Peer violence in the School Environment and Its Relationship with Subjective Well-Being and Perceived Social Support Among Children and Adolescents in Northeastern Brazil

The general aim of this study was to analyse the relationship between peer violence in the school environment (bullying), subjective well-being and perceived social support from the perspective of 910 children and adolescents in Years 6 and 7 of primary school (M = 11.90 years old; SD = 1.21). The participants were taken from 27 primary schools—both state-run and private, urban and rural—in Cearà state (Brazil). The following instruments were used: the Peer Victimization and Aggression Scale (EVAP); the Social Support from Family and Friends Scale (SSA); an index of satisfaction with different developmental contexts (home, school, neighbourhood); and as indicators of subjective well-being, three scales (Single item on Overall Life Satisfaction, Personal Well-Being Index School Children, Students’ Life Satisfaction Scale). Results indicated that aggression and victimization behaviours correlated negatively with the three well-being indicators used, while social support and satisfaction with different developmental contexts correlated positively. When considering type of involvement in bullying, victims, perpetrators and perpetrator–victims all scored lower on subjective well-being than those not involved in bullying. A model is also presented that explains 42 % of well-being. Understanding how bullying relates to well-being and how social support and favourable developmental contexts can act as protective factors are particularly important when designing public policies aimed at intervening in violence prevention and promoting well-being in childhood and adolescence.     

Sharing genes fosters identity fusion and altruism

Researchers have shown that the more genes twins share, the more they care about one another. Here, we examine a psychological mediator of such genetic influences, “identity fusion” (a visceral sense of oneness with them). Results supported this hypothesis. Relative to dizygotic twins, monozygotic twins reported stronger fusion and elevated desire to have contact and share experiences with their twin (Study 1), to forgive and grant favors to their twin after being disappointed by him/her (Study 2), and willingness to make sacrifices for their twin (Study 3). Fusion with the twin mediated the impact of zygosity on these outcomes. These findings demonstrate that genetic relatedness fosters a powerful feeling of union with one’s twin that predicts sharing, tolerance, and self-sacrificial behavior toward him or her.     

Where do dialectal effects on speech processing come from? Evidence from a cross-dialect investigation

Accented speech has been seen as an additional impediment for speech processing; it usually adds linguistic and cognitive load to the listener's task. In the current study we analyse where the processing costs of regional dialects come from, a question that has not been answered yet. We quantify the proficiency of Basque–Spanish bilinguals who have different native dialects of Basque on many dimensions and test for costs at each of three levels of processing–phonemic discrimination, word recognition, and semantic processing. The ability to discriminate a dialect-specific contrast is affected by a bilingual's linguistic background less than lexical access is, and an individual's difficulty in lexical access is correlated with basic discrimination problems. Once lexical access is achieved, dialectal variation has little impact on semantic processing. The results are discussed in terms of the presence or absence of correlations between different processing levels. The implications of the results are considered for how models of spoken word recognition handle dialectal variation.     

Grammatical and Phonological Influences on Word Order

ABSTRACT— During the grammatical encoding of spoken multiword utterances, various kinds of information must be used to determine the order of words. For example, whereas in adjective-noun utterances like "red car," word order can be determined on the basis of the word's grammatical class information, in noun-noun utterances like "… by car, bus, or …," word order cannot be determined on the basis of a word's grammatical class information. We investigated whether a word's phonological properties play a role in grammatical encoding. In four experiments, participants produced multiword utterances in which the words' onset phonology was manipulated. Phonological-onset relatedness yielded inhibitory effects in noun-noun utterances, no effects in noun-adjective utterances, and facilitatory effects in adjective-noun, noun-verb, and adjective-adjective-noun utterances. These results cannot be explained by differences in the stimulus displays used to elicit the utterances and suggest that grammatical encoding is sensitive to the phonological properties of words.     

Predictive Factors of Ethnic Prejudice Toward Immigrants in a Representative Subsample of Spanish Young People1

This research aimed to study those factors that predict different types of ethnic prejudice in a representative subsample of Spanish young people. The instrument we used was Pettigrew & Meertens' (1995 ) blatant/subtle prejudice scale. Results show that although there is a similar underlying pattern in both types of ethnic prejudice, subtle prejudice is based more on cultural differences, whereas blatant prejudice also stresses the racial, economic, and labor effects of immigration. Moreover, blatant prejudice is also influenced by the formal level of education and political position. The results are interpreted within the Spanish context; and the implications for identity formation and maintenance, and practical programs directed toward ethnic prejudice awareness are discussed.     

