Selective inhibition in children with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder off and on stimulant medication

Selective inhibition requires discrimination between auditory signals and is assessed using a modification of the stop-signal task. Selective inhibition was assessed in a group of 59 clinic-referred, DSM-IV-diagnosed children with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and compared to that of a community sample of 59 children. Methylphenidate (MPH) effects on selective inhibition were assessed in a subset of the ADHD sample that participated in an acute, randomized, placebo-controlled, crossover trial with 3 fixed doses of MPH. Children with ADHD performed more poorly than controls on the majority of selective stop-signal task parameters: they exhibited more anticipatory (invalid) responses, with less accurate and more variable responses on the response execution task, as well as a slower selective inhibition process. MPH improved speed of both inhibition and response execution processes; it also reduced variability of response execution and decreased nonselective inhibition. On the one hand, findings are consistent with purported inhibition deficit in ADHD, but on the other hand, suggest that neither the impairment itself, nor MPH effects, were restricted to inhibition.     

Reducing the influence of extrapersonal associations on the Implicit Association Test: personalizing the IAT

The authors argue that the Implicit Association Test (IAT; A.G. Greenwald, D.E. McGhee, & J.L.K. Schwartz, 1998) can be contaminated by associations that do not contribute to one's evaluation of an attitude object and thus do not become activated when one encounters the object but that are nevertheless available in memory. The authors propose a variant of the IAT that reduces the contamination of these "extrapersonal associations." Consistent with the notion that the traditional version of the IAT is affected by society's negative portrayal of minority groups, the "personalized" IAT revealed relatively less racial prejudice among Whites in Experiments 1 and 2. In Experiments 3 and 4, the personalized IAT correlated more strongly with explicit measures of attitudes and behavioral intentions than did the traditional IAT. The feasibility of disentangling personal and extrapersonal associations is discussed.     

Willingness to Recommend: Does Workplace Incivility Actually Play a Role?

Journal of Business and Psychology - To prevent workplace incivility, scholars encourage organizations to use reference checks to help eliminate uncivil applicants. However, under certain...     

Collective aspirations: collective regulatory focus as a mediator between transformational and transactional leadership and team creativity

Journal of Business and Psychology - This paper examines the mediating role of two emergent team states—collective regulatory focus (CRF) and team initiative—for transmitting the...     

Daily Parent-Adolescent Digital Exchanges

Research on Child and Adolescent Psychopathology - The present study tracked adolescents via mobile phones to describe how parents and their adolescent children are using digital technologies in...     

Similarity Judgment Within and Across Categories: A Comprehensive Model Comparison

Similarity is one of the most important relations humans perceive, arguably subserving category learning and categorization, generalization and discrimination, judgment and decision making, and other cognitive functions. Researchers have proposed a wide range of representations and metrics that could be at play in similarity judgment, yet have not comprehensively compared the power of these representations and metrics for predicting similarity within and across different semantic categories. We performed such a comparison by pairing nine prominent vector semantic representations with seven established similarity metrics that could operate on these representations, as well as supervised methods for dimensional weighting in the similarity function. This approach yields a factorial model structure with 126 distinct representation-metric pairs, which we tested on a novel dataset of similarity judgments between pairs of cohyponymic words in eight categories. We found that cosine similarity and Pearson correlation were the overall best performing unweighted similarity functions, and that word vectors derived from free association norms often outperformed word vectors derived from text (including those specialized for similarity). Importantly, models that used human similarity judgments to learn category-specific weights on dimensions yielded substantially better predictions than all unweighted approaches across all types of similarity functions and representations, although dimension weights did not generalize well across semantic categories, suggesting strong category context effects in similarity judgment. We discuss implications of these results for cognitive modeling and natural language processing, as well as for theories of the representations and metrics involved in similarity.     

Of unbiased beans and slanted stocks: Neutral stimuli reveal the fundamental relation between political ideology and exploratory behaviour

Fiagbenu et al. (2019, British Journal of Psychology) questioned the nature and extent of ideological differences in learning and behaviour documented by Shook and Fazio (2009, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 45, 995). We correct a mischaracterization in their depiction of Shook & Fazio’s research, and in doing so, we outline why the original findings represent domain-general ideological differences in attitude-formation processes, rather than simple differences in responses to physical threat. We also report new data that suggest a potential mechanism for the authors’ findings and further highlight the importance of novel, ideologically neutral stimuli when examining fundamental psychological differences between liberals and conservatives.     

Infant feeding and internalized stigma: The role of guilt and shame

Globally the rates of breastfeeding duration are extremely low and postnatal mental health issues are common. As a result, it is important to examine the emotions that underlie these matters. Across two studies (one correlational study N = 160 and one experimental study N = 118), we examined participants’ experiences of shame and guilt when feeding their baby, and the relationship between these emotions with breastfeeding behaviors and internalized stigma. We also examined the psychosocial factors that predict internalized stigma, and whether shame and guilt mediate these relationships. We focused on three factors that have been shown to be associated with internalized stigma in other domains: self-esteem and social support (Study 1), as well as self-efficacy (Study 2). Multiple regression revealed that experienced guilt uniquely predicted a shorter duration of exclusive breastfeeding (Study 1). Higher self-efficacy (Study 2), self-esteem, and perceived social support (Study 1) predicted lower internalized stigma of feeding choice. We found that shame was a mediator for the self-esteem and internalized stigma relationship (Study 1), while guilt was a mediator for the self-efficacy and internalized stigma relationship (Study 2). Our findings highlight the importance of experienced shame and guilt in mothers’ infant feeding experiences. The current results can inform future research and the design of interventions to improve breastfeeding rates and reduce feelings of stigma.     

Margolis Looks at the Arts

This paper examines the early aesthetic writings of Joseph Margolis from the late 1950s to the mid-1960s in order to argue for the relevance of these works in understanding Margolis’s later, more well-known views in the philosophy of art. Specifically, the paper addresses Margolis’s early essays on the definition and ontology of art and aesthetic perception. These essays not only show Margolis engaged in the most significant debates in mid-century analytic aesthetics but also provide important indications of the limitations of that approach to thinking about the arts that informs the development of Margolis’s later cultural realism.