Social dominance and interpersonal power: Asymmetrical relationships within hierarchy‐enhancing and hierarchy‐attenuating work environments

We studied whether high‐social dominant employees sustain hierarchies in different hierarchy‐enhancing and hierarchy‐attenuating organizations endorsing harsh and soft power tactics. We found that social dominance orientation was positively associated with harsh power tactics, and negatively associated with soft power tactics. Employees higher in social dominance orientation endorsed harsh and opposed to soft power tactics as respectively hierarchy‐enhancing and hierarchy‐attenuating legitimizing myths that promote a dominant‐submissive form of intergroup relationships. We also found that supervisors higher in social dominance, due to their dominant position, strongly opposed soft power tactics more than subordinates did. Amongst high‐social dominant employees in the hierarchy‐attenuating (vs. hierarchy‐enhancing) organization, we observed the strongest opposition to soft power tactics, which are the tactics most shared in an organization which tends to attenuate hierarchies.     

Stone-Type Representations and Dualities for Varieties of Bisemilattices

In this article we will focus our attention on the variety of distributive bisemilattices and some linguistic expansions thereof: bounded, De Morgan, and involutive bisemilattices. After extending Balbes’ representation theorem to bounded, De Morgan, and involutive bisemilattices, we make use of Hartonas–Dunn duality and introduce the categories of 2spaces and 2spaces\(^{\star }\). The categories of 2spaces and 2spaces\(^{\star }\) will play with respect to the categories of distributive bisemilattices and De Morgan bisemilattices, respectively, a role analogous to the category of Stone spaces with respect to the category of Boolean algebras. Actually, the aim of this work is to show that these categories are, in fact, dually equivalent.     

Acute Aerobic Exercise Enhances Students’ Creativity

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of an aerobics games class on creativity in children during the school day. Participants were 96 students (age = 9.84 ± 1.12 years), 48 girls and 48 boys. The students were randomly assigned to the experimental group (EG, n = 48) or the control group (CG, n = 48). The Prueba de Imaginación Creativa-Niños (PIC-N) test was employed to assess narrative and graphic creativity. The EG took part in an aerobic games session lasting 45 min; the CG did not take part in a physical education class on that school day. As for group × time interaction, the EG experienced significant improvements in all creativity variables except in graphic originality, graphic titles, and graphic details. The CG did not improve any creativity variables. The findings suggest that acute aerobic exercise can enhance students’ creativity, which could be important for academic achievement.     

Relativism of Distance - a Step in the Naturalization of Meta-Ethics

Bernard Williams proposed his relativism of distance based on the recognition “that others are at varying distances from us”. Recent work in moral psychology and experimental philosophy highlights the prevalence of folk relativism in relation to spatial and temporal distance. However, Williams’ relativism of distance as well as recent empirical findings which seem to support some of Williams’ main ideas on this issue have received scant attention. In this article, we would like to focus on the phenomenon of moral relativism regarding spatiotemporal distance as an entry point to the nature of folk moral relativism and the methodology of meta-ethics. To do so, we first introduce Williams’ relativism of distance. Then we compare Williams’ approach on this matter to recent experimental approaches on folk relativism. On this score the main result is that Williams’ proposal is consistent with several well-established insights on the experimental study of folk relativism. Williams’ relativism of distance is not only empirically plausible, but it is also of relevance for shaping the methodology of an empirically informed meta-ethics. We close this paper by stressing this methodological contribution.     

Do Envy and Compassion Pave the Way to Unhappiness? Social Preferences and Life Satisfaction in a Spanish City

Mounting evidence shows that people’s self-reported life satisfaction (LS) is negatively related to income inequality. Under the interpretation that the relationship between macro-level variables and LS reflects individuals’ social preferences, this finding indicates that most people display inequality-averse preferences. We explore the relationship between self-reports on inequality aversion and LS in a citywide representative survey/experiment conducted in Spain. If self-reported well-being can be used to infer people’s social preferences, LS should correlate negatively with both “envy” and “compassion” scores (i.e., how much one suffers from disadvantageous and advantageous inequality, respectively). We find that LS relates negatively to envy but positively to compassion, which would imply that suffering from observing poorer others, paradoxically, increases well-being. Using an incentivized Dictator Game as a measure of generous behavior, we reject the hypothesis that the positive link between compassion and LS is actually driven by generosity. We discuss how these findings could indicate that the way LS is used to assess social preferences in the population should be revised.     

