Maternal guilt

The recent emphasis on humans as cooperative breeders invites new research on human family dynamics. In this paper we look at maternal guilt as a consequence of conditional maternal investment. Solicited texts written by Finnish mothers with under school-aged children in 2007 (n = 63) described maternal emotions perceived as difficult and forbidden. Content analysis of guilt-inducing situations showed that guilt arose from diverging interest and negotiations between the mother and child (i.e., classic parent- offspring conflict). Also cultural expectations of extensive and perpetual high-quality maternal investment or the "motherhood myth" induced guilt in mothers. We argue that guilt plays an important role in maternal-investment regulation. Maternal guilt is predicted to vary with social and cultural context but also to show universal characteristics due to parent-offspring conflict and allomaternal manipulation. Results are preliminary and intended to stimulate research into the mechanisms, gender differences and cultural variations of guilt and other social emotions in human parenting.     

Co-occurring anxiety influences patterns of brain activity in depression

Brain activation associated with anhedonic depression and co-occurring anxious arousal and anxious apprehension was measured by fMRI during performance of an emotion word Stroop task. Consistent with EEG findings, depression was associated with rightward frontal lateralization in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), but only when anxious arousal was elevated and anxious apprehension was low. Activity in the right inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) was also reduced for depression under the same conditions. In contrast, depression was associated with more activity in the anterior cingulate cortex (dorsal ACC and rostral ACC) and the bilateral amygdala. Results imply that depression, particularly when accompanied by anxious arousal, may result in a failure to implement top-down processing by appropriate brain regions (left DLPFC, right IFG) due to increased activation in regions associated with responding to emotionally salient information (right DLPFC, amygdala).     

Beyond good and evil: the time-course of neural activity elicited by specific picture content

The present study examined electrocortical evidence for a negativity bias, focusing on the impact of specific picture content on a range of event-related potentials (ERPs). To this end, ERPs were recorded while 67 participants viewed a variety of pictures from the International Affective Picture System. Examination of broad categories (i.e., pleasant, neutral, unpleasant) found no evidence for a negativity bias in two early components, the N1 and the Early Posterior Negativity (EPN), but revealed that unpleasant images did elicit a larger late positive potential (LPP) than pleasant pictures. However, images of erotica and mutilation elicited comparable LPP responses, as did affiliative and threatening images. Exciting (i.e., sports) images and disgusting images elicited smaller LPPs than other emotional images, similar to neutral images containing people-which were associated with the largest LPPs among neutral pictures. When these three anomalous categories (exciting, disgusting, and scenes with people) were excluded, unpleasant images no longer elicited a larger LPP than pleasant images. Thus, including exciting images in pleasant ERP averages disproportionately reduces the LPP. The present findings are discussed in light of the motivational significance of specific picture subtypes.     

The creativity-spirituality construct and its role in transformative coping

The present study examines whether and to what extent creativity and spirituality are used in coping in a cross-cultural and cross-denominational student sample of 610 participants. Two new theory-based instruments, displaying good internal consistency and satisfactory levels of content-, and construct validity, are introduced, the Creative Coping Scale-19 (CCS-19), and the Spiritual Coping Scale-30 (SCS-30). A positive, moderate relationship between creative and spiritual coping emerged, thus supporting the theory of transformative coping. The findings demonstrated that participants applied both creative and spiritual coping in their lives in order to deal with acute and chronic stress. Associations between creative and spiritual coping and demographic variables were outlined. Practical applications for the promotion of mental health were discussed. Future research should seek to replicate and extend the present findings.     

Video Versus Reality: Infants' Attention and Affective Responses to Video and Live Presentations

Television viewing by infants has become very common, yet relatively little is known about infants' reactions to video compared to live events. We conducted two experiments in order to compare 9- or 10-month-old infants' behavioral reactions to live events and video presentations of those events. In the first experiment, infants' were shown video and live presentations shown consecutively; their affective reactions were consistent, indicating that video conveys meaning and emotional impact even in infancy. However, infants generally looked longer at, reached more to, showed more interest in, and exhibited more fear to the real stimuli. In a second experiment, infants were shown identical live and video events simultaneously; they looked much longer at the live presentations, further confirming that they distinguished live events from video and preferred to watch real events. Implications for infants' television viewing and the use of video images in infancy research are discussed.     

