Control of stimulus confounds is an ever-present, and ever-important, aspect of experimental design. Typically, researchers concern themselves with such control on a local level, ensuring that individual stimuli contain only the properties they intend for them to represent. Significantly less attention, however, is paid to stimulus properties in the aggregate, aspects that, although not present in individual stimuli, can nevertheless become emergent properties of the stimulus set when viewed in total. This paper describes two examples of such effects. The first (Case Study 1) focuses on emergent properties of pairs of to-be-performed tones on a piano keyboard, and the second (Case Study 2) focuses on emergent properties of short, atonal melodies in a perception/memory task. In both cases these sets of stimuli induced identifiable tonal influences despite being explicitly created to be devoid of musical tonality. These results highlight the importance of monitoring aggregate stimulus properties in one's research, and are discussed with reference to their implications for interpreting psychological findings quite generally.
Childhood adversity is associated with increased current life stress in adulthood and is often influenced by subjective appraisals related to anxiety. Anxiety is a multifaceted construct that includes variability in assumed presentation. The current study assessed the unique mediating effects of both trait and symptom-based anxiety on childhood adversity and current life stress. Undergraduate students enrolled in a large, urban, public university (N = 638, 89% non-Caucasian) completed the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire, State-Trait Anxiety Inventory, Beck Anxiety Inventory, and the Perceived Stress Scale. A parallel mediation demonstrated that both trait and symptom-based anxiety fully mediated the relationship between childhood adversity and perceived current life stress and that these effects are statistically different (b = .112, SE = .020, 95% CI [.074, .153]). Thus, we demonstrated a unique mediating role of two different anxiety indices that varied in strength of their respective contributions to the model.
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