Norms for 10,491 Spanish words for five discrete emotions: Happiness,disgust, anger,fear, and sadness

The discrete emotion theory proposes that affective experiences can be reduced to a limited set of universal “basic” emotions, most commonly identified as happiness, sadness, anger, fear, and disgust. Here we present norms for 10,491 Spanish words for those five discrete emotions collected from a total of 2,010 native speakers, making it the largest set of norms for discrete emotions in any language to date. When used in conjunction with the norms from Hinojosa, Martínez-García et al. (Behavior Research Methods, 48, 272–284, 2016) and Ferré, Guasch, Martínez-García, Fraga, & Hinojosa (Behavior Research Methods, 49, 1082-1094, 2017), researchers now have access to ratings of discrete emotions for 13,633 Spanish words. Our norms show a high degree of inter-rater reliability and correlate highly with those from Ferré et al. (2017). Our exploration of the relationship between the five discrete emotions and relevant lexical and emotional variables confirmed findings of previous studies conducted with smaller datasets. The availability of such large set of norms will greatly facilitate the study of emotion, language and related fields. The norms are available as supplementary materials to this article.     

The cyber dating violence inventory. Validation of a new scale for online perpetration and victimization among dating partners

Cyber dating abuse is a new kind of dating violence. Several recent measures assess this phenomenon, but do not focus on a severe aggression that aims to spoil a partner’s relational network (relational cyber abuse). This study developed and validated the Cyber Dating Violence Inventory (CDVI) with 1405 adolescents and young adults (M_age = 18.17; SD_age = 2.39; 65.1% females), an instrument that considers the relational dimension of online dating abuse. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses found two correlated factors (Psychological and Relational) for both perpetration and victimization, showing good reliability. CDVI factors were positively correlated with offline dating violence, showing good criterion validity. This instrument has clinical and educational implications.     

Thermal sensitivity and cardiovascular reactivity to stress in healthy males

This paper examines the association of cardiovascular reactivity with thermal thresholds (detection and unpleasantness). Heart period (HP), systolic (SBP) and diastolic (DBP) blood pressure of 42 health young males were recorded during a cardiovascular reactivity task (a videogame based upon Sidman's avoidance paradigm). Thermal sensitivity, assessing detection and unpleasantness thresholds with radiant heat in the forearm was also estimated for participants. Participants with differential scores in the cardiovascular variables from base line to task > or = P65 were considered as reactors and those how have differential scores < or = P35 were considered as non-reactors. Significant differences were observed between groups in the unpleasantness thresholds in blood pressure (BP) but not in HP. Reactors exhibited significant higher unpleasantness thresholds than non-reactors. No significant differences were obtained in detection thresholds between groups.     

Acculturative stress in Latin-American immigrants: an assessment proposal

The aim of this paper was to develop an instrument to assess levels of stress experienced by Latin-American immigrants in their acculturative process in Spain. A sample of 692 immigrants from Latin America, aged 20 to 63 years, took part on this study (54.9% males and 45.1% females). A 24-item questionnaire with high reliability (.92) was elaborated. Six factors related to acculturative stress were found: 1) discrimination and rejection; 2) differences with the out-group (native Spaniards); 3) citizenship problems and legality; 4) problems concerning social relationships with other immigrants; 5) nostalgia and longing; and 6) family break-up. Our findings show that participants have a high level of stress related to nostalgia and longing, family break-up, and the perception of discrimination and rejection by natives. The usefulness of the instrument and its applications and restrictions are discussed.     

