Comparative risk and perceived control: implications for psychological and physical well-being among older adults

As older adults become more susceptible to certain health crises, their preoccupation with their risk of suffering such events increases. Understanding the implications of risk perceptions is critical because they may have consequences for psychological and physical well-being in later life. In the present study of older adults living in the community, the authors examined participants' comparative risk estimates (CREs)--their perceptions of their own risk relative to a similar other's risk--of suffering a hip fracture. Using multiple regression analyses, the authors examined the role of CREs on psychological well-being (negative emotions, life satisfaction) and self-rated physical well-being (general physical health, recent physical health). The authors expected perceived control (PC) to moderate the relationship between CREs and well-being. The predicted interaction did occur: Among individuals with high PC, comparative optimism (perceiving a comparatively low risk) was associated with better psychological well-being (fewer negative emotions and greater life satisfaction) and better physical well-being (general and recent physical health) relative to comparative pessimism (perceiving a comparatively high risk). Among individuals with low PC, there were no differences in well-being between comparative optimists and comparative pessimists. These findings suggest that the protective effect of comparative optimism on well-being is limited to older adults who have a strong sense of control.     

Infants’ Brain Responses to Looming Danger: Degeneracy of Neural Connectivity Patterns

Abstract

A fundamental property of most animals is the ability to see whether an object is approaching on a direct collision course and, if so, when it will collide. Using high-density electroencephalography in infants and a looming stimulus approaching under three different accelerations, we previously found how visual information for impending collision is sustained in the young human nervous system. In the present study, using longitudinal data on 25 infants at 4–5?months and 12–13?months, we show that infants’ looming-related brain activity is clearly localized in the visual cortex (V1) following retinotopic mapping, but is highly adaptive in its organization otherwise. Analyzing the orientation of electrical source flow, we provide evidence for a high degree of variability, spread across a relatively large area of the visual cortex. The findings reveal a highly dynamic functional organization, with connectivity patterns constantly emerging and changing in many different directions between trials. This suggests degeneracy of neural connectivity patterns through reentry principles, where neurons temporarily assemble to enable an appropriate looming response with the necessary precision.     

When less is more: like humans,chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) misperceive food amounts based on plate size

We investigated whether chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) misperceived food portion sizes depending upon the context in which they were presented, something that often affects how much humans serve themselves and subsequently consume. Chimpanzees judged same-sized and smaller food portions to be larger in amount when presented on a small plate compared to an equal or larger food portion presented on a large plate and did so despite clearly being able to tell the difference in portions when plate size was identical. These results are consistent with data from the human literature in which people misperceive food portion sizes as a function of plate size. This misperception is attributed to the Delboeuf illusion which occurs when the size of a central item is misperceived on the basis of its surrounding context. These results demonstrate a cross-species shared visual misperception of portion size that affects choice behavior, here in a nonhuman species for which there is little experience with tests that involve choosing between food amounts on dinnerware. The biases resulting in this form of misperception of food portions appear to have a deep-rooted evolutionary history which we share with, at minimum, our closest living nonhuman relative, the chimpanzee.     

Do rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta) perceive the Zöllner illusion?

A long-standing debate surrounds the issue of whether human and nonhuman animals share the same perceptual mechanisms. In humans, the Zöllner illusion occurs when two parallel lines appear to be convergent when oblique crosshatching lines are superimposed. Although one baboon study suggests that they too might perceive this illusion, the results of that study were unclear, whereas two recent studies suggest that birds see this illusion in the opposite direction from humans. It is currently unclear whether these mixed results are an artifact of the experimental design or reflect a peculiarity of birds’ visual system or, instead, a wider phenomenon shared among nonhuman mammals. Here, we trained 6 monkeys to select the narrower of two gaps at the end of two convergent lines. Three different conditions were set up: control (no crosshatches), perpendicular (crosshatches not inducing the illusion), and Zöllner (crosshatches inducing the illusion in humans). During training, the degrees of convergence between the two lines ranged from 15° to 12°. Monkeys that reached the training criterion were tested with more difficult discriminations (11°–1°), including probe trials with parallel lines (0°). The results showed that monkeys perceived the Zöllner illusion in the same direction as humans. Comparison of these data with the data from bird studies points toward the existence of different orientation-tuned mechanisms between primate and nonprimate species.     

