Psychopathological and Behavior Impairments in Williams-Beuren Syndrome: The Influence of Gender,Chronological Age,and Cognition

The aim of this study was to explore psychopathological and behavior impairments in Williams-Beuren syndrome (WBS) by focusing on individual differences rather than group tendencies. Parent/Guardian ratings on the Child Behavior Checklist were analyzed in order to examine the influence of gender, chronological age, and cognitive abilities on psychopathological impairment within WBS. In line with predictions, and consistent with cognitive heterogeneity in WBS, psychopathological and behavioral abnormalities were variable, with gender and specific cognitive abilities making significant and independent contributions to this variance. For gender, females were significantly more likely than males with WBS to display difficulties with externalizing problems. For specific cognitive abilities, those cognitive functions characteristic of the classic WBS cognitive profile (a strength in verbal skills and a weakness in spatial skills) related to significantly greater internalizing difficulties. Future studies should explore underlying genetic and neurological differences in individuals with WBS in order to help explain the variability in psychopathological and cognitive functions.     

The Evaluation of Advice in Supportive Interactions: Facework and Contextual Factors

Perceptions of advice in supportive interactions are known to be influenced by the threat advice poses to a recipient's face. However, research has given little attention to factors that may moderate the influence of face concerns on advice evaluations. This study examined how evaluator sex, target responsibility and effort, and advice content influenced evaluations of advice given bluntly, with aggravating facework, or with mitigating facework. Participants (N = 305) evaluated advice directed at a student depicted as upset about failing an exam. The student's responsibility and effort with regard to the failure was manipulated within scenarios. Facework was found to have a substantial main effect on evaluations of advice, with mitigating facework producing the most positive evaluations. This effect was moderated to varying degrees by each of the contextual factors examined.     

Passport Checks: Interactions Between Matching Faces and Biographical Details

Matching unfamiliar faces is known to be a difficult task. However, most research has tested viewers' ability to match pairs of faces presented in isolation. In real settings, professionals are commonly required to examine photo ID that contains other biographical information too. In three experiments, we present faces embedded in passport frames and ask viewers to make face matching decisions and to check biographical information. We find that the inclusion of a passport frame reduces viewers' ability to detect a face mismatch. Furthermore, the nature of the face match influences biographical data checking—true matches lead to fewer detections of invalid data. In general, viewers were poor at spotting errors in biographical information. This pattern suggests that detection of fraudulent photo ID is even harder than current experimental studies suggest. Possible mechanisms for these effects are discussed. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Learning About Categories in the Absence of Training: Profound Amnesia and the Relationship Between PerceptualCategorization and Recognition Memory

Previous evidence suggests that amnesics can categorize stimuli as well as normal individuals but are significantly worse at recognizing those stimuli. In an extreme case, a profoundly amnesic individual, E.P., was found to have near-normal categorization, yet, unlike most amnesics, was unable to recognize better than chance. This evidence has been used to argue against the possibility that a common memory system underlies these cognitive processes. However, we provide evidence that the experimental procedures typically used to test amnesic individuals may be flawed in that initial exposure to category members may be unnecessary to observe accurate categorization of test stimuli. We experimentally "induced" profound amnesia in normal individuals by telling them they had viewed subliminally presented stimuli, which were never actually presented. Using the same experimental paradigm used to test amnesics, we observed that participants' recognition performance was completely at chance, as should be expected, yet categorization performance was quite good.     

整字和部件的语义关系对汉字认知的影响

等级汉字是指由小汉字组成的大汉字。依据Navon的复合刺激范式,实验1选取“生物和非生物范畴”的汉字构建等级汉字,探索语义范畴是否一致对刺激认知的影响。实验2选取“意义相反或无关”的汉字组成等级汉字,采用真假字判断任务探索语义关系对刺激加工的影响。实验结果发现,等级汉字加工受大小汉字语义范畴关系和语义关系的影响,同时,任务类型影响汉字认知。     

Global and Local processing in Williams Syndrome: Drawing versus Perceiving

It has been hypothesized that a local processing bias underlies overall visuospatial impairments in Williams syndrome (WS). However, recent studies have challenged this hypothesis by providing evidence against a local processing bias at the perceptual level. The aim of the present study was to further examine drawing and perceptual skills in children with WS using closely matched-hierarchical stimuli. In the drawing task children with WS exhibited a local processing bias. However, no significant preferential bias was found in the perceptual task. This indicates that children with WS do not systematically present a preferential bias for local information. Taken together the findings of the present study suggest that perceptual processing deficits per se are unlikely to explain local processing biases in visuoconstructive tasks often described in people with WS.     

