Parent–Child Informant Discrepancy is Associated with Poorer Treatment Outcome

In child clinical psychology, parent and child reports are typically used to make treatment decisions and determine the effectiveness of treatment. However, there are often moderate to large discrepancies between parent and child reports, and these discrepancies may reflect meaningful information about the parent, the child, and the parent–child relationship. Additionally, parent–child discrepancy may predict treatment outcome. This study examined parent–child discrepancy in a sample of 62 children (10.15±1.26 years old) with prominent social competence deficits and mixed diagnoses who were treated with a resilience-based, cognitive–behavioral group therapy program (the Resilience Builder Program) in a private clinical setting. Further analyses were conducted to investigate whether parent–child discrepancy related to treatment outcome. Consistent with the literature, prominent parent–child discrepancy was found across domains, with parents generally reporting more severe symptomatology. Treatment with the Resilience Builder Program resulted in significant improvement in parent report of multiple domains of functioning, including resilience, social skills, and emotion and behavior regulation. Importantly, larger parent–child discrepancy at the start of therapy was predictive of poorer overall treatment response. Given its impact on therapeutic effectiveness, these results suggest that parent–child disagreement regarding the child’s impairment at the onset of therapy is worthy of assessment prior to treatment, and may itself be a topic worthy of targeting in treatment.     

Memory in 3‐month‐old infants benefits from a short nap

A broad range of studies demonstrate that sleep has a facilitating role in memory consolidation (see Rasch & Born, 2013 ). Whether sleep‐dependent memory consolidation is also apparent in infants in their first few months of life has not been investigated. We demonstrate that 3‐month‐old infants only remember a cartoon face approximately 1.5–2 hours after its first presentation when a period of sleep followed learning. Furthermore, habituation time, that is, the time to become bored with a stimulus shown repetitively, correlated negatively with the density of infant sleep spindles, implying that processing speed is linked to specific electroencephalographic components of sleep. Our findings show that without a short period of sleep infants have problems remembering a newly seen face, that sleep enhances memory consolidation from a very early age, highlighting the importance of napping in infancy, and that infant sleep spindles may be associated with some aspects of cognitive ability.     

The Commitment Account of Hypocrisy

Hypocrisy is widely thought to be morally objectionable in a way that undermines the hypocrite’s moral standing to blame others. To wit, we seem to intuitively accept the “Nonhypocrisy Condition:” R has the standing to blame S for some violation of a moral norm N only if R’s blaming S is not hypocritical. This claim has been the subject of intensifying philosophical investigation in recent years. However, we can only understand why hypocrisy is morally objectionable and has an effect on standing to blame if we can correctly characterize hypocrisy itself. Unfortunately, some recent discussions fail to do this, which fatally undermines subsequent arguments concerning the effect of hypocrisy on the standing to blame. This paper’s central aim is to develop and defend a better account of hypocrisy. The hope is that with such an account in hand, we can explain and perhaps justify our moral aversion to hypocrisy in general as well as the Nonhypocrisy Condition in particular.     

On Love’s Robustness

Recently Philip Pettit (2015) has claimed that attachment, virtue, and respect are robust goods. Robust goods require not only the actual provision of certain associated ‘thin’ goods, but also the modally robust provision of these thin goods across a range of counterfactual situations. I focus my attention on Pettit’s account of the robust good of love, which, for Pettit, is the modally robust provision of care. I argue Pettit’s account provides neither necessary nor sufficient conditions for love. In place of Pettit’s account, I suggest an alternative account of love that distinguishes loving dispositions from loving actions.     

Opposing pupil responses to offered and anticipated reward values

Previous studies have shown that the pupils dilate more in anticipation of larger rewards. This finding raises the possibility of a more general association between reward amount and pupil size. We tested this idea by characterizing macaque pupil responses to offered rewards during evaluation and comparison in a binary choice task. To control attention, we made use of a design in which offers occurred in sequence. By looking at pupil responses after choice but before reward, we confirmed the previously observed positive association between pupil size and anticipated reward values. Surprisingly, however, we find that pupil size is negatively correlated with the value of offered gambles before choice, during both evaluation and comparison stages of the task. These results demonstrate a functional distinction between offered and anticipated rewards and present evidence against a narrow version of the simulation hypothesis; the idea that we represent offers by reactivating states associated with anticipating them. They also suggest that pupil size is correlated with relative, not absolute, values of offers, suggestive of an accept–reject model of comparison.     

