal can also disrupt attentional preparation by interfering with the process of preparing. It was hypothesised that a warning signal consisting of a change to the task relevant items (array onset) may be more effective than a traditional warning signal consisting of the arrival, or removal, of a bar-cue which is independent of the task array. In three experiments array onset was a more effective warning signal than the bar-cue because reaction times were significantly faster without an increase in errors. In addition, an auditory warning signal resulted in faster reaction time than the bar-cue but in performance equivalent to that with an onset warning signal. Thus, the superiority of an auditory warning signal, reported by Davis and Green, was not found, when the interference of the visual warning signal with preparation was reduced. These results suggest that a visual warning signal consisting of a change to the stimulus array is more effective than an event independent from the stimulus array.

This study examines the role of auditory information sources in spoken language in the disambiguation of sentences. The study indicates that listeners use parsodic cues, transmitted by pitch, intonation, and pause duration, in addition to syntactic information while processing the meaning of an unclear sentence.

Perceptual judgements concerning the magnitude of a stimulus feature are typically influenced more by the left side of the stimulus than by the right side. This research examined whether the leftward bias also applies to judgements of the attractiveness of abstract visual patterns. Across four experiments participants chose between two versions of a stimulus which either had an attractive left side or an attractive right side. Experiments 1 and 2 presented artworks and experiments 3 and 4 presented wallpaper designs. In each experiment participants showed a significant bias to choose the stimulus with an attractive left side more than the stimulus with an attractive right side. The leftward bias emerged at age 10/11, was not caused by a systematic asymmetry in the perception of colourfulness or complexity, and was stronger when the difference in attractiveness between the left and right sides was larger. The results are relevant to the aesthetics of product and packaging design and show that leftward biases extend to the perceptual judgement of everyday items. Possible causes of the leftward bias for attractiveness judgements are discussed and it is suggested that the size of the bias may not be a measure of the degree of hemispheric specialization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]