Inhibitory Control During Sentence Reading in Dyslexic Children

The present study focused on the nature of the reading disability of children with the guessing subtype of dyslexia (who read fast and inaccurately). The objective was to separate the excitatory account of their reading disturbance (i.e., in guessers the words’ resting levels of activation are oversensitive to semantic context) from the inhibitory account (i.e., guessers tend to react prematurely to (false) candidate words that are activated in the lexicon).

To disentangle the above accounts, guessers and normal readers were presented with a sentential priming task (SPT). In the SPT, subjects had to determine whether the final word of a sentence was semantically congruent or incongruent with the sentence, but had to inhibit their ‘congruent’ or ‘incongruent’ response in case of an occasionally presented pseudoword. To evoke guessing, each pseudoword closely resembled either a valid congruent or incongruent word. Guessing referred to prematurely accepting a pseudoword as a word that either appropriately or inappropriately completed the sentence. The extent to which subjects guessed at word meaning was evidenced by the false recognition rates (FRR) of the misspelled terminal words.

Analyses on the FRRs of the pseudowords showed that guessers had significantly more difficulty in suppressing the ‘go tendency’ triggered by the pseudowords. It was concluded that the impulsive reading style of guessers should be ascribed to a less efficient suppression mechanism rather than to excessive reliance on contextual information. Specifically, the data were explained by assuming that the availability of the pseudoword’s candidate meaning activated the hand to respond with, and that guessers found difficulty in suspending this response until they analyzed all letters in the stimulus and they could be sure of its spelling.     

The Idea of an Exact Number: Children's Understanding of Cardinality and Equinumerosity

Understanding what numbers are means knowing several things. It means knowing how counting relates to numbers (called the cardinal principle or cardinality); it means knowing that each number is generated by adding one to the previous number (called the successor function or succession), and it means knowing that all and only sets whose members can be placed in one‐to‐one correspondence have the same number of items (called exact equality or equinumerosity). A previous study (Sarnecka & Carey, 2008) linked children's understanding of cardinality to their understanding of succession for the numbers five and six. This study investigates the link between cardinality and equinumerosity for these numbers, finding that children either understand both cardinality and equinumerosity or they understand neither. This suggests that cardinality and equinumerosity (along with succession) are interrelated facets of the concepts five and six, the acquisition of which is an important conceptual achievement of early childhood.     

Self-Stigma in Substance Abuse: Development of a New Measure

Little attention has been paid to the examination and measurement of self-stigma in substance misuse. This paper aims to fill this gap by reporting on the development of a new scale to measure self-stigma experienced by people who are misusing substances, the Substance Abuse Self-Stigma Scale. Content validity and item refinement occurred through an iterative process involving a literature search, focus groups, and expert judges. Psychometric properties were examined in a cross-sectional study of individuals (n?=?352) receiving treatment for substance misuse. Factor analyses resulted in a 40-item measure with self devaluation, fear of enacted stigma, stigma avoidance, and values disengagement subscales. The measure showed a strong factor structure and good reliability and validity overall, though the values disengagement subscale showed a mixed pattern. Results are discussed in terms of their implications for studies of stigma impact and intervention.     

Emotion work and job stressors and their effects on burnout

Abstract

This article reports research on emotion work, organizational as well as social variables as predictors of job burnout. In burnout research, high emotional demands resulting from interactions with clients are seen as a core characteristic of service jobs. However, these emotional demands were seldom measured in a direct manner. It was only recently that emotional demands were included in studies on burnout referring to the concept of emotion work (emotional labor). Emotion work is defined as the requirement to display organizationally desired emotions. A multi-dimensional concept of emotion work was used to analyze the relations of emotion work variables with organizational and social variables and their joint effect on burnout in five samples including employees working in children's homes, kindergartens, hotels, banks and call centers. Emotion work variables correlated with organizational stressors and resources. However, hierarchical multiple regression showed a unique contribution of emotion work variables in the prediction of burnout. Moreover, the analysis of interaction effects of emotional dissonance and organizational and social stressors showed that for service professionals, the coincidence of these stressors led to exaggerated levels of emotional exhaustion and depersonalization.     

Thoughts Associated with Unprotected Anal Intercourse Among Men at High Risk in San Francisco 1997-1999

Men who had high-risk sex with men in the previous year ( N = 124) were asked to recall their thought processes at the time they last had unprotected anal sex with a man who was HIV-positive or of unknown serostatus. Self-justifications for non-condom use were examined individually and in internally validated scales. The most common single self-justification was I want to have unprotected sex because it feels good , endorsed by 76%. Other common thoughts included the notion that it is only human to slip up occasionally (59%) and the resolution to withdraw before ejaculation (59%). For scaled items, the most strongly endorsed themes were: (1) that condoms reduce sexual pleasure (any of 6 items endorsed at least slightly by 90%); (2) fatalism or leaving it to chance (11 items, 81%); and (3) loss of control (9 items, 77%). The thoughts and themes identified may be useful in planning individual and community prevention messages.     

