Parenting and Adolescent Adjustment in Mexico: Initial Evidence of Validity for the Mexican Parenting Questionnaire for Adolescents (MPQ-A)

The present study examined the validity of a self-report parenting instrument for use with Mexican adolescents. The 13-item measure was adapted from the Mexican Parenting Questionnaire. The sample included 1123 adolescents (M age?=?15.07, SD?=?1.52) from Puebla, Mexico. Adolescents self-reported on six subscales of parenting (i.e., affection, verbal guidance, monitoring, communication, physical punishment and verbal punishment), as well as on measures of school grades, life satisfaction, familism, depressive and anxiety symptoms. Using confirmatory factor analyses, the original constructs were found to be a good fit with the data. Most subscales consisted of moderate levels of internal consistency and predicted several measures of adolescent adjustment in expected directions. Girls were more likely to report higher levels of monitoring, affection, and communication than boys. Adolescents who were younger and who reported lower school grades were more likely to report greater levels of physical punishment. Familism was positively associated with five of the six parenting dimensions (i.e., affection, verbal guidance, monitoring, physical punishment, and communication). Findings advance understanding on families and adolescent well-being in Mexico and may inform culturally competent services for clinicians who work with Mexican families.     

The Mitigating Role of Trait Core Confidence on Psychological Distress in Entrepreneurship

We conceptualize the mitigating role of trait core confidence on psychological distress in entrepreneurship manifested by occupational stress, anxiety, and depression. To facilitate field research, we first developed a short trait core confidence scale and validated it in six independent samples (N = 2,434). To test our hypothesis that trait core confidence negatively relates to base-line levels of psychological distress as well as reduces fluctuations of distress in entrepreneurship, we collected data from a 3-day entrepreneurial event called Startup Weekend across seven occasions in the United States. High trait core confidence was related to lower psychological distress both at the start of the event on Friday and at the end of it on Sunday. Core confidence remained stable from Friday to Sunday, as well as 1 month following the event, affirming its trait properties. Additionally, we measured team confidence during the event and found that high team confidence reduced psychological distress of team members. This research contributes to the research on the role of dispositions in occupational health psychology and to a better understanding of how distress of aspiring entrepreneurs is mitigated by trait core confidence.     

Previewing the neighborhood: the role of orthographic neighbors as parafoveal previews in reading

In 2 experiments, a boundary technique was used with parafoveal previews that were identical to a target (e.g., sleet), a word orthographic neighbor (sweet), or an orthographically matched nonword (speet). In Experiment 1, low-frequency words in orthographic pairs were targets, and high-frequency words were previews. In Experiment 2, the roles were reversed. In Experiment 1, neighbor words provided as much preview benefit as identical words and greater benefit than nonwords, whereas in Experiment 2, neighbor words provided no greater preview benefit than nonwords. These results indicate that the frequency of a preview influences the extraction of letter information without setting up appreciable competition between previews and targets. This is consistent with a model of word recognition in which early stages largely depend on excitation of letter information, and competition between lexical candidates becomes important only in later stages.     

Perception d’attributs des visages parlants par le nouveau-né humain

A visual preference method is used for studying how human newborns can process internal characteristics on speaking faces in a multimodal context. In a first experiment, two mobile faces associated with a speech sound are opposed: one is clear and the other is blurred. A preference for the clear face is observed. A second experiment contrasts two clear faces, showing lip movements respectively congruent and non-congruent with the associated speech sound. No preference is observed in this situation. These results show that newborns process mobile faces by orienting their attention on more information than that corresponding to very low spatial frequencies. It seems however that they cannot detect the correspondences between the lip movements and the associated sounds.     

Resting Heart Rate,Vagal Tone,and Reactive and Proactive Aggression in Chinese Children

Abundant research conducted in Western contexts has shown that biological risk factors such as low resting heart rate (HR) might be related to childhood aggression. However, it was unclear (1) how resting HR, as well as other markers of cardiac functions such as resting vagal tone, may be related to subtypes of aggression such as reactive and proactive aggression, and (2) whether the HR-aggression relation can be replicated in non-Western contexts. Therefore, this study examined the concurrent and prospective relations between resting HR, vagal tone, and Chinese children’s reactive and proactive aggression. Participants were 183 children (M age?=?7.64 years, 91 girls) recruited from an elementary school in Zhenjiang, PRC. Children’s resting HR and vagal tone were assessed in the second grade (T1). Teachers rated children’s reactive and proactive aggression in the second (T1) and fourth grade (T2). Results showed that lower resting HR at T1 was associated with higher reactive and proactive aggression at T1 and T2, and higher vagal tone was associated with lower HR, which in turn was related to higher reactive and proactive aggression at T1 and T2. Lower vagal tone was directly related to higher reactive but not proactive aggression at T1 and T2, whereas lower HR was related to higher reactive aggression at T2 for children with low or moderate vagal tone but was not for children with high vagal tone. These psychophysiological findings from a non-Western context add additional support for both similarities and differences between reactive and proactive aggression in childhood.     

Creative Fixation is No Laughing Matter: The Effects of Funny and Unfunny Examples on Humor Production

How do people come up with humorous ideas? In creative cognition research, exposure to good examples sometimes causes fixation (people get “stuck” on the examples) but other times sparks inspiration (people's responses are more creative). The present research examined the effects of funny and unfunny examples on joke production. A sample of 175 adults read scenarios that they completed with funny responses. All participants were instructed to be funny, but before responding they read (a) funny responses as examples of good responses to emulate, (b) unfunny responses as examples of poor responses to avoid, or (c) no examples. The participants’ own responses were rated for funniness and for similarity to the example responses, and response times were recorded. Reading either funny or unfunny examples, compared to no examples, caused people to come up with funnier jokes. Similarity to the examples was low in all conditions, so fixation was relatively modest, but people who saw unfunny examples spent more time coming up with their responses. Taken together, the findings support the growing literature showing that examples are often inspiring rather than constraining, and they imply that good and bad examples spark creative thought via different paths.     

Two Kinds of Logical Impossibility

In this paper, we argue that a distinction ought to be drawn between two ways in which a given world might be logically impossible. First, a world w might be impossible because the laws that hold at w are different from those that hold at some other world (say the actual world). Second, a world w might be impossible because the laws of logic that hold in some world (say the actual world) are violated at w. We develop a novel way of modelling logical possibility that makes room for both kinds of logical impossibility. Doing so has interesting implications for the relationship between logical possibility and other kinds of possibility (for example, metaphysical possibility) and implications for the necessity or contingency of the laws of logic.     

Reduction of implicit cognitive bias with cathodal tDCS to the left prefrontal cortex

Implicit associations can interfere with cognitive operations and behavioral decisions without direct intention. Enhancement of neural activity with anodal transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) was proposed to reduce implicit associations by means of improved cognitive control. However, a targeted reduction of distractive implicit associations by inhibitory cathodal tDCS, recently shown in spatial–numerical associations, provides an interesting alternative approach to support goal-directed behavior with transcranial brain stimulation. To test this rationale with a sham-controlled cross-over design, a standardized Implicit Association Test (IAT) was performed by 24 healthy participants parallel to 1 mA cathodal or sham tDCS to the left prefrontal cortex. In this double-classification task, insect versus flower pictures and negative versus positive words are mapped together onto two shared response keys with crossed response assignments in separate blocks. Responses were faster when insect + negative and flower + positive stimuli required the same answer (IAT effect). Most critically, the IAT effect was reduced during cathodal tDCS as compared to sham stimulation. Thus, results are consistent with the proposed stimulation rationale, with previous observations, and complementary to previous studies using different tDCS configurations.