Lifelong reductions of PKMζ in ventral hippocampus of nonhuman primates exposed to early-life adversity due to unpredictable maternal care

Protein kinase Mζ (PKMζ) maintains long-term potentiation (LTP) and long-term memory through persistent increases in kinase expression. Early-life adversity is a precursor to adult mood and anxiety disorders, in part, through persistent disruption of emotional memory throughout life. Here we subjected 10- to 16-wk-old male bonnet macaques to adversity by a maternal variable-foraging demand paradigm. We then examined PKMζ expression in their ventral hippocampi as 7- to 12-yr-old adults. Quantitative immunohistochemistry reveals decreased PKMζ in dentate gyrus, CA1, and subiculum of subjects who had experienced early-life adversity due to the unpredictability of maternal care. Adult animals with persistent decrements of PKMζ in ventral hippocampus express timid rather than confrontational responses to a human intruder. Persistent down-regulation of PKMζ in the ventral hippocampus might reduce the capacity for emotional memory maintenance and contribute to the long-lasting emotional effects of early-life adversity.

Early-life adversity is associated with an increased vulnerability to stress-related disorders that is maintained into adulthood, suggesting a very long-lived effect on emotional memory by the early-life event (Coplan et al. 1996). Although several structural and neurochemical sequelae of early-life adversity have been reported (Teicher et al. 2003; Jackowski et al. 2011), the direct effects of early-life adversity on the molecular substrates maintaining long-term memory storage have not been explored.Accumulating evidence supports a crucial role for the autonomously active, atypical protein kinase C (PKC) isoform protein kinase Mζ (PKMζ) in maintaining synaptic long-term potentiation (LTP), a putative physical substrate for memory, and long-term memory storage (Ling et al. 2002; Pastalkova et al. 2006; Glanzman 2013; Sacktor and Fenton 2018). The autonomous activity of PKMζ is due to its unusual structure that differs from other PKC isoforms (Sacktor et al. 1993). Most PKCs consist of two domains: a catalytic domain and an autoinhibitory regulatory domain that suppresses the catalytic domain. Therefore, most PKCs are inactive until second messengers bind to the regulatory domain and induce a conformational change that releases the autoinhibition. Because second messengers that activate PKCs such as Ca²⁺ or diacylglycerol have short half-lives, most PKCs are only transiently activated.PKMζ, in contrast, consists of an independent PKCζ catalytic domain, and the absence of an autoinhibitory regulatory domain results in autonomous and thus persistent activity once the kinase is synthesized. PKMζ mRNA is transcribed from an internal promoter within the PKCζ/PKMζ gene that is active only in neural tissue (Hernandez et al. 2003). The mRNA is translationally repressed and transported to dendrites of neurons (Muslimov et al. 2004). High-frequency afferent synaptic activity during LTP induction or learning derepresses PKMζ mRNA translation, triggering new synthesis of PKMζ protein (Osten et al. 1996; Hernandez et al. 2003; Tsokas et al. 2016; Hsieh et al. 2017).Once increased, the steady-state amount of PKMζ remains elevated during LTP or long-term memory maintenance. Recent work with quantitative immunohistochemistry (IHC) shows that spatial conditioning induces persistent increases of PKMζ in somatic and selective dendritic compartments of dorsal hippocampal CA1 pyramidal cells that can last at least 1 mo (Hsieh et al. 2021). The persistent increases are preferentially expressed in CA1 pyramidal cells that were activated during the formation of the memory, specifically at the termination zone of the Schaffer collateral/commissural inputs from subfield CA3. In contrast, persistent PKMζ increases are not evident in stratum lacunosum-moleculare, the termination zone that originates in entorhinal cortex that nonetheless is capable of expressing PKMζ. Postsynaptic domain-specific PKMζ expression patterns hint at distinct circuit-specific modifications of cortical–hippocampal synaptic function by maturational and experiential factors.Persistent changes in PKMζ expression are also associated with changes in the capacity for learning and memory across the life span of animals. Decreased memory ability in aged rats is associated