Emotional content of talk to the fetus and healthy coping behaviors during pregnancy

This study examined whether the emotional content of talk to the self and to the fetus were related to health behaviors and psychosocial factors during pregnancy. One hundred fifty-two third-trimester pregnant women attending childbirth preparation classes completed a survey containing the Intrapersonal Communication Questionnaire, which sampled spontaneous talk to the self (self-talk) and to the fetus (baby-talk), and which yielded ratings of emotional valence of talk quotations into positive, negative, neutral, and mixed categories; the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale; and indices for life stress, social support, and consumption behaviors. Baby-talk was more positive whereas self-talk was more negative, or emotionally distressed. More mixed baby-talk occurred with more medicine consumption, and medicine consumption was also related to lower self-esteem and more life stress. More negative baby-talk occurred when cigarette and caffeine consumption was higher. Emotional content of maternal talk to the fetus might indicate development of maternal bonding, and specific emotional contents might be related to health-relevant coping behaviors, for example, consumption of cigarettes and caffeine. Clinical implications for maternal behaviors after birth are discussed.     

Visual working memory for global,object, and part-based information

We investigated visual working memory for novel objects and parts of novel objects. After a delay period, participants showed strikingly more accurate performance recognizing a single whole object than the parts of that object. This bias to remember whole objects, rather than parts, persisted even when the division between parts was clearly defined and the parts were disconnected from each other so that, in order to remember the single whole object, the participants needed to mentally combine the parts. In addition, the bias was confirmed when the parts were divided by color. These experiments indicated that holistic perceptual-grouping biases are automatically used to organize storage in visual working memory. In addition, our results suggested that the bias was impervious to top-down consciously directed control, because when task demands were manipulated through instruction and catch trials, the participants still recognized whole objects more quickly and more accurately than their parts. This bias persisted even when the whole objects were novel and the parts were familiar. We propose that visual working memory representations depend primarily on the global configural properties of whole objects, rather than part-based representations, even when the parts themselves can be clearly perceived as individual objects. This global configural bias beneficially reduces memory load on a capacity-limited system operating in a complex visual environment, because fewer distinct items must be remembered.     

Probabilistic retroactive interference: the role of accessibility bias in interference effects

Probabilistic retroactive interference (RI) refers to the interfering effects of intermixing presentations of an earlier studied response (A-B) with presentations of a competing response (A-D). As an example, for a 2/3 condition, a cue word was presented with its earlier studied response twice and its competing response once during the interference phase. Performance on direct and indirect tests of memory for earlier studied responses was combined to reveal dissociations between effects on recollection and accessibility bias. Manipulating probabilistic RI influenced accessibility bias but left recollection unchanged. Effects of probabilistic RI were compared with effects of traditional, nonprobabilistic RI. The authors contrast their dual-process model with traditional accounts of RI and discuss the importance of distinguishing between recollection and accessibility bias for understanding interference effects.     

Facial averageness and attractiveness in an isolated population of hunter-gatherers

Average faces possess traits that are common to a population. Preferences for averageness have been found in several types of study of both real and computer-manipulated faces. Such preferences have been proposed to be biologically based and thus should be found across human populations, though cross-cultural evidence to date has been limited. In this study we examined preferences for averageness in both the West and in an isolated hunter-gatherer society, the Hadza of Northern Tanzania in Africa. We show that averageness is generally preferred across faces and cultures, but there were no significant preferences for averageness in European faces by Hadza judges. The different visual experience of the two cultures may explain the differences in preferences. While Westerners have visual experience of both European and African faces, the Hadza are limited in their experience of European faces, potentially leading to a lack of preference for averageness in this group because of the lack of a representation of the 'norm' of European faces.     

Social dominance in preschool classrooms

The authors examined preschoolers' aggressive and cooperative behaviors and their associations with social dominance. First and as predicted, directly observed aggressive interactions decreased across the school year, and same-sex aggression occurred more frequently than cross-sex aggression. Next, the authors examined the relation between aggression and reconciliation, cooperation, and social display variables. Teacher ratings of children's aggression related to observed aggression but not to observed "wins" of aggressive bouts. Instead, wins were related to cooperation and display variables. Finally, they examined the relative power of wins and cooperation in predicting 2 measures of social dominance. After age was controlled, wins alone predicted teacher-rated social dominance. Results are discussed in terms of different forms of competition and how school ethos affects these forms.     

