Death anxiety and death obsession in Spanish students

This study examined the dimensional structure of Templer's Death Anxiety Scale and Abdel-Khalek's Death Obsession Scale. The responses of 289 Spanish students to the Spanish forms of both scales were evaluated by means of a principal components analysis with varimax rotation. Three significant factors were identified: Death Obsession, Cognitive-Affective, and Death Anxiety. The distribution of the factor loadings for the items of both scales on Factors 1 and 3 supported the discriminant validity of the constructs specific to each of the scales, while Factor 2 showed a common component in both scales characterized by cognitive and affective aspects in relation to the idea of death.     

Iberian rock lizards (Lacerta monticola) assess short-term changes in predation risk level when deciding refuge use

Prey might assess that risk level estimated in the first encounter with a predator was fixed in subsequent responses, whereas prey using flexible behavior would track short-term changes in risk. The authors examined, in the field, refuge use of Iberian rock lizards (Lacerta monticola) after simulated predator attacks and tested (a) how risk was assessed when multiple sources of risk were present simultaneously, (b) how short-term changes in risk level of successive attacks affected refuge use, and (c) whether the interval between attacks was important, insofar as attacks were considered to be coming from the same or different predators. Results suggest that lizards have a flexible estimate of risk that is based on multiple sources and flexibly dependent on previous estimates.     

Exploring the structure of Zuckerman's Sensation Seeking Scale, Form V in a Spanish sample

The psychometric properties of the original version of the Sensation Seeking Scale (Form V) were analyzed in a sample of 1,006 Spanish university students. The total sample was randomly split into two halves. Exploratory factor analyses were conducted on the calibration sample (n=504), whereas confirmatory factor analysis procedures were performed on the validation sample (n=502). As previous studies have suggested, exploratory factor structure indicated that several items load on a different factor or have loadings lower than .30. Those problems were surpassed when the best five items per factor were factor analyzed again. The confirmatory factor analyses showed that a 4-factor simple structure model gave a clearly imperfect fit. A model of 20 items (5 items per factor) gave a better fit, although with similar problems regarding the low reliabilities of the Experience Seeking and Boredom Susceptibility subscales. The need for improvement of the four-factor structure is discussed.     

Effects of suppressing neutral and obsession-like thoughts in normal subjects: beyond frequency

Recent cognitive-behavioral theories on obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) show that deliberate attempts to suppress intrusive and undesirable thoughts lie at the genesis of clinical obsessions. In this paper the results of an experimental study on the suppression of neutral and obsession-like thoughts in normal subjects are presented. Eighty-seven university students performed in three experimental periods: (1) base-line monitoring, (2) experimental instruction, and (3) monitoring. For each of these periods, the frequency of the occurrence of a "white bear" thought or a personally relevant intrusive thought was registered. Half of the subjects received instructions to suppress the target-thought in period 2, and the other half were instructed to only monitor the target-thought in each of the experimental periods. Several measures were also obtained before and after the experiment: annoyance caused by the intrusion, suppression effort, subjective success, and evaluative appraisals of the target-thought. The results showed neither immediate nor delayed frequency increases of the target thought. However, evidence was found that deliberate thought suppression efforts, regardless of their content, had greater negative consequences than did non suppression. These results are discussed in relation to the recent cognitive proposals about OCD.     

On the representation of Portuguese gender-inflected words in the mental lexicon

This study aims at verifying whether Portuguese gender-inflected nouns and adjectives are represented as full forms as suggested by Spanish data (Dominguez, Cuetos, & Segui, 1999). A series of lexical decision experiments is reported. Grammatical gender, frequency dominance, and grammatical category are manipulated and cumulative frequency is controlled. The results do not provide support for a full form representation of gender-inflected words. They suggest that grammatical category, or the nature of the inflectional process involved (lexical or syntactic), affects the way words are represented and accessed. Shorter recognition latencies were obtained for nouns drawn from Feminine dominant gender-inflected pairs than from Masculine dominant pairs whereas a tendency in the opposite direction was observed in adjectives. The effect of frequency dominance appears, nevertheless, to be restricted to feminine nouns. The data are compatible with the view that masculine nouns and adjectives are represented as gender-unmarked forms. These results are discussed in relation to current dual-access models of word recognition and to the notion of "interpretability" of lexico-syntactic features, as put forward in the Minimalist Program of Generative Linguistics.     