Feminist Radical Empiricism,Values, and Evidence

Feminist epistemologies consider ways in which gender (among other social factors) influences knowledge. In this article, I want to consider a particular kind of feminist empiricism that has been called feminist radical empiricism (where the empiricism, not the feminism, is radical). I am particularly interested in this view's treatment of values as empirical, and consequently up for revision on the basis of empirical evidence. Proponents of this view cite the fact that it allows us to talk about certain things such as racial and gender equality as objective facts: not just whether we have achieved said equality in our society, but whether we are, in fact, all equal. I will raise the concern that the way in which they model the role of values in epistemology may be a problematic idealization of the open‐mindedness of human agents. In some cases, resistance to value‐change cannot be diagnosed as a failure to respond adequately to evidence. If so, the strategy of empirically testing our values that some feminist radical empiricists suggest may not be as useful a tool for social change as they think.     

Crossing the cultural divide: issues in translation, mistrust, and cocreation of meaning in cross-cultural therapeutic assessment

This article examines cross-cultural therapeutic assessment in a community mental health clinic. The first case describes the work between a Caucasian assessor and a Mexican American family. The authors explore the metaphorical and literal translation of the findings from English to Spanish and the parallel process of translation of the self, experienced by both assessor and client. The second case describes the work between a Caucasian assessor and an African American adolescent. We describe the inherent challenge between the Eurocentric "task" orientation of the evaluation and the Afrocentric "relationship" orientation. We suggest that bridging the gap between cultures and overcoming cultural mistrust lay in the building of the assessor-client relationship. Fischer's concepts of rapport and intimacy are emphasized and expanded on as we emphasize the importance of cocreated meaning in cross-cultural assessment work.     

Lexical representation of schwa words: two mackerels, but only one salami

The present study investigated the lexical representations underlying the production of English schwa words. Two types of schwa words were compared: words with a schwa in poststress position (e.g., mackerel), whose schwa and reduced variants differ in a categorical way, and words with a schwa in prestress position (e.g., salami), whose variants differ in a noncategorical way. Participants named pseudohomophones and matched pseudowords corresponding to schwa and reduced variants of these words. Results revealed an advantage for pseudohomophones over matched pseudowords for both variants of poststress schwa words but only for schwa variants of prestress schwa words. As the pseudohomophone advantage is assumed to reflect the activation of a phonologically matching stored phonological representation, these results suggest that both variants of poststress schwa words are lexically represented while only schwa variants of prestress schwa words are. This result extends the proposal that words with two categorically distinct variants are stored in the production lexicon with 2 representations to another language and demonstrates that this 2-lexeme account does not generalize to pronunciation variants differing from one another in a noncategorical fashion. This finding challenges one of the widely shared assumption of generative models of word production: that content words have only 1 phonological representation. On the other hand, it provides further evidence in favor of another fundamental assumption of these models: that lexical representations are abstract sets of segments rather than fully detailed exemplars.     

Perfectionism in African American students: relationship to racial identity, GPA, self-esteem, and depression

This study examined 219 African American college students at predominantly White universities using the constructs of perfectionism, academic achievement, self-esteem, depression, and racial identity. Cluster analysis was performed using the Almost Perfect Scale-Revised (APS-R), which yielded three clusters that represented adaptive perfectionists, maladaptive perfectionists, and nonperfectionists. These three groups were compared on their scores on the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale (RSES), the Center for Epidemiological Studies-Depression Scale (CES-D), the Cross Racial Identity Scale (CRIS), and Grade Point Average (GPA). Adaptive perfectionists reported higher self-esteem and lower depression scores than both the nonperfectionists and maladaptive perfectionists. Adaptive perfectionists had higher GPAs than nonperfectionists. On the racial identity scales, maladaptive perfectionists had higher scores on Pre-Encounter Self Hatred and Immersion-Emersion Anti-White subscales than adaptive perfectionists. The cultural and counseling implications of this study are discussed and integrated. Finally, recommendations are made for future studies of African American college students and perfectionism.