Preschool Children's Multimodal Word Learning

Two studies used a new paradigm to examine preschool children's (i.e., 2-, 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds) word learning across multiple sense modalities. In Study 1 (n = 60), children heard a word for an object that they touched but did not see, while word learning was examined using objects that were seen but not touched. In Study 2 (n = 60), children heard a word for an object that they saw but did not touch, while word learning was examined using objects that were touched but not seen. Findings from both studies revealed that children were able to learn words by coordinating information across multiple sense modalities and that word learning improved with age. These findings are discussed in terms of E. J. Gibson's differentiation theory (1969 Gibson , E. J. ( 1969 ). Principles of perceptual learning and development . Englewood Cliffs , NJ : Prentice Hall . [Google Scholar], 1988 Gibson , E. J. ( 1988 ). Exploratory behavior in the development of perceiving, acting, and the acquiring of knowledge . Annual Review of Psychology , 39 , 1 – 41 .[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]).     

Suggestibility From Stories: Can Production Difficulties and Source Monitoring Explain a Developmental Reversal?

Children's memories improve throughout childhood, and this improvement is often accompanied by a reduction in suggestibility. In this context, it is surprising that older children learn and reproduce more factual errors from stories than do younger children (Fazio & Marsh, 2008 Fazio , L. K. , & Marsh , E. J. ( 2008 ). Older, not younger, children learn more false facts from stories . Cognition , 106 , 1081 – 1089 .[Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). The present study examined whether this developmental reversal is limited to production tests, or whether younger children are still less suggestible when the final test (multiple-choice) asks them to recognize the answer. A second goal was to explore the role of source monitoring in children's suggestibility by examining children's awareness of learning within, versus before, the experiment. Five-year-olds and 7-year-olds listened to stories containing correct, neutral, and misleading references and later took either a multiple-choice or short-answer general knowledge test. In addition, they judged whether each answer had appeared in the stories and whether they had known it before the experiment. Critically, a developmental reversal in suggestibility was observed on both tests; younger children were less suggestible even when faced with the story errors at test. Although older children showed superior source discriminability for whether their answers had appeared in the stories, they showed an illusion of prior knowledge, believing they had known their misinformation answers all along. To this effect, older children's increased suggestibility may be due not only to their superior memory capacity for specific story errors, but also to their ability and tendency to integrate story information into their knowledge base.     

Anatomically plausible illusory posture affects mental rotation of body parts

During mental rotation (MR) of body parts, people internally simulate the movement of their corresponding body segments. These sensory–motor mechanisms render MR sensitive to proprioceptive information (e.g., posture). Similar mechanisms can alter illusory hand ownership following synchronous visuotactile stimulation (e.g., the rubber hand illusion [RHI]). In the present study, we first showed that illusory ownership for a fake hand can also be induced when the posture of the fake hand (palm-up) does not correspond with the subject’s physical hand posture (palm-down). Then we tested whether illusory ownership for a fake hand in such a posture impacts the MR of hands carried out immediately and repeatedly after the RHI. The results showed that MR was altered for the view corresponding to the fake hand’s posture, but not for other views. Additionally, these effects depended on illusory ownership, as only synchronous visuotactile stimulation was found to lead to these changes, characterized by a modulation of the rotation-dependent profile of MR response times. These findings show that similar sensory–motor mechanisms are recruited during the MR of hands and illusory hand ownership manipulated through multisensory mismatch, and that bottom-up visuotactile stimulation interferes with high-level imagery processes.     

Body size over-estimation in women with anorexia nervosa is not qualitatively different from female controls

Over-estimation of body size is a cardinal feature of anorexia nervosa (AN), usually revealed by comparing individuals who have AN with non-AN individuals, the inference being that over-estimation is pathological. We show that the same result can be reproduced by sampling selectively from a single distribution of performance in body size judgement by comparing low BMI individuals with normal BMI individuals. Over-estimation of body size in AN is not necessarily pathological and can be predicted by normal psychophysical biases in magnitude estimation. We confirm this prediction in a dataset from a morphing study in which 30 women with AN and 137 control women altered a photograph of themselves to estimate their actual body size. We further investigated the relative contributions of sensory and attitudinal factors to body-size overestimation in a sample of 166 women. Our results suggest that both factors play a role, but their relative importance is task dependent.