Relation of emotion-related regulation to children's social competence: a longitudinal study

The differential relations of children's emotion-related regulation (i.e., effortful control and impulsivity) to their personality resiliency, adult-rated popularity, and social competence were examined in children who were 4.5-7.9 years old and who were remeasured 2 years later. Parents and teachers reported on all constructs, and children's attentional persistence was observed. Structural equation modeling was used to test the mediating role of resiliency on the relations between regulation/control and popularity using two-wave longitudinal data. The results provide some evidence of the mediating role of resiliency in the relations between effortful control and popularity, provide some evidence of bidirectional effects, and also buttress the view that emotional regulation should be differentiated into effortful and reactive forms of control.     

Deficient response modulation and emotion processing in low-anxious Caucasian psychopathic offenders: results from a lexical decision task

The clinical and research literatures on psychopathy have identified an emotion paradox: Psychopaths display normal appraisal but impaired use of emotion cues. Using R. D. Hare's (1991) Psychopathy Checklist-Revised and the G. S. Welsh Anxiety Scale (1956), the authors identified low-anxious psychopaths and controls and examined predictions concerning their performance on a lexical-decision task. Results supported all the predictions: (a) low-anxious psychopaths appraised emotion cues as well as controls; (b) their lexical decisions were relatively unaffected by emotion cues; (c) their lexical decisions were relatively unaffected by affectively neutral word-frequency cues; and (d) their performance deficits were specific to conditions involving right-handed responses. The authors propose that deficient response modulation may underlie both the emotional and cognitive deficits associated with low-anxious psychopaths.     

The nonconsciousness of self-consciousness

Five studies demonstrated that private self-consciousness is associated with nonconscious, automatic behaviors. In 2 studies, high but not low self-conscious individuals walked more slowly following exposure to an implicit elderly prime. In a 3rd study, high but not low self-conscious individuals showed improved performance following exposure to a subliminal success prime relative to a subliminal failure prime. In a 4th study, subliminal exposure to an angry prime was shown to increase blood pressure relative to a relax prime. In a final study, the latter effect was shown to be true only for high self-conscious individuals and only for subliminal presentations. Results are discussed in terms of their implications for understanding a variety of effects associated with self-consciousness and self-awareness.     

Facial expression of pain: an evolutionary account

This paper proposes that human expression of pain in the presence or absence of caregivers, and the detection of pain by observers, arises from evolved propensities. The function of pain is to demand attention and prioritise escape, recovery, and healing; where others can help achieve these goals, effective communication of pain is required. Evidence is reviewed of a distinct and specific facial expression of pain from infancy to old age, consistent across stimuli, and recognizable as pain by observers. Voluntary control over amplitude is incomplete, and observers can better detect pain that the individual attempts to suppress rather than amplify or simulate. In many clinical and experimental settings, the facial expression of pain is incorporated with verbal and nonverbal vocal activity, posture, and movement in an overall category of pain behaviour. This is assumed by clinicians to be under operant control of social contingencies such as sympathy, caregiving, and practical help; thus, strong facial expression is presumed to constitute and attempt to manipulate these contingencies by amplification of the normal expression. Operant formulations support skepticism about the presence or extent of pain, judgments of malingering, and sometimes the withholding of caregiving and help. To the extent that pain expression is influenced by environmental contingencies, however, "amplification" could equally plausibly constitute the release of suppression according to evolved contingent propensities that guide behaviour. Pain has been largely neglected in the evolutionary literature and the literature on expression of emotion, but an evolutionary account can generate improved assessment of pain and reactions to it.     

The Diabetes Family Behavior Checklist: A Psychometric Evaluation

The Diabetes Family Behavior Checklist (DFBC) assesses supportive and non-supportive parental behavior specific to diabetes management via parent and child reports. The DFBC was administered to 133 children with type 1 diabetes (T1D) and their caregivers. Subsequent analysis verified the two-factor structure of the DFBC corresponding to positive and negative support behaviors. Internal consistency was high for DFBC scores. Moderate to strong correlations with other measures of diabetes-specific familial behaviors, adherence, and metabolic control support the validity of the DFBC. Clinical application of the DFBC is discussed.     

Speech-specific auditory processing: where is it?

Are speech-specific processes localized in dedicated cortical regions or do they emerge from developmental plasticity in the connections among non-dedicated regions? Here we claim that all the brain regions activated by the processing of auditory speech can be re-classified according to whether they respond to non-verbal environmental sounds, pitch changes, unfamiliar melodies, or conceptual processes. We therefore argue that speech-specific processing emerges from differential demands on auditory and conceptual processes that are shared by speech and non-speech stimuli. This has implications for domain- vs. process-specific cognitive models, and for the relative importance of segregation and integration in functional anatomy.     

Action experience alters 3-month-old infants' perception of others' actions

An intervention facilitated 3-month-old infants' apprehension of objects either prior to (reach first), or after (watch first) viewing another person grasp similar objects in a visual habituation procedure. Action experience facilitated action perception: reach-first infants focused on the relation between the actor and her goal, but watch-first infants did not. Infants' sensitivity to the actor's goal was correlated with their engagement in object-directed contact with the toys. These findings indicate that infants can rapidly form goal-based action representations and suggest a developmental link between infants' goal directed actions and their ability to detect goals in the actions of others.     

Posthypnotic amnesia for a first romantic relationship: Forgetting the entire relationship versus forgetting selected events

This experiment investigated the impact of suggestion focus on posthypnotic amnesia (PHA) for memories of a first romantic relationship. During hypnosis, high and low hypnotisable participants recalled specific memories from this period in response to 10 cue phrases (Elicitation). They then received a PHA suggestion that targeted either the entire period or specific memories from that period. Participants' explicit memory was indexed by cued recall after PHA was administered (memories recalled to "old" and "new" cues; Recall 1) and after it was cancelled (Recall 2). A social judgement task indexed dissociations between implicit and explicit memory. PHA had the greatest impact on highs', but not lows', memory performance (in terms of memories recalled to old cues, recall latency, and qualitative memory ratings) when the suggestion targeted the entire period rather than specific events. We discuss these findings in terms of the parameters of PHA's influence on memory, its value for exploring the nature and structure of autobiographical memory, and its utility as a laboratory analogue of functional amnesia.     

Development of an abstract category representation for the spatial relation between in 6- to 10-month-old infants

Nine experiments examined the formation of an abstract category representation for the spatial relation between by 6- to 10-month-old infants. The experiments determined that 9- to 10-month-olds, but not 6- to 7-month-olds, could form an abstract category representation for between when performing in an object-variation version of the between categorization task. The results also demonstrated that 6- to 7-month-olds could form category representations for between in the object-variation version of the between categorization task but that such representations were specific to the particular objects presented. The evidence confirms that representations for different spatial relations emerge at different points during development, and suggests that each representation undergoes its own period of development from concrete to abstract.