Quantity discrimination by kittens of the domestic cat (Felis silvestris catus)

Animal Cognition - Quantitative abilities are well described in many species and in diverse life situations, including in the adult domestic cat. However, such abilities have been much less studied...     

Negative Recurrent Thinking as a Moderator of the Relationship Between Perceived Stress and Depressive Symptoms

Both perceived stress and negative recurrent thinking (rumination and worry) have been associated with depressive symptoms. However, no research to date has investigated the association between perceived stress and negative recurrent thinking. In the present study we aimed to explore whether perceived stress and negative recurrent thinking are associated and whether negative recurrent thinking moderates the relationship between perceived stress and depressive symptoms. A convenience sample of 273 undergraduate students completed the Perceived Stress Scale, the Ruminative Responses Scale-10, the Penn State Worry Questionnaire and the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale 2 weeks prior to sitting mid-year examinations. Correlation analyses showed that perceived stress, rumination and worry were positively and significantly associated with depressive symptoms and that perceived stress was positively and significantly associated with rumination and worry. A moderation analysis confirmed that negative recurrent thinking moderated the relationship between perceived stress and depressive symptoms. The implications of these findings are discussed.     

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.     

Iconicity and Diachronic Language Change

Iconicity, the resemblance between the form of a word and its meaning, has effects on behavior in both communicative symbol development and language learning experiments. These results have invited speculation about iconicity being a key feature of the origins of language, yet the presence of iconicity in natural languages seems limited. In a diachronic study of language change, we investigated the extent to which iconicity is a stable property of vocabulary, alongside previously investigated psycholinguistic predictors of change. Analyzing 784 English words with data on their historical forms, we found that stable words are higher in iconicity, longer in length, and earlier acquired during development, but that the role of frequency and grammatical category may be less important than previously suggested. Iconicity is revealed as a feature of ultra-conserved words and potentially also as a property of vocabulary early in the history of language origins.