We form first impressions from faces despite warnings not to do so. Moreover, there is considerable agreement in our impressions, which carry significant social outcomes. Appearance matters because some facial qualities are so useful in guiding adaptive behavior that even a trace of those qualities can create an impression. Specifically, the qualities revealed by facial cues that characterize l...

This paper argues for a theory of lexical acquisition which takes syntactic transfer effects in bilinguals and overgeneralization in monolinguals to be manifestations of the same underlying mechanism. The theory views both transfer and overgeneralization as epiphenomena of an updating system which spreads newly acquired information across paradigms. A consequence of this set up is that both tra...

This paper argues for a theory of lexical acquisition which takes overgeneralization in monolinguals and syntactic transfer effects in bilinguals to be manifestations of the same underlying mechanism. The theory views both overgeneralization and transfer as epiphenomena of an updating system which spreads newly acquired information across paradigms. A consequence of this set up is that both ove...

Different degrees of threat predictability are thought to induce either phasic fear or sustained anxiety. Maladaptive, sustained anxious apprehension is thought to result in overgeneralization of anxiety and thereby to contribute to the development of anxiety disorders. Therefore, differences in threat predictability have been associated with pathological states of anxiety with specific phobia ...

Generalization of conditioned fear refers to the transfer of the conditioned fear response to stimuli that resemble the original conditioned stimulus. Overgeneralization of conditioned fear has been associated with panic disorder and generalized anxiety disorder and may be relevant to obsessive-compulsive (OC) symptoms as well. This study represents the first attempt to determine the degree to ...

Between the ages of 3 and 7 years, children have been observed to produce verb argument structure overgeneralization errors (e.g., Don’t giggle me; Bowerman, 1982, 1988; Pinker, 1989). A number of recent studies have begun to find evidence that the precise distributional properties of the input may provide an important part of the explanation for why children retreat from overgeneralization err...

Overgeneralization of dangerous stimuli is a possible etiological account for anxiety disorders, yet the underlying behavioral and neural origins remain vague. Specifically, it is unclear whether this is a choice behavior in an unsafe environment ("better safe than sorry") or also a fundamental change in how the stimulus is perceived. We show that anxiety patients have wider generalization for ...