Hoarding in obsessive-compulsive disorder: results from the OCD Collaborative Genetics Study

Hoarding behavior occurs frequently in obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Results from previous studies suggest that individuals with OCD who have hoarding symptoms are clinically different than non-hoarders and may represent a distinct clinical group. In the present study, we compared 235 hoarding to 389 non-hoarding participants, all of whom had OCD, collected in the course of the OCD Collaborative Genetics Study. We found that, compared to non-hoarding individuals, hoarders were more likely to have symmetry obsessions and repeating, counting, and ordering compulsions; poorer insight; more severe illness; difficulty initiating or completing tasks; and indecision. Hoarders had a greater prevalence of social phobia and generalized anxiety disorder. Hoarders also had a greater prevalence of obsessive-compulsive and dependent personality disorders. Five personality traits were independently associated with hoarding: miserliness, preoccupation with details, difficulty making decisions, odd behavior or appearance, and magical thinking. Hoarding and indecision were more prevalent in the relatives of hoarding than of non-hoarding probands. Hoarding in relatives was associated with indecision in probands, independently of proband hoarding status. The findings suggest that hoarding behavior may help differentiate a distinct clinical subgroup of people with OCD and may aggregate in some OCD families. Indecision may be a risk factor for hoarding in these families.     

Evidence for distinct contributions of form and motion information to the recognition of emotions from body gestures

The importance of kinematics in emotion perception from body movement has been widely demonstrated. Evidence also suggests that the perception of biological motion relies to some extent on information about spatial and spatiotemporal form, yet the contribution of such form-related cues to emotion perception remains unclear. This study reports, for the first time, the relative effects on emotion recognition of inverting and motion-reversing patch-light compared to fully illuminated displays of whole-body emotion gestures. Inverting the gesture movies or playing them backwards significantly impaired emotion classification accuracy, but did so more for patch-light displays than for identical but fully illuminated movement sequences. This result suggests that inversion impairs the processing of form information related to the configuration of body parts, and reversal impairs the sequencing of form changes, more than these manipulations impair the processing of kinematic cues. This effect was strongest for inversion, suggesting an important role for configural information in emotion recognition. Nevertheless, even in combination these stimulus manipulations did not abolish above chance recognition of any of the emotions, suggesting that kinematics help distinguish emotions expressed by body gestures. Disproportionate impairments in recognition accuracy were observed for fear and disgust under inversion, and for fear under motion reversal, suggesting a greater role for form-related cues in the perception of these emotions.     

Gender differences in the sensitivity to posttraumatic stress disorder: An epidemiological study of urban young adults

The authors examine the relationship between 2 separate but interrelated findings in the epidemiology of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD): women's greater PTSD risk following traumatic events and the sensitizing effects of a prior trauma on the PTSD response to a subsequent trauma. Data come from a representative sample of 1,698 young adults from a large U.S. city. Analysis was conducted on the subset exposed to traumatic events. Women's risk for PTSD following assaultive violence was higher than men's. When assaultive violence preceded a later nonassaultive trauma in women, there was an increased risk (relative risk = 4.9) for PTSD, which was not observed in men. The relative risk estimate in women was significantly higher than in men. These findings suggest that assaultive violence elicits women's PTSD response directly and by sensitizing them to the effects of subsequent traumatic events of lesser magnitude.     

A method for describing preschoolers' activity preferences

We designed a series of analyses to develop a measurement system capable of simultaneously recording the free-play patterns of 20 children in a preschool classroom. Study 1 determined the intermittency with which the location and engagement of each child could be momentarily observed before the accuracy of the measurement was compromised. Results showed that intervals up to 120 s introduced less than 10% measurement error. Study 2 determined the extent of agreement between two observers who simultaneously collected data for 20 children using 30-, 60-, 90-, and 120-s momentary time sampling (MTS) intervals. The three larger intervals resulted in high levels of interobserver agreement (above 90%), whereas the 30-s interval resulted in unacceptably low levels of agreement (less than 80%). By allowing observers to select from among the different MTS intervals via a datasheet array and then collect data with the chosen system, Study 3 determined observers' preferences for the remaining MTS intervals. Both data collectors preferred the 90-s MTS procedure. The sensitivity of the 90-s MTS procedure, which was shown to be accurate, reliable, and preferred, was then demonstrated by its use to describe activity preferences of a classroom of children in Study 4. This system identified high- and low-preference activities for individual children and revealed interesting patterns of response allocation by the group.