Diminished cooperativeness of psychopaths in a prisoner's dilemma game yields higher rewards

Maladaptive social behavior is one of the defining characteristics of psychopathic personality disorder. Nevertheless, maladaptive social behavior has only rarely been observed among psychopaths in experimentally controlled situations. The authors assessed the behavior of criminal psychopaths from high-security psychiatric hospitals in a computer simulation of a social dilemma situation. The psychopaths showed a markedly higher proneness to competitive (i.e., noncooperative) behavior than did healthy adults from the general population. The odds ratio between defection and being a psychopath was estimated at 7.86 in the sample. The probability to choose selfish instead of cooperative behavior was significantly linked to the following subscales of the Psychopathy Personality Inventory-Revised (S. O. Lilienfeld & M. R. Widows, 2005): rebellious nonconformity, Machiavellian egocentricity, and the total score. On average, the psychopathic participants accumulated higher gain and more strongly exploited their counterpart than did the healthy participants.     

“I’m Not Really Afraid of Osama Bin Laden!” Fear of Terrorism in Dutch Children

We examined to what extent children in The Netherlands are affected by the threat of terrorism. For this purpose, a sample of school children living in Rotterdam or adjacent satellites (N = 216) completed a fear survey that included a number of terrorism-related items, and were confronted with ambiguous vignettes to measure threat-related interpretation bias. The results demonstrated that although a number of terrorism-related items (i.e., bombing attacks, explosions in a bus or subway) listed high in a ranking of most intense childhood fears, very few children made terrorist-related interpretations of ambiguous situations.     

A Population-Based Twin Study of Parentally Reported Tactile and Auditory Defensiveness in Young Children

  Some adults and children exhibit defensive behaviors to tactile or auditory stimulation. These symptoms occur not only in subsets of children with ADHD, autism, and Fragile X syndrome, but also in the apparent absence of accompanying disorders. Relatively little research explores the correlates and antecedents of sensory defensiveness. Using a population-based sample of 1,394 toddler-aged twins, mothers reported on tactile and auditory defensiveness, temperament, and behavior problems. The incidence of defensive symptoms was widely distributed, with some accumulation of cases in the extreme range. Girls were overrepresented in the extreme tactile defensiveness group. Both auditory and tactile defensiveness were modestly associated with fearful temperament and anxiety, but they were relatively distinct from other common dimensions of childhood behavioral dysfunction. Twin correlations for the full range of scores and concordance rates for the extremes suggested moderate genetic influences, with some indication that the tactile domain might be more heritable than the auditory domain.     

Infants' imitation of goal-directed actions: the role of movements and action effects

This paper reviews studies on infants' imitation of goal-directed actions in the first two years of life. Special emphasis is given to the role of the two observable components of an action, that is, the movement and the action effects, on infants' replication of target actions. The reviewed studies provide evidence that infants benefit most from a full demonstration of both movements and effects. If movements are demonstrated in isolation, infants may encode this information, but they preferentially reproduce actions that lead to salient effects. If action effects are presented in isolation, infants younger than 19 months usually fail to emulate the unseen movements that would be necessary to produce these effects. Infants' ability to predict action effects or to infer unseen movements from incomplete demonstrations improves substantially at the end of the second year of life. It is concluded that the capability to learn relations between movements and action effects by observation, and the knowledge about movement-effect relations acquired so far, may be important factors underlying the developmental changes in infants' imitation of goal-directed actions.     

Imagery intervention in open and closed tennis motor skill performance

To assess use of imagery intervention in performance of two tennis motor skills the quasi-experimental design included a pre- and posttest and a control group. The tennis service shot and service receiving skill were selected as representative of open and closed skills, respectively. 48 subjects, male tennis players, whose ages ranged from 16 to 18 yr. (M = 17.2), were divided into two groups: (1) Technical practice only which was used as control group and (2) Imagery group who received both imagery and technical practice. Analysis of covariance showed a significant main effect for the imagery intervention on the closed skill (p = .002). Findings suggest that imaging a positive outcome may be more powerful in improving performance of closed skill movements than of open skill movements.     