with decreased training-induced, persistent PKMζ expression in prelimbic cortex, and increases in PKMζ are crucial for the cognition-enhancing effects of environmental enrichment in the aged animals (Chen et al. 2016). Hara et al. extended the connection between PKMζ and cognitive function to nonhuman primates (NHPs), showing that levels of PKMζ expression in dentate gyrus (DG) axospinous synapses correlate with successful performance on cognitive tasks in young and aged monkeys (Hara et al. 2012). These studies suggest that persistent down-regulation of PKMζ may comprise an important pathophysiological mechanism for cognitive impairment.Here we used a validated NHP model of early-life adversity, maternal variable-foraging demand (VFD), to explore the links between adversity in infancy and PKMζ expression in adulthood (Coplan et al. 1996; Jackowski et al. 2011). Previous studies of the VFD paradigm have revealed that both infants and their mothers exposed to VFD show significant cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) elevations of the stress neuropeptide, corticotropin-releasing factor (CRF). Moreover, the magnitude of CRF change in mothers and infants are positively correlated, suggesting synchronization of maternal–infant stress responses to the VFD stressor (Coplan et al. 2005). From a behavioral standpoint, maternal social rank plays a negligible role in determining an aggregate score of maternal–infant proximity, suggesting preferential attention of mothers to their infants. During the VFD condition, maternal social rank predicts >80% of the variance of maternal–infant proximity, suggesting mothering patterns are interrupted by preferential orientations to social rank; the latter determines food accessibility (Coplan et al. 2015). Dominant females show relative increases in maternal–infant proximity, whereas subordinate females show relative reductions in maternal–infant proximity. Neither pattern of attachment ameliorates an abnormal association between CSF oxytocin concentrations and hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis activity (Coplan et al. 2015). Offspring exposed to VFD rearing assessed both as juveniles and as full adults demonstrate persistent increases in CSF CRF concentrations in comparison with controls reared under non-VFD conditions (Coplan et al. 1996, 2001).Our prior neurohistological studies pointed to the DG as a region particularly vulnerable to VFD exposure, as shown by reduced trophic signaling and neurogenesis (Jackowski et al. 2011; Perera et al. 2011; Schoenfeld et al. 2021). We therefore hypothesized that early-life adversity due to unpredictable maternal care (for brevity, subsequently referred to as “early-life adversity”) reduces the persistent expression of PKMζ within the DG of ventral intrahippocampal neurocircuitry that mediates affective memory processing (Fanselow and Dong 2010). We used PKMζ antisera validated by the lack of immunostaining in PKMζ-null mice (Hsieh et al. 2021) to examine PKMζ expression in ventral hippocampus (NHP anterior hippocampus) in both DG granule cell layer and the stratum moleculare of the suprapyramidal blade that receives direct input from entorhinal cortex, as well as other regions encompassing the hippocampal formation, including the hilus, CA3, CA1, and subiculum.To assess behavioral correlates of hippocampal PKMζ expression, we used a stress-inducing paradigm designed specifically for singly housed bonnet macaque male NHPs, which we refer to as the “human exposure response” (Jackowski et al. 2011; Hamel et al. 2017), which is a variation of the paradigm used in human exposure studies by Kalin et al. in rhesus macaques (Kalin and Shelton 1989). On exposure to a direct human presence, singly housed adult male bonnet macaques react with a dichotomy of responses—confrontational versus timid (see the Materials and Methods) (Jackowski et al. 2011). In our macaque colony, groups of fully adult males are necessarily housed individually to prevent injury sustained during male agonistic encounters, whereas adult females and/or juveniles are safely housed in social groups. Because group housing of nursing females and/or juveniles of both sexes elicits a range of behaviors intrinsic to the species’ social repertoire (Rosenblum et al. 2001; Coplan et al. 2015) that complicates behavioral analyses to human exposure, we restricted our current study to male macaques.