The production of determiners: evidence from French.

In numerous languages determiner forms depend not only on semantic information but also on several other kinds of information, such as the grammatical gender of the controlling noun or the phonological properties of the context. In the present research we contrasted two possible accounts of determiner retrieval: one in which every type of required information is bundled into a unitized representation for determiner retrieval and one in which each type of information can individually activate determiner forms. These alternative hypotheses were investigated in three experiments in which native speakers of French named pictures with simple [determiner + noun] or complex [determiner + adjective + noun] noun phrases. In the experiments, the properties of the contextual cues that drive the retrieval of the determiner were manipulated - for example, we manipulated the number of determiner forms that are compatible with a given grammatical gender and the number of grammatical genders that a given determiner form can be used with. Neither hypothesis can fully account for the results of the three experiments. However, a hybrid hypothesis that combines the principal features of the two hypotheses provides a good account of the data.     

成人与中学生科学概念形成过程的四个对比实验

以一组非人工的、自然的科学概念(“反作用力”、“机械能守恒”、“熵”和“场”)为学习内容,分别以成人和中学生为被试,实验研究成人和中学生科学概念形成过程的异同。结论如下：(1)成人与中学生科学概念形成过程均分为振荡渐进期、高原期和突变期。(2)成人的振荡渐进期较长;中学生的振荡渐进期较短且振荡特征比较明显。(3)成人的高原期出现较晚,但持续较长;中学生的高原期出现较早,但持续较短。(4)中学生的突变期的跨度随概念的抽象程度提高而越来越大。     

Affective ratings of sound stimuli

This article present the Spanish assessments of the 111 sounds included in the International Affective Digitized Sounds (IADS; Bradley &; Lang, 1999b). The sounds were evaluated by 159 participants in the dimensions of valence, arousal, and dominance, using a computer version of the Self-Assessment Manikin (Bradley &; Lang, 1994). Results are compared with those obtained in the American version of the IADS, as well as in the Spanish adaptations of the International Affective Picture System (P. J. Lang, Bradley, &; Cuthbert, 1999; Moltó et al., 1999) and the Affective Norms for English Words (Bradley &; Lang, 1999a; Redondo, Fraga, Padrón, &; Comesaña, 2007).     

An inhibitory within-compound association attenuates overshadowing

According to the comparator hypothesis (Miller & Matzel, 1988), cue competition depends on the association between a target stimulus (X) and a competing cue (e.g., an overshadowing cue [A]). Thus, it was expected that overshadowing would be reduced by establishing an inhibitory-like relationship between X and A before compound conditioning. In three lever press suppression experiments with rats, this expectation was supported. Experiment 1 showed that establishing an inhibitory X-A relationship reduced overshadowing. In Experiment 2, degrading the inhibitory-like relationship before conditioning allowed reinforced AX compound trials to result in overshadowing. Experiment 3 replicated the results of Experiment 2 when the inhibitory relationship was degraded after compound conditioning. The results support the view that within-compound associations are necessary not only for retrospective revaluation, but also for conventional cue competition.     

Modulating the masked congruence priming effect with the hands and the mouth

The authors report a series of experiments in which they use the masked congruence priming paradigm to investigate the processing of masked primes in the manual and verbal response modalities. In the manual response modality, they found that masked incongruent primes produced interference relative to both congruent and neutral primes. This finding, which replicates the standard finding in the masked congruence priming literature, is presumed to reflect the conflict that arises between two incompatible responses and, thus, to index the extent of processing of the masked prime. Somewhat surprisingly, when participants were asked to respond verbally in the same task, masked incongruent primes no longer produced interference, but masked congruent primes produced facilitation. These findings are surprising because they suggest that the processing of nonconsciously perceived primes extends to the response level in the manual, but not verbal, response modality. The authors propose that the modulation of the masked congruence priming effect by response modality is due to verbal, but not manual, responses being mediated by the lexical-phonological production system.