How 7-month-olds interpret ambiguous motion events: Category-based reasoning in infancy

This paper investigates the role of static and dynamic attributes for the animate-inanimate distinction in category-based reasoning of 7-month-olds. Three experiments tested infants’ responses to movement events involving an unfamiliar animal and a ball. When either the animal or the ball showed self-initiated irregular movements (Experiment 1), infants expected the previously active object to start moving again. When both objects were moving together in an ambiguous motion event (Experiment 2), infants expected only the animal to start moving again. Initial looking preferences for each object did not influence results. When either the facial features of the animal were removed, or its furry body was replaced by a plastic spiral in an ambiguous motion event (Experiment 3), infants formed no clear expectation regarding future movements. Based on this set of findings we conclude that 7-month-olds flexibly combine information about the static and dynamic properties of objects in order to reason about motion events.     

What Explains Boys’ Stronger Confidence in their Intelligence?

This study investigated whether boys’ stronger confidence in their intelligence is explained by gender differences in measured intelligence and gender-stereotypical parental perceptions of their children’s intelligence. Verbal, numeric, figural, and reasoning intelligence and corresponding self-ratings were assessed for 496 German 11th and 12th graders (284 girls; age: M?=?16.95). Parents also rated their children’s intelligence (339 parents; 205 mothers; age: M?=?46.66). With and without controlling for intelligence, boys rated their numerical, figural, and reasoning abilities higher than girls. The same pattern appeared in parental intelligence perceptions. Boys even judged themselves as more intelligent controlling for both measured intelligence and parental intelligence estimates. Thus, neither intelligence nor gender-stereotypical parental perceptions totally explains boys’ stronger confidence in their intelligence.     

The retrieval of controlled and automatic aspects of meaning on direct and indirect tests

The literature concerning implicit memory presents conflicting evidence on the importance of meaning in recovering recently studied words. When the same cues are used during testing, indirect instructions reduce levels of processing effects relative to those obtained with direct instructions, suggesting that meaning is not as likely to be retrieved on indirect tests. However, with certain cues, meaning set size of the studied words affects performance even under indirect instructions, suggesting that meaning is retrieved on such tests. The purpose of the present experiments was to resolve this apparent inconsistency. In Experiment 1, the effects of levels of processing and meaning set size were evaluated under direct and indirect test instructions, with the use of stem and word-fragment cues. In other experiments, beginning and ending stem cues were compared, and levels, set size, and instructional effects were evaluated using meaning cues. The findings indicated that levels effects were determined more by test instructions than by test cues, and that set size effects were determined more by test cues than by test instructions. Implications are discussed for transfer-appropriate processing viewpoints and for a model in which it is assumed that performance is determined by searching either explicit or implicit memories.     

Stress Management in Bus Drivers: A Pilot Study Based on the Model of Effort–Reward Imbalance

A number of studies documented associations between work stress and elevated morbidity in professional drivers. The model of effort–reward imbalance (ERI) identifies distinct situational and personal characteristcs which elicit chronically stressful experience at work in terms of a mismatch between high costs and low gain. Fifty-four highly stressed male inner-city bus drivers (mean age 49,5 ± 5,3) were recruited to participate in a 12 weeks stress management program based on the ERI model (intervention group (IG) n = 26, control group (CG) n = 28). Intervention included relaxation, coping with anger and excessive work commitment (“high need for control”), management of conflicts with superiors, and recommendations for structural changes at work. After 12 weeks, mean level of “need for control,” a critical, health adverse style of coping with job demands, was significantly reduced in IG vs. CG, and this effect persisted after 3 months. In conclusion, a theory-based worksite stress management program in an occupational risk group is feasible and shows beneficial psychological effects.