A novel integrative method for analyzing eye and hand behaviour during reaching and grasping in an MRI environment

The development of noninvasive neuroimaging techniques, such as fMRI, has rapidly advanced our understanding of the neural systems underlying the integration of visual and motor information. However, the fMRI experimental design is restricted by several environmental elements, such as the presence of the magnetic field and the restricted view of the participant, making it difficult to monitor and measure behaviour. The present article describes a novel, specialized software package developed in our laboratory called Biometric Integration Recording and Analysis (BIRA). BIRA integrates video with kinematic data derived from the hand and eye, acquired using MRI-compatible equipment. The present article demonstrates the acquisition and analysis of eye and hand data using BIRA in a mock (0 Tesla) scanner. A method for collecting and integrating gaze and kinematic data in fMRI studies on visuomotor behaviour has several advantages: Specifically, it will allow for more sophisticated, behaviourally driven analyses and eliminate potential confounds of gaze or kinematic data.     

An abstract dynamic access control architecture

This paper presents an abstract architecture capturing the most essential characteristics of security architectures for the kind of access control required in multi-agent systems. A security architecture is usually component based; it is dynamically extensible, reflective, and should be able to support a variety of policy strategies and enforcement mechanisms. Therefore, in designing and implementing such an architecture, it is important to accurately describe its structure, components, and their interactions; and we should also provide support for verifying properties that the architecture must satisfy. The abstract Dynamic Access Control Architecture, or DACA, we propose provides the flexibility to express several complex characteristics abstractly, ultimately resulting in a more structured foundation for implementing security architectures for access control.     

Semantic context effects in the comprehension of reduced pronunciation variants

Listeners require context to understand the highly reduced words that occur in casual speech. The present study reports four auditory lexical decision experiments in which the role of semantic context in the comprehension of reduced versus unreduced speech was investigated. Experiments 1 and 2 showed semantic priming for combinations of unreduced, but not reduced, primes and low-frequency targets. In Experiment 3, we crossed the reduction of the prime with the reduction of the target. Results showed no semantic priming from reduced primes, regardless of the reduction of the targets. Finally, Experiment 4 showed that reduced and unreduced primes facilitate upcoming low-frequency related words equally if the interstimulus interval is extended. These results suggest that semantically related words need more time to be recognized after reduced primes, but once reduced primes have been fully (semantically) processed, these primes can facilitate the recognition of upcoming words as well as do unreduced primes.     

Developmental Pathways to Depressive Symptoms in Adolescence: A Multi-Wave Prospective Study of Negative Emotionality,Stressors, and Anxiety

This study examined two potential developmental pathways through which the temperament risk factor of negative emotionality (NE) leads to prospective increases in depressive symptoms through the mediating role of stressors and anxious symptoms in a sample of early to middle adolescents (N = 350, 6th–10th graders). The primary hypothesized model was that baseline NE leads to increased stressors, which results in increases in anxious arousal, which culminates with elevated depressive symptoms. An alternate model hypothesized that baseline NE leads to increased anxious arousal, which results in increases in stressors, and this culminates in elevated depressive symptoms. Youth completed self-report measures of NE, stressors, anxious arousal, and depressive symptoms at four time-points. Path analysis supported the primary model and showed that the mediating influence of stressors and anxious arousal explained 78% of the association between NE and prospective elevations in depressive symptoms. The alternate model was not supported. Neither gender nor age were moderators.     

Fluent, fast, and frugal? A formal model evaluation of the interplay between memory, fluency, and comparative judgments

A new process model of the interplay between memory and judgment processes was recently suggested, assuming that retrieval fluency-that is, the speed with which objects are recognized-will determine inferences concerning such objects in a single-cue fashion. This aspect of the fluency heuristic, an extension of the recognition heuristic, has remained largely untested due to methodological difficulties. To overcome the latter, we propose a measurement model from the class of multinomial processing tree models that can estimate true single-cue reliance on recognition and retrieval fluency. We applied this model to aggregate and individual data from a probabilistic inference experiment and considered both goodness of fit and model complexity to evaluate different hypotheses. The results were relatively clear-cut, revealing that the fluency heuristic is an unlikely candidate for describing comparative judgments concerning recognized objects. These findings are discussed in light of a broader theoretical view on the interplay of memory and judgment processes.