Hiring Discrimination Against Arab Minorities: Interactions Between Prejudice and Job Characteristics

Individuals of Arab descent have increasingly experienced prejudice and employment discrimination. This study used the social identity paradigm to investigate whether greater Arab identification of applicants led to hiring discrimination and whether job characteristics and raters' prejudice moderated this effect. One hundred forty-one American and 153 Dutch participants rated résumés on job suitability. Résumés with Arab name and affiliations negatively influenced job suitability ratings, but only when job cognitive demands and external client contact were limited. Within the Dutch sample job suitability rating of Arab applicants was lowest when Dutch raters' implicit prejudice was high. As expected, no effects of explicit prejudice were found: discrimination may operate in subtle ways, depending on the combined effect of applicant, job, and rater characteristics. Further research and implications for employment-related decision making, such as anonymous résumé-sifting, are discussed.     

The Relation Between Parental Mental Illness and Adolescent Mental Health: The Role of Family Factors

Children of parents with a mental illness are often found to be at high risk of developing psychological problems themselves. Little is known about the role of family factors in the relation between parental and adolescent mental health. The current study focused on parent–child interaction and family environment. This cross-sectional questionnaire study included 124 families with a mentally ill parent and 127 families without a mentally ill parent who at the time of the study had children aged 11–16 years old. Parents completed questionnaires about their mental health, parent–child interaction (i.e., parental monitoring and parental support), and family environment (i.e., cohesion, expressiveness, and conflict). Adolescents reported their internalizing and externalizing problems. Path analyses were used to examine the direct associations between parental mental illness and adolescent problems as well as the indirect relations via parent–child interaction and family environment. The results showed that interaction between parents with a mental illness and their child was significantly worse compared to parents without a mental illness. The family environment of parents with mental illness was also more negative. Mentally ill parents monitored their adolescents less, which in turn related to more externalizing problems of the adolescents. No factors mediated the relation between parental mental health and adolescent internalizing problems. Moreover, no direct effects of parental support, family cohesion, and family expressiveness with externalizing problems were found. These findings imply that parental monitoring should get a specific focus of attention in existing interventions designed to prevent adolescents with a mentally ill parent from developing problems.     

Suicide Crisis Syndrome Mediates the Relationship Between Long‐term Risk Factors and Lifetime Suicidal Phenomena

In recent years, there has been growing attention to the distinction between acute and long‐term suicidal risk factors. We have previously characterized an acute, negative affect state, termed the suicide crisis syndrome (SCS ), as a marker of near‐term suicidal risk. Here, we test whether documented long‐term risk factors (i.e., trait vulnerabilities), including perfectionism, impulsivity, chronic substance abuse, insecure attachment, poor social support, and childhood trauma, associate to suicidal phenomena through a pathway of the SCS . A sample of 207 psychiatric inpatients were administered a battery of eight scales, including the Suicide Trigger Scale (STS ‐3) as a measure of the SCS . While both STS ‐3 and all trait vulnerabilities were associated with lifetime suicidal ideation and attempts, only STS ‐3 was related to pre‐admission suicide attempts. The STS ‐3 significantly mediated the effect of each trait vulnerability on lifetime suicidal phenomena (combining ideation and behavior), with the proportion of mediating effect ranging from .29 to .56. Reverse mediation analyses were only significant for insecure attachment, supporting a largely unidirectional mediation effect. The SCS appears to serve as an acute risk factor for suicidal behavior in psychiatric inpatients and may act as a mechanism by which long‐term risk factors increase suicidal risk.     

Parental Patterns of Cooperation in Parent–Child Interactions: The Relationship Between Nonverbal and Verbal Communication

This study expands the existing research into forms of parent–child cooperation by simultaneously assessing verbal/nonverbal channels of communication and their congruent/incongruent interrelatedness. The study aims to explain parental patterns of cooperation and to analyze the effect of a wide range of social and situational factors, including parents' gender, child's gender, socioeconomic status, and task difficulty. Parent–child interactions (n = 160) in structured joint game sequences were filmed in their homes and analyzed using a mixed multivariant design. The results highlight the importance of integrative congruence/incongruence patterns and the significant effects of background variables in parental inducing/inhibiting‐cooperation patterns. The proposed model expands the theoretical and methodological framework of parental cooperation.     

Preserved re-experience of discrete emotions: Amnesia and executive function

Amnesic patients can re-experience emotions elicited by forgotten events, suggesting that brain systems for episodic and emotional memory are independent. However, the range of such emotional memories remains under-investigated (most studies employing just positive–negative emotion dyads), and executive function may also play a role in the re-experience of emotions. This is the first investigation of the intensity of the emotional re-experience of a range of discrete emotions (anger, fear, sadness, and happiness) for a group of amnesic patients. Twenty Korsakoff syndrome (KS) patients and 20 neurologically normal controls listened to four novel emotional vignettes selectively eliciting the four basic emotions. Emotional experience was measured using pen-and-paper Visual Analogue Mood Scales and episodic memory using verbal recollections. After 30 min, the recollection of stories was severely impaired for the patient group, but the emotional re-experience was no different from that of controls. Notably, there was no relationship between episodic recall and the intensity of the four emotions, such that even profoundly amnesic patients reported moderate levels of the target emotion. Exploratory analyses revealed negative correlations between the intensity of basic emotions and executive functions (e.g., cognitive flexibility and response inhibition) for controls but not patients. The results suggest that discrete emotions can be re-experienced independently of episodic memory, and that the re-experience of certain discrete emotions appears to be dampened by executive control. KS patients with absent or mild cognitive symptoms should benefit from emotion-regulation interventions aimed at reducing the recognized affective burden associated with their episodic memory deficit.     

