Adapting the Unique Minds Program: Exploring the Feasibility of a Multiple Family Intervention for Children with Learning Disabilities in the Context of Spain

The Unique Minds Program (Stern, Unique Minds Program, 1999) addresses the socio‐emotional needs of children with learning disabilities (LD) and their families. Children and their parents work together in a multiple family group to learn more about LD and themselves as people with the capacity to solve problems in a collaborative way, including problems in family school relationships. This article reports the cultural adaptation of the program for use in Spain and findings from a feasibility study involving three multiple family groups and a total of 15 children and 15 mothers, using a pre‐post design. This Spanish adaptation of the program is called “Mentes Únicas”. Standardized outcome measures indicated an overall statistically significant decrease in children's self‐rated maladjustment and relationship difficulties by the end of the program. Improvements were endorsed by most mothers, although they were not always recognized by the children's teachers. The program had a high level of acceptability: Mothers and children felt safe, understood, and helped throughout the sessions. The efficacy of the adapted intervention for the context of Spain remains to be tested in a more rigorous study.     

Standard and Short RoM Isokinetic Testing: Comparative Analysis in Identifying Submaximal Shoulder External Rotator Effort

An isokinetic-related parameter termed the difference between eccentric-concentric strength ratios at two distinct test velocities (DEC) based on 60° (standard) range of motion (RoM) has been proven to be highly efficient detecting feigned muscular efforts. This study aimed to verify whether a DEC derived from a much shorter test RoM (20°) was equally useful than a long RoM–derived one. Eighteen healthy men (32.4 ± 6.4 years old) took part in a study focusing on shoulder external rotation isokinetic strength. Participants performed a genuine shoulder external rotator maximal effort (eight pairs of concentric and eccentric contractions at high and low velocities at short and long RoM) and then instructed to feign maximal effort. Contraction velocities were adjusted accordingly by applying a 1:4 gradient and peak moments registered. Both condition DEC was then calculated by subtracting the eccentric and concentric strength ratios at low velocities from those at high velocities. DEC scores in the feigned effort were significantly higher than maximal effort ones in both conditions in men. It enabled the setting of specific cutoff levels for separating the efforts. Both approaches revealed a coincident sensitivity (78%) whereas short RoM showed an even higher specificity: 88% versus 78%. Thus, the short RoM protocol provides clinically acceptable detection power.     

Objectivism about Color and Comparative Color Statements. Reply to Hansen*

Nat Hansen builds a new argument for subjectivism about the semantics of color language, based on a potential kind of intersubjective disagreements about comparative color statements. In reply, I note that the disagreements of this kind are merely hypothetical, probably few if actual, and not evidently relevant as test cases for a semantic theory. Furthermore, even if they turned out to be actual and semantically relevant, they would be intuitively unusable by the subjectivist.     

Age slowing down in detection and visual discrimination under varying presentation times

The reaction time has been described as a measure of perception, decision making, and other cognitive processes. The aim of this work is to examine age‐related changes in executive functions in terms of demand load under varying presentation times. Two tasks were employed where a signal detection and a discrimination task were performed by young and older university students. Furthermore, a characterization of the response time distribution by an ex‐Gaussian fit was carried out. The results indicated that the older participants were slower than the younger ones in signal detection and discrimination. Moreover, the differences between both processes for the older participants were higher, and they also showed a higher distribution average except for the lower and higher presentation time. The results suggest a general slowdown in both tasks for age under different presentation times, except for the cases where presentation times were lower and higher. Moreover, if these parameters are understood to be a reflection of executive functions, these findings are consistent with the common view that age‐related cognitive deficits show a decline in this function.     

Conscientiousness but not agreeableness mediates females’ tendency toward being a morning person

Individuals differ in their chronotype, and some are identified as morning ones and others as evening ones. Earlier studies showed that women were higher on morningness, conscientiousness, and agreeableness. In this study, we aimed at exploring the mediational effects of conscientiousness and agreeableness in the relationship of gender and morningness‐eveningness. Participants were 669 university students. Results supported positive relationships between morningness and conscientiousness and agreeableness and between conscientiousness and agreeableness. Females were higher on all these three variables. Mediation analyses suggested that the effect of gender (here females) on chronotype (here morningness) was mediated by conscientiousness but not agreeableness so that after the mediation partially occurred, the gender's effect did not remain significant anymore. This study backed our hypothesis that conscientiousness might play a more pronounced role than the intrinsic diurnal rhythm concerning the sex differences in chronotype.     