Morphological family size in a morphologically rich language: the case of Finnish compared with Dutch and Hebrew

Finnish has a very productive morphology in which a stem can give rise to several thousand words. This study presents a visual lexical decision experiment addressing the processing consequences of the huge productivity of Finnish morphology. The authors observed that in Finnish words with larger morphological families elicited shorter response latencies. However, in contrast to Dutch and Hebrew, it is not the complete morphological family of a complex Finnish word that codetermines response latencies but only the subset of words directly derived from the complex word itself. Comparisons with parallel experiments using translation equivalents in Dutch and Hebrew showed substantial cross-language predictivity of family size between Finnish and Dutch but not between Finnish and Hebrew, reflecting the different ways in which the Hebrew and Finnish morphological systems contribute to the semantic organization of concepts in the mental lexicon.     

The on-line resolution of the sentence complement/relative clause ambiguity: evidence from Spanish

Two self-paced reading experiments investigated syntactic ambiguity resolution in Spanish. The experiments examined the way in which Spanish subjects initially interpret sentences that are temporarily ambiguous between a sentence complement and a relative clause interpretation. Experiment 1 examined whether the sentence complement preference found in English is observed in Spanish speaking subjects. In Experiment 2, verbal mood was manipulated in order to study the influence of verb-specific information on sentence processing. Since subcategorization for a subjunctive complement clause is generally assumed to be a lexical property of some verbs, the manipulation of the mood of the embedded verb affords us an interesting and novel way to examine the influence of lexical information on syntactic ambiguity resolution. Experiment 1 showed that Spanish speakers initially interpret the ambiguous that-clause as a sentence complement. Experiment 2 showed that verb-specific information, in particular, the information that specificies that a verb subcategorizes for a subjunctive complement, is accessed and used rapidly and affects the ambiguity resolution process. The results are discussed in relation to current models of sentence processing.     

Limitations of the mnemonic-keyword method

The effectiveness of the mnemonic-keyword method was investigated in 4 experiments in which participants were required to learn the 1st-language (L1, Spanish) equivalents of a list of 30 2nd-language words (L2, Latin). Experiments 1 (adolescents) and 2 (adults) were designed to assess whether the keyword method was more effective than the rote method; the researcher supplied the keyword, and the participants were allowed to pace themselves through the list. Experiments 3 (adolescents) and 4 (adults) were similar to Experiments 1 and 2 except that the participants were also supplied with a drawing that illustrated the relationship between the keyword and the L1 target word. All the experiments were performed with groups of participants in their classrooms (i.e., not in a laboratory context). In all experiments, the rote method was significantly more effective than was the keyword method.     

Differential effects of forward or simultaneous conditioned stimulus-unconditioned stimulus intervals on the defensive behavior system of the Norway rat (Rattus norvegicus)

To test several predictions derived from a behavior-systems approach, the authors assessed Pavlovian fear conditioning in rats after 30 trials of forward, simultaneous, or unpaired training. Direct evidence of conditioned fear was collected through observation of flight and freezing reactions during presentations of the conditioned stimulus (CS) alone. The authors also tested the CS's potential to reinforce an instrumental escape response in an escape-from-fear paradigm. On the one hand, rats that received forward training showed conditioned freezing, but no conditioned flight was observed. On the other hand, rats that received simultaneous training showed conditioned flight, but no conditioned freezing was observed. Rats that received either forward or simultaneous pairings showed instrumental learning of the escape-from-fear response. Implications for several theories of Pavlovian conditioning are discussed.