Attentional capture by emotional faces in adolescence

Poor decision making during adolescence occurs most frequently when situations are emotionally charged. However, relatively few studies have measured the development of cognitive control in response to emotional stimuli in this population. This study used both affective (emotional faces) and non-affective (letter) stimuli in two different flanker tasks to assess the ability to ignore task-irrelevant but distracting information, in 25 adults and 25 adolescents. On the non-emotional (letter) flanker task, the presence of incongruent flanking letters increased the number of errors, and also slowed participants’ ability to identify a central letter. Adolescents committed more errors than adults, but there were no age-related differences for the reaction time interference effect in the letter condition. Post-hoc testing revealed that age-related differences on the task were driven by the younger adolescents (11-14 years); adults and older adolescents (15-17 years) were equally accurate in the letter condition. In contrast, on the emotional face flanker task, not only were adolescents less accurate than adults but they were also more distracted by task-irrelevant fearful faces as evidenced by greater reaction time interference effects. Our findings suggest that the ability to self-regulate in adolescents, as evidenced by the ability to suppress irrelevant information on a flanker task, is more difficult when stimuli are affective in nature. The ability to ignore irrelevant flankers appears to mature earlier for non-affective stimuli than for affective stimuli.     

Foreign accent strength and listener familiarity with an accent codetermine speed of perceptual adaptation

We investigated how the strength of a foreign accent and varying types of experience with foreign-accented speech influence the recognition of accented words. In Experiment 1, native Dutch listeners with limited or extensive prior experience with German-accented Dutch completed a cross-modal priming experiment with strongly, medium, and weakly accented words. Participants with limited experience were primed by the medium and weakly accented words, but not by the strongly accented words. Participants with extensive experience were primed by all accent types. In Experiments 2 and 3, Dutch listeners with limited experience listened to a short story before doing the cross-modal priming task. In Experiment 2, the story was spoken by the priming task speaker and either contained strongly accented words or did not. Strongly accented exposure led to immediate priming by novel strongly accented words, while exposure to the speaker without strongly accented tokens led to priming only in the experiment’s second half. In Experiment 3, listeners listened to the story with strongly accented words spoken by a different German-accented speaker. Listeners were primed by the strongly accented words, but again only in the experiment’s second half. Together, these results show that adaptation to foreign-accented speech is rapid but depends on accent strength and on listener familiarity with those strongly accented words.     

Factors influencing juror verdict in a case involving repressed memories of abuse

Mental health professionals acting as expert witnesses are expected to testify about the prevalence of sexual abuse, and also about the veracity of memory. In cases involving adult survivors of sexual abuse, this testimony is typically about repressed and false memory syndromes. Many professionals have noted concerns about the lack of definitive data to support either syndrome. This study examined the following variables: juror knowledge and experience with repressed and false memory syndromes, juror attitudes about sexual abuse and memory recovery techniques, and gender of juror on verdict. Results include effects for repressed memory knowledge/experience and gender. Gender differences were found regarding attitudes about abuse and memory. Concluding comments include practical and research implications of the study results.     

Saving What We Love at Any Cost: The Rhetoric of Heroic Medicine as Diversion

Discussion of the worldwide corporate development of biotechnologies is sometimes diverted through the introduction of images of heroic medical intervention, exemplified by the statement, “I would do anything to save my daughter.” Such heroic images seem to justify virtually any deployment of resources and nearly any health or environmental risk. But it is instructive for future public discussions to examine the use of such images, and to note that those advocating a prominent role for biotechnologies in an expanding global economy welcome such diversionary patterns. Our responsibility to do our own thinking is beset by conditions that may lead us astray. In a time burdened by profound worry—crushing inequalities among the world's peoples, an ecological crisis, and threat of nuclear war—it is tempting to avert our eyes when we are faced with grave new dangers. Moreover, in our increasingly visual culture, images have come to function as a facsimile of and substitute for real thinking. If we are to have significant discussions about the potential of biotechnology, we must not only be wary of promises of economic growth but must also be mindful of sources of diversion and the appeals of image-thinking. We should strive to become more critical of our own ways of thinking, thus opening the discussion to a fuller consideration of what needs to be saved.     

Effects of Damage to Right-Hemisphere Brain Structures on Spontaneous Emotional and Social Judgments

Recent work in cognitive and social neuroscience has focused on the neural substrates of social judgment. The present study explores the effects of damage to the right-hemisphere somatosensory cortices (RSS), a region known for its role in emotion recognition. Seven subjects with RSS damage were shown a short movie depicting objects that move in socially suggestive ways, a stimulus that typically elicits spontaneous social and emotional attributions from normal subjects. The spontaneous verbal responses of RSS-damaged subjects to this movie were compared to those of normal subjects as well as brain-damaged control subjects; the data were derived using a word count and categorization computer program. This method measures spontaneous social and emotional judgments rather than the more typical rating and labeling measures used in neuropsychological studies of social judgment. As predicted, relative to brain-damaged and normal controls, subjects with RSS damage reacted to the stimulus movie with fewer words in categories describing emotional and social processes, despite using a similar total number of words (and slightly more words describing movement, a control category). These results provide further evidence for the role of the RSS in social/emotional processing and identify a role for the RSS in automatic representation in ourselves of body states of others to foster emotion recognition and social cognition.     

The Undecidability of Grisin's Set Theory

We investigate a contractionless naive set theory, due to Grisin [11]. We prove that the theory is undecidable.     

Thoughts of Death and Suicide in Early Adolescence

The prevalence and persistence of thoughts of death and suicide during early adolescence were estimated in a community‐based cohort. A latent class approach was used to identify distinct subgroups based on endorsements to depression items administered repeatedly over 24 months. Two classes emerged, with 75% in a low ideation class across four assessments. Less than 2% persisted in the high ideation class over three or more assessments. African American and Asian American adolescents were more likely than European Americans to belong to the high ideation class. No members of the low ideation class endorsed “thought about killing myself,” while “thoughts of death and dying” was endorsed by members of both classes. Implications for interpreting meanings of death and suicide ideation in early adolescence are discussed.     

Simone Weil and the Theo‐Poetics of Compassion

Simone Weil's writings suggest that human compassion is divinely revelatory to the extent that interpersonal union and estrangement intensify identically and simultaneously. The relational space of compassionate communion is aporetic; the more attuned one becomes to an afflicted other, the more unreachable this other is seen to be. In her uniquely poetic style of writing, Weil locates perhaps the most intense experience of God directly in the center of this aporia. Compassion between two people—a sufferer and an empathizer—becomes a locus of divine manifestation as it instantiates the (im)possible distance and oneness of Creation, Incarnation, and Cross.