Concurrent Verbal and Emotion Laterality Effects Exhibited by Normally Achieving and Learning Disabled Children

This study assessed both left- and right-hemisphere functions simultaneously when two-syllable words differing only in the initial stop consonant and spoken in different emotional tones were paired dichotically. Seventy-two right-handed normally achieving children, 12 boys and 12 girls at each of grades 1, 3, and 5, were instructed to detect either the presence of a specific word or of a specific emotion. In addition, 30 right-handed learning disabled (LD) children (age-matched to the normal controls) were assessed to determine whether LD children distribute verbal and nonverbal functions to different hemispheres. Results indicated that although both control and LD children demonstrated an overall REA for word stimuli and an LEA for emotional stimuli, and that emotional stimuli were easier to process than word stimuli, LD children were less accurate in processing both types of stimuli than their control counterparts. ‘Complementary specialization,’ as assessed through distribution of laterality effects, was found to be greater for control children than for LD children. However, the lack of consistency in complementary specialization found among the three developmental grade levels may be indicative that independent brain mechanisms underlying verbal and emotional processing have yet to be fully established in children. Further, in contrast to adult findings, a larger LEA was obtained for the emotion ‘happy’ than for the emotion ‘sad.’ It was concluded that whereas independent hemisphere processing for words and emotions is somewhat prevalent for control children, LD children might not be as strongly lateralized for opposite hemisphere processing of these functions.     

Consumer recycling: An ethical decision‐making process

Although recycling is often experienced as a moral dilemma, studies that systematically approach this issue from an ethical perspective are scarce. Moreover, previous studies have explored recycling by mainly using single ethical constructs, such as moral norms, values or obligations, rarely approaching it as an ethical decision‐making process. Our study takes a more holistic approach and integrates the recycling literature with business ethics theory in order to develop a conceptual model of ethical decision making involved in recycling. The model is based on Jones' issue‐contingent model and its key concept, that is, moral intensity, which we extend by adding altruism as an important personality trait that influences pro‐social behaviour. The data were collected from a sample of 367 adult consumers, representative of the Slovenian population by gender and age. The hypotheses were tested using structural equation modelling. The results of our study confirmed the relationships between three key facets of ethical decision making: moral recognition, moral judgment and moral intention. Higher levels of moral recognition were found to lead to more positive moral judgments, which in turn positively influenced the formation of intentions to recycle. Moreover, moral intensity was found to be a significant predictor of moral recognition and moral judgment, while altruism was found to be a significant predictor of moral recognition. These findings hold important implications for public policy makers and social marketers who have to consider not only the consumer characteristics but also the issue characteristics in seeking to understand and influence consumer recycling. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Comparison Facilitates Children's Learning of Names for Parts

Learning names for parts of objects can be challenging for children, as it requires overcoming their tendency to name whole objects. We test whether comparing items can facilitate learning names for their parts. Applying the structure-mapping theory of comparison leads to two predictions: (a) young children will find it easier to identify a common part between two very similar items than between two dissimilar items (because the similar pair is easier to align); (b) close alignments potentiate far alignments: children will be better able to extend a novel part name to a dissimilar object after having extended it to a similar object. In three studies, 227 preschool children mapped novel part terms to new animals or objects. Both predictions were confirmed. Children more accurately extended novel part terms to objects that were similar to the standard than to objects that were dissimilar (Experiments 1 and 2), and children more accurately extended novel part names to dissimilar objects after having extended them to similar objects (Experiment 3). We conclude that structure-mapping processes can support part learning.     

Out of Sight Is Not Out of Mind: Developmental Changes in Infants' Understanding of Visual Perception During the Second Year

Three experiments investigated 14-, 18-, and 24- month-old infants' understanding of visual perception. Infants viewed films in which a protagonist was either able to view the location of a hidden object (Visual Access condition) or was blindfolded when the object location was revealed (No Visual Access condition). When requested to find the object, the protagonist pointed either at the correct location or at the incorrect location. Across experiments, 18-month-olds looked longer at the unexpected action (e.g., person pointing at the incorrect location in the Visual Access condition). By 24 month of age, infants could infer the correct search behavior from gaze alone. These findings suggest that by the middle of the second year of life, infants understand the psychological relation between an observer and an object, even if the object is no longer visible.     

The Effect of Action Valence and Race on 3- to 8-Year-Old Children's Social Cognitive Judgments

The present study investigated children's judgments of actions as a function of the valence of the action and the race of the actor. Three- to 8-year-old children were read an illustrated storybook in which 1 character did not share (a negatively valenced action) and the other character was helpful (a positively valenced action). The race of the characters was manipulated such that in the story, there was 1 Black character and 1 White character. Children were asked to make judgments about how mean/nice the characters were and what consequence (reward or punishment) they should receive for their actions. Despite the fact that children of this age show explicit and implicit pro-White biases (e.g., Baron & Banaji, 2006 Baron, A. S., & Banaji, M. R. (2006). The development of implicit attitudes: Evidence of race evaluations from ages 6 and 10 and adulthood. Psychological Science, 17, 53–58. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.2005.01664.x[Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]), children's judgments were based solely on the valence of action and not on character race. The findings are discussed in light of moral development and the development of bias as it pertains to race.