Necessity and Language: The Gap Is Still Very Real

In my previous paper “Has the later Wittgenstein accounted for necessity?” I argued against the conventionalist account of necessity proposed by Wittgenstein and his followers. Glock has addressed some of my objections in his paper “Necessity and Language: In Defence of Conventionalism”. This brief rejoinder considers Glock's replies to three of those objections. In the course of doing so, I revisit Wittgenstein's explanation of the special status of necessary propositions, the supposedly arbitrary nature of colour‐grammatical propositions, and the relation between rules and modality.     

鼻部因素在阻塞性睡眠呼吸暂停低通气综合征中的作用

比较临床鼻中隔偏曲、解剖鼻中隔偏曲及无鼻中隔偏曲组间睡眠呼吸紊乱指数(AHI)、最低血氧饱和度的差异.比较过敏性鼻炎与无过敏性鼻炎病史组间AHI、最低血氧饱和度的差异.分析性别、年龄、病程、过敏性鼻炎、鼻中隔偏曲等多种因素对AHI和最低血氧饱和度的影响作用.比较临床鼻中隔偏曲组、解剖鼻中隔偏曲组、无鼻中隔偏曲组的AHI和最低血氧饱和度,均无统计学差异.比较过敏性鼻炎组与无过敏性鼻炎组AHI和最低血氧饱和度,过敏性鼻炎组的AHI大于无过敏性鼻炎组,差异有统计学意义,两组间最低血氧饱和度无统计学差异.多种因素对AHI和最低血氧饱和度的影响作用无统计学意义.合并过敏性鼻炎的OSAHS患者可能睡眠中的呼吸暂停和低通气次数更多,但不能通过性别、年龄、病程、过敏性鼻炎及鼻中隔偏曲的因素来预测OSAHS的疾病严重程度.     

系统视角下致癌基因与遗传背景的相互作用

肿瘤是当今人类生命健康的主要威胁之一。致癌基因与遗传背景和肿瘤的形成有密切关系。致癌基因与遗传背景,致癌基因与抗癌基因之间的时空结构和非线性作用都有可能使正常细胞恶变,导致肿瘤的形成。致癌基因与遗传背景实际上构成了细胞中的一个完整的遗传系统。本文试图用系统方法探讨两者的相互作用,以便更好地探讨肿瘤发生的机理和治疗手段。     

军人焦虑、忧郁情绪研究Ⅱ:主导因素及其交互作用

在研究Ⅰ中我们揭示了军人焦虑、忧郁情绪的基本状态,发现了影响因素,产提出因素间可能存在一定的交互作用,共同对情绪发生影响的假设。本研究在此基础上,着重对主导因素及因素间的交互作用进一步探索。结果发现,导致忧郁的主要因素为家庭因素即单亲家庭;其次为军龄,独生子女和成长环境（城市或农村）,环境与文化程度两因素的交互作用明显;导致焦虑的主要因素也为单亲家庭,其次为军龄,环境与文化程度两因素的我互作用同样     

Attachment Quality and Psychopathological Symptoms in Clinically Referred Adolescents: The Mediating Role of Early Maladaptive Schema

This study investigated relationships between attachment insecurity, maladaptive cognitive schemas, and various types of psychopathological symptoms in a sample of clinically referred adolescents (N = 82). A mediation model was tested in which maladaptive schemas operated as mediators in the relations between indices of attachment quality and conduct, peer, and emotional problems. Results revealed partial support for the hypothesized mediation effect: the schema domain of disconnection/rejection acted as a mediator in the links between insecure attachment and peer problems and emotional problems. Further analysis of these effects revealed that different types of maladaptive schemas were involved in both types of psychopathology. Altogether, findings suggest that treatment of adolescent psychological problems may need to target the improvement of attachment relationships with peers and parents and the correction of underlying cognitive schemas.     

The Relationship Between Secondary Traumatic Stress and Personal Posttraumatic Growth: Personality Factors as Moderators

This present study examined the relationship between secondary traumatic stress, personality factors, and personal posttraumatic growth for persons indirectly exposed to traumatic life events. A sample of 162 nurses and physicians completed the self-report measures describing symptoms of secondary traumatic stress, personality factors and vicarious posttraumatic growth. The results indicated that secondary traumatic stress negatively correlated with vicarious posttraumatic growth. Moreover, this relation is moderated by personality factors. A low level of secondary traumatic stress symptoms is associated with a higher level of perceived posttraumatic growth for participants with a high level of openness, agreeability and conscientiousness. These findings emphasize the differences in perceiving posttraumatic growth in the context of secondary exposure to traumatic life events.