A survey of women's social representations of aging and rejuvenation

The goal of this work was to analyze the social representations that women of three different age groups had about aging, rejuvenating, and methods of rejuvenation. The research was performed in S?o Paulo between 2004 and 2005. The participants of this research were three groups of women of different ages: 19 to 24 years, 25 to 35 years, and over 60 years. The data were collected by the focus group technique. Data was analyzed using the lexical analysis software ALCESTE 4.5. The main results show a social representation of aging centered on losses and gains. The subjects appraised the possibility of using rejuvenating methods only when it was extremely necessary, because of the health risks that most of them involve. The three groups agreed about natural methods of rejuvenating instead of resorting to invasive methods.     

Influence of impulsivity-reflexivity when testing dynamic spatial ability: sex and g differences

This work analyzes the possibility that the differences in the performance of men and women in dynamic spatial tasks such as the Spatial Orientation Dynamic Test-Revised (SODT-R; Santacreu & Rubio, 1998), obtained in previous works, are due to cognitive style (Reflexivity-Impulsivity) or to the speed-accuracy tradeoff (SATO) that the participants implement. If these differences are due to cognitive style, they would be independent of intelligence, whereas if they are due to SATO, they may be associated with intelligence. In this work, 1652 participants, 984 men and 668 women, ages between 18 and 55 years, were assessed. In addition to the SODT-R, the "Test de Razonamiento Analitico, Secuencial e Inductivo" (TRASI [Analytical, Sequential, and Inductive Reasoning Test]; Rubio & Santacreu, 2003) was administered as a measure of general intelligence. Impulsivity scores (Zi) of Salkind and Wright (1977) were used to analyze reflexivity-impulsivity and SATO. The results obtained indicate that (a) four performance groups can be identified: Fast-accurate, Slow-inaccurate, Impulsive, and Reflexive. The first two groups solve the task as a function of a competence variable and the last two as a function of a personality variable; (b) performance differences should be attributed to SATO; (c) SATO differs depending on sex and intelligence level.     

Computer speech-based remediation for reading disabilities: the size of spelling-to-sound unit in a transparent orthography

This study was designed to assess the effects of four reading-training procedures for children with reading disabilities (RD) in a transparent orthography, with the aim of examining the effects of different spelling-to-sound units in computer speech-based reading. We selected a sample of 83 Spanish children aged between 7 years 1 month and 10 years 6 months (M = 105.2, SD = 7.8) whose pseudoword reading performance was below the 25th percentile and IQ > 90. The participants were randomly assigned to five groups: (a) the whole-word training group (WW) (n = 17), (b) the syllable training group (S)(n = 16), (c) the onset-rime training group (OR) (n = 17), (d) the phoneme training group (P) (n = 15), and (e) the untrained control group (n = 18). Children were pre- and post-tested in word recognition, reading comprehension, phonological awareness, and orthographic and phonological tasks. The results indicate that experimental groups who participated in the phoneme and syllable conditions improved their word recognition in comparison with the control group. In addition, dyslexics who participated in the phoneme, syllable, and onset-rime conditions made a greater number of requests during computer-based word reading under conditions that required extensive phonological computation (low frequency words and long words). Reading time, however, was greater for long words in the phoneme group during computer-based reading. These results suggest the importance of training phonological processes in improving word decoding in children with dyslexia who learn in a consistent orthography.     

Direct and indirect effects of parents' education on reading achievement among third graders in Sweden

Background Cultural capital in families and especially, the educational level of parents, has during the last decades been found to be the most important dimension of socio‐economic influence on school performance. How the transmission of cultural capital over generations is concretized is however not yet fully investigated. Aims The aim is to unfold the influence of home background and more specifically, to reveal some important mediating factors between the educational levels of parents and the reading achievement levels of children. Sample Data comes from the Swedish participation in Progress in International Reading Literacy Study 2001 conducted by the The International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement and comprises some 10,000 students in grade 3. Methods The effects of parents' education on reading achievement are estimated with structural equation modelling. Results The results reveal that the total effect of parents' education is substantial and that almost half of this effect is mediated through other variables, i.e. the number of books at home, early literacy activities, and emergent literacy abilities at the time for school start. The article thus identifies some of the mechanisms through which parents' education exert an influence on children's literacy development. Conclusions Cultural reproduction starts in the very early childhood, in informal settings where reading aloud is an important activity. The knowledge of written language that children have at the time for school‐start influences further reading acquisition.     

