The thrill of victory and the agony of defeat: spontaneous expressions of medal winners of the 2004 Athens Olympic Games

Facial behaviors of medal winners of the judo competition at the 2004 Athens Olympic Games were coded with P. Ekman and W. V. Friesen's (1978) Facial Affect Coding System (FACS) and interpreted using their Emotion FACS dictionary. Winners' spontaneous expressions were captured immediately when they completed medal matches, when they received their medal from a dignitary, and when they posed on the podium. The 84 athletes who contributed expressions came from 35 countries. The findings strongly supported the notion that expressions occur in relation to emotionally evocative contexts in people of all cultures, that these expressions correspond to the facial expressions of emotion considered to be universal, that expressions provide information that can reliably differentiate the antecedent situations that produced them, and that expressions that occur without inhibition are different than those that occur in social and interactive settings.     

Maternal depression and the timing of mother–child dialogue

Turn-taking in dialogue is an essential part of communication and early language experience. The prevalence of utterances and the timing of responses in dialogue were examined at 14 and 36 months of age in 104 mother–child dyads from the Early Head Start Research and Evaluation Project (EHSREP). Mothers varied in their level of depression risk (measured with the Center for Epidemiological Studies-Depression scale; CES-D). Although maternal utterance rate did not vary significantly across any factors, the latency of mothers' responses to their children decreased with development (12 ms/month) and was significantly related to that of their own children (i.e., slow-responding children had slow-responding mothers). Mothers with higher levels of depressive symptoms were 11% slower in responding to their children than mothers with low depression risk, suggesting that the interactive timing of speech to children may be particularly sensitive to maternal depression, modifying the contingent properties of children's early language experience.     

Rising verbal intelligence scores: implications for research and clinical practice

Evidence suggests that scores on various intelligence tests have been rising at a fast rate. To find out whether performance on the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS) Vocabulary subtest has also been rising, the authors searched major psychology journals for investigations involving healthy younger and older adult participants and collected the reported WAIS Vocabulary scores. The meta-analysis shows that WAIS Vocabulary scores have been rising at the rate of 0.117/year (corresponding to 1.52 IQ points/decade) for younger adults and 0.367/year (corresponding to 4.79 IQ points/decade) for older adults.