The consultation clinic

Pastoral Psychology -     

Motor,affective and cognitive empathy in adolescence: Interrelations between facial electromyography and self-reported trait and state measures

This study examined interrelations of trait and state empathy in an adolescent sample. Self-reported affective trait empathy and cognitive trait empathy were assessed during a home visit. During a test session at the university, motor empathy (facial electromyography), and self-reported affective and cognitive state empathy were assessed in response to empathy-inducing film clips portraying happiness and sadness. Adolescents who responded with stronger motor empathy consistently reported higher affective state empathy. Adolescents' motor empathy was also positively related to cognitive state empathy, either directly or indirectly via affective state empathy. Whereas trait empathy was consistently, but modestly, related to state empathy with sadness, for state empathy with happiness few trait–state associations were found. Together, the findings provide support for the notion that empathy is a multi-faceted phenomenon. Motor, affective and cognitive empathy seem to be related processes, each playing a different role in the ability to understand and share others' feelings.     

Andrzej de Lazari et al. (eds.), Idei v Rossii/Idee w Rosji/Ideas in Russia; Leksykon rosyjsko-polsko-angielski

Studies in East European Thought -     

Learning the association between a context and a target location in infancy

Extracting the statistical regularities present in the environment is a central learning mechanism in infancy. For instance, infants are able to learn the associations between simultaneously or successively presented visual objects (Fiser & Aslin, 2002 ; Kirkham, Slemmer & Johnson, 2002 ). The present study extends these results by investigating whether infants can learn the association between a target location and the context in which it is presented. With this aim, we used a visual associative learning procedure inspired by the contextual cuing paradigm, with infants from 8 to 12 months of age. In two experiments, in which we varied the complexity of the stimuli, we first habituated infants to several scenes where the location of a target (a cartoon character) was consistently associated with a context, namely a specific configuration of geometrical shapes. Second, we examined whether infants learned the covariation between the target location and the context by measuring looking times at scenes that either respected or violated the association. In both experiments, results showed that infants learned the target–context associations, as they looked longer at the familiar scenes than at the novel ones. In particular, infants selected clusters of co‐occurring contextual shapes and learned the covariation between the target location and this subset. These results support the existence of a powerful and versatile statistical learning mechanism that may influence the orientation of infants’ visual attention toward areas of interest in their environment during early developmental stages. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Hm1unyLBn0     

Book Reviews : Galin Tihanov,The Master and the Slave: Lukács,Bakhtin, and the Ideas of their Time,Oxford University Press,New York, 2000, 327 pp.

Studies in East European Thought -     

Familial risk of early suicide: variations by age and sex of children and parents

To determine familial risk of early suicide, data on cause of death of all Dutch residents aged 20-55 years who died between 1995 and 2001 were linked to data of their parents. Men whose father died by suicide had a higher odds of suicide themselves, relative to men whose father died of other causes (Odds Ratio (OR): 2.5; 95% confidence interval: 1.8-3.6). This effect was slightly stronger in the case of mother's suicide (OR: 3.4; 2.3-5.0). The same effect was observed for women, for suicide by father (OR: 2.2; 1.3-3.7) and mother (OR: 4.6; 2.6-8.0). The odds of suicide increased with decreasing age at death of parent. Parental suicide is predictive for offspring suicide. Our data suggest that the predictive value is higher in case the mother died by suicide, particularly if the mother died by suicide at a young age.     

Multisensory perceptual learning reshapes both fast and slow mechanisms of crossmodal processing

Previous research has shown that sounds facilitate perception of visual patterns appearing immediately after the sound but impair perception of patterns appearing after some delay. Here we examined the spatial gradient of the fast crossmodal facilitation effect and the slow inhibition effect in order to test whether they reflect separate mechanisms. We found that crossmodal facilitation is only observed at visual field locations overlapping with the sound, whereas crossmodal inhibition affects the whole hemifield. Furthermore, we tested whether multisensory perceptual learning with misaligned audio-visual stimuli reshapes crossmodal facilitation and inhibition. We found that training shifts crossmodal facilitation towards the trained location without changing its range. By contrast, training narrows the range of inhibition without shifting its position. Our results suggest that crossmodal facilitation and inhibition reflect separate mechanisms that can both be reshaped by multisensory experience even in adult humans. Multisensory links seem to be more plastic than previously thought.