When head is tempered by heart: Heart rate variability modulates perception of other-blame reducing anger

This study examined the relationship between heart rate variability (HRV), as an index of individual differences in emotion regulation, and perception of other-blame, as a mechanism of anger induction. The physiological responses were recorded while subjects read a story from a computer screen. The story narrated a negative event in self-referred way -dismissal from a job as the result of a colleague’s action- under conditions of intentionality versus non-intentionality. Cognitive and emotional variables were assessed by questionnaire immediately after the physiological test. The resulting structural model supports the conclusion that HRV exerts its regulatory influence directly on perception of other-blame rather than on emotion. In situations of intentionality, individuals with higher HRV make less extreme evaluation of the offender’s blame, versus those with lower HRV, thus leading to a reduction in anger reaction. These results suggest that HRV is a direct index of cognitive rather than emotional regulation.     

Hysterectomy as Viewed by Mexican Women and Men

This study explored the views of Mexican men and women concerning hysterectomy. We studied 120 women and 135 men between the ages of 36 and 55. Women had not had a hysterectomy and men were married to a woman without a hysterectomy. The most negative views about hysterectomy were women’s suppositions about male perceptions, but only among people with a limited educational background. This group was more likely to believe that women who undergo hysterectomy are incomplete, rejected by their partners, and experience emotional changes. These findings are discussed in light of sociocultural features.     

Age‐related changes in transient and oscillatory brain responses to auditory stimulation during early adolescence

Maturational changes in the capacity to process quickly the temporal envelope of sound have been linked to language abilities in typically developing individuals. As part of a longitudinal study of brain maturation and cognitive development during adolescence, we employed dense‐array EEG and spatiotemporal source analysis to characterize maturational changes in the timing of brain responses to temporal variations in sound. We found significant changes in the brain responses compared longitudinally at two time points in early adolescence, namely 10 years (65 subjects) and 11.5 years (60 of the 65 subjects), as well as large differences between adults, studied with the same protocol ( Poulsen, Picton & Paus, 2007 ), and the children at 10 and 11.5 years of age. The transient auditory evoked potential to tone onset showed decreases in the latency of vertex and T‐complex components, and a highly significant increase in the amplitude of the N1 wave with increasing age. The auditory steady state response to a 40‐Hz frequency‐modulated tone increased in amplitude with increasing age. The peak frequency of the envelope‐following response to sweeps of amplitude‐modulated white noise also increased significantly with increasing age. These results indicate persistent maturation of the cortical mechanisms for auditory processing from childhood into middle adulthood.     

Language‐specific stress perception by 9‐month‐old French and Spanish infants

During the first year of life, infants begin to have difficulties perceiving non‐native vowel and consonant contrasts, thus adapting their perception to the phonetic categories of the target language. In this paper, we examine the perception of a non‐segmental feature, i.e. stress. Previous research with adults has shown that speakers of French (a language with fixed stress) have great difficulties in perceiving stress contrasts ( Dupoux, Pallier, Sebastián & Mehler, 1997 ), whereas speakers of Spanish (a language with lexically contrastive stress) perceive these contrasts as accurately as segmental contrasts. We show that language‐specific differences in the perception of stress likewise arise during the first year of life. Specifically, 9‐month‐old Spanish infants successfully distinguish between stress‐initial and stress‐final pseudo‐words, while French infants of this age show no sign of discrimination. In a second experiment using multiple tokens of a single pseudo‐word, French infants of the same age successfully discriminate between the two stress patterns, showing that they are able to perceive the acoustic correlates of stress. Their failure to discriminate stress patterns in the first experiment thus reflects an inability to process stress at an abstract, phonological level.     

The Spanish adaptation of ANEW (Affective Norms for English Words)

This article presents the Spanish adaptation of the Affective Norms for English Words (ANEW; Bradley & Lang, 1999). The norms are based on 720 participants' assessments of the translation into Spanish of the 1,034 words included in the ANEW. The evaluations were done in the dimensions of valence, arousal and dominance using the Self-Assessment Manikin (SAM). Apart from these dimensions, five objective (number of letters, number of syllables, grammatical class, frequency and number of orthographic neighbors) and three subjective (familiarity, concreteness and imageability) psycholinguistic indexes are included. The Spanish adaptation of ANEW can be downloaded at www.psychonomic.org.