Jill turns 40. Should this change how she evaluates her life, and would a similar change occur when she turns 41? Milestone age (e.g., 30, 40, 50)--a naturally occurring feature in personal timelines--has received much attention is popular culture, but little attention in academic inquiry. This study examines whether milestone birthdays change the way people evaluate their life. We show that li...

A major issue in elementary cognition and information processinghas been whether rapidsearch of short-term memory or a visual display can terminate when a predesignated target is found or whether it must proceed until all items are examined. This study summarizes past and recent theoretical results on the ability of self-terminatingand exhaustive models topredict differences in slopes between p...

Evaluative conditioning (EC) is defined as the change in the evaluation of a conditioned stimulus (CS) due to its pairing with a positive or negative unconditioned stimulus (US). Although several individual studies suggest that EC is unaffected by unreinforced presentations of the CS without the US, a recent meta-analysis indicates that EC effects are less pronounced for post-extinction measure...

Evaluative arguments are pervasive in natural human communication. In countless situations people attempt to advise or persuade their interlocutors that something is desirable (vs. undesirable) or right (vs. wrong). With the proliferation of on-line systems serving as personal advisors and assistants, there is a pressing need to develop general and testable computational models for generating a...

We examined several determinants of interjudge agreement on personality traits. The findings, which were cross-validated in two samples, suggest that agreement is a function of four factors: which Big Five content domain the trait represents, how observable relevant behaviors are, how evaluative the trait is, and whether the self is one of the judges. Agreement was highest for traits related to...

The relationship between flavor evaluative conditioning and contingency awareness was examined intwo experiments using flavored drinks. In Experiment 1, one flavor was always paired with sugar and the other with bitter tween (polysorbate20) during conditioning. In a subsequent test phase, participants tasted the two flavors, and their evaluative ratings indicated an overall preference for the s...

Evaluative morphology (esp. augmentatives and diminutives) has been extensively discussed in the field of morphological typology (see e.g. Stump, 1993; Bauer, 1997; Grandi & Montermini, 2005; Körtvélyessy & Stekauer, 2011). Corpus-based descriptions of evaluative morphology, however, are still sorely lacking for many languages, including French. A first attempt at an exhaustive inventory and ge...

Evaluative conditioning (EC) effects are often assumed to be based on a learned mental link between the CS (conditioned stimulus) and the US (unconditioned stimulus). We demonstrate that this link is not the only one that can underlie EC effects, but that if evaluative responses are actually given during the learning phase also a direct link between the CS and an evaluative response-a CS-ER lin...

Children's assessment of the value of different sources of information about psychological traits was investigated among 6- to 7-year-olds and 10- to 11-year-olds across 5 studies (N = 330). Older children were more likely than younger children to reject self-report as a source of information about the highly evaluative traits smart and honest, but no such age-related difference was seen for th...