Previously acquired cue–outcome structural knowledge guides new learning: Evidence from the retroactive-interference-between-cues effect

The effect of retroactive interference between cues predicting the same outcome (RIBC) occurs when the behavioral expression of a cue–outcome association (e.g., A→O1) is reduced due to the later acquisition of an association between a different cue and the same outcome (e.g., B→O1). In the present experimental series, we show that this effect can be modulated by knowledge concerning the structure of these cue–outcome relationships. In Experiments 1A and 1B, a pretraining phase was included to promote the expectation of either a one-to-one (OtO) or a many-to-one (MtO) cue–outcome structure during the subsequent RIBC training phases. We hypothesized that the adoption of an OtO expectation would make participants infer that the previously learned A→O1 relationship would not hold any longer after the exposure to B→O1 trials. Alternatively, the adoption of an MtO expectation would prevent participants from making such an inference. Experiment 1B included an additional condition without pretraining, to assess whether the OtO structure was expected by default. Experiment 2 included control conditions to assess the RIBC effect and induced the expectation of an OtO or MtO structure without the addition of a pretraining phase. Overall, the results suggest that participants effectively induced structural expectations regarding the cue–outcome contingencies. In turn, these expectations may have potentiated (OtO expectation) or alleviated (MtO expectation) the RIBC effect, depending on how well these expectations could accommodate the target A→O1 test association. This pattern of results poses difficulties for current explanations of the RIBC effect, since these explanations do not consider the incidence of cue–outcome structural expectations.     

The heteronomous moral value of shame

Recent work in moral theory has argued against according shame any moral value in virtue of its supposed heteronomy. Authors who have defended shame's moral value have generally argued that shame is, in fact, autonomous. In the present article, I draw on the work of Jean-Paul Sartre, Stanley Cavell and Adam Smith to develop an argument for shame's moral worth based on its heteronomy. I then contrast my defence with work that holds shame's moral value to be based on its autonomy. I argue that that view goes wrong by construing shame on the model of private experience. This psychology is unconvincing in its own right and can underwrite moral failings.     

Psychopathology and behavior problems in children and adolescents with Williams syndrome: Distinctive relationships with cognition

Several studies have documented the high prevalence of psychopathology and behavior problems in Williams syndrome (WS). However, the links between cognitive development and such symptoms need further clarification. Our study aims to expand current knowledge on levels of behavior problems and its links to cognition in a sample of Brazilian individuals with WS. A total of 25 children and adolescents with WS and their parents participated in this study. The participants’ IQs were assessed with the Wechsler Scales of Intelligence (for children or adults) and parental reports of psychopathology/behavior problems were collected using the Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL). The presence of clinically significant attention problems was a main feature in our sample of children and adolescents with WS. In the children, higher IQ scores were found to be significantly associated with less externalizing problems, while in the adolescents cognitive abilities were found to be associated with less internalizing symptoms. These results provide further insight into the links between psychopathology and behavior problems and cognitive abilities in WS, and suggest the need to take age into consideration when analyzing such relationships.     

Do we reflect while performing skillful actions? Automaticity,control, and the perils of distraction

From our everyday commuting to the gold medalist’s world-class performance, skillful actions are characterized by fine-grained, online agentive control. What is the proper explanation of such control? There are two traditional candidates: intellectualism explains skillful agentive control by reference to the agent’s propositional mental states; anti-intellectualism holds that propositional mental states or reflective processes are unnecessary since skillful action is fully accounted for by automatic coping processes. I examine the evidence for three psychological phenomena recently held to support anti-intellectualism (choking under pressure, expertise-induced amnesia, and expert confabulation) and argue that it supports neither traditional candidate, but an intermediate attention-control account, according to which the top-down, intention-directed control of attention is a necessary component of skillful action. Only this account recognizes both the role of automatic control in skilled action and the need for higher-order cognition to thread automatic processes together into a unified, skillful performance. This applies to bodily skillful action in general, from the world-class performance of experts to mundane, habitual action. The attention-control account stresses that, for intentions to play their role as top-down modulators of attention, agents must sustain the intention’s activation; hence, the need for reflecting throughout performance.     

Because difficulty is not the same for everyone: the impact of complexity in working memory is associated with cannabinoid 1 receptor genetic variation in young adults

Individual differences in working memory ability are mainly revealed when a demanding challenge is imposed. Here, we have associated cannabinoid 1 (CB1) receptor genetic variation rs2180619 (AA, AG, GG), which is located in a potential CNR1 regulatory sequence, with performance in working memory. Two-hundred and nine Mexican-mestizo healthy young participants (89 women, 120 men, mean age: 23.26 years, SD?=?2.85) were challenged to solve a medium (2-back) vs. a high (3-back) difficulty N-back tasks. All subjects responded as expected, performance was better with the medium than the high demand task version, but no differences were found among genotypes while performing each working memory (WM) task. However, the cost of the level of complexity in N-back paradigm was double for GG subjects than for AA subjects. It is noteworthy that an additive-dosage allele relation was found for G allele in terms of cost of level of complexity. These genetic variation results support that the endocannabinoid system, evaluated by rs2180619 polymorphism, is involved in WM ability in humans.