Measurement of Impulsivity: Construct Coherence, Longitudinal Stability, and Relationship with Externalizing Problems in Middle Childhood and Adolescence

This study focused on the assessment of impulsivity in nonreferred school-aged children. Children had been participants since infancy in the Bloomington Longitudinal Study. Individual differences in impulsivity were assessed in the laboratory when children were 6 (44 boys, 36 girls) and 8 (50 boys, 39 girls) years of age. Impulsivity constructs derived from these assessments were related to parent and teacher ratings of externalizing problems across the school-age period (ages 7–10) and to parent and self-ratings of these outcomes across adolescence (ages 14–17). Consistent with prior research, individual measures of impulsivity factor-analyzed into subdimensions reflecting children's executive control capabilities, delay of gratification, and ability or willingness to sustain attention and compliance during work tasks. Children's performance on the main interactive task index, inhibitory control, showed a signficant level of stability between ages 6 and 8. During the school-age years, children who performed impulsively on the laboratory measures were perceived by mothers and by teachers as more impulsive, inattentive, and overactive than others, affirming the external validity of the impulsivity constructs. Finally, impulsive behavior in the laboratory at ages 6 and 8 predicted maternal and self-ratings of externalizing problem behavior across adolescence, supporting the longterm predictive value of the laboratory-derived impulsivity measures.     

The incidence of out-of-body experiences in hospitalized patients

The author studied out-of-body experiences (OBEs), cultural differences in reporting those OBEs, and associations between OBEs and frequency of dream recall in 100 white and 100 black adults hospitalized in a university medical center. Of the 200 subjects interviewed, 31 reported having had an OBE, six during the current hospitalization. White patients reported OBEs significantly more often than did black patients, possibly because of methodological problems in the interview techniques. Chi-squared tests showed significant positive associations between frequency of dream recall and incidence of OBEs, and between vivid dreams and incidence of OBEs.     

Misattribution, preparatory information, and speech anxiety

In two experiments with undergraduate subjects, I compared the effects of misattribution versus information manipulations on speech anxiety. In Experiment 1, some subjects were allegedly exposed to subliminal noise while reading a speech in front of a camera. These subjects were told that subliminal noise makes people feel either unpleasantly aroused or pleasantly relaxed or that it has no effect. Subjects in a fourth condition were given accurate information about how they would feel (unpleasantly aroused) but were not exposed to the subliminal noise misattribution source. In Experiment 2, I replicated the arousing noise and accurate information conditions from the first study and added two new groups incorporating a delay that should preclude misattribution. In both experiments, the alleged presence of arousing subliminal noise reduced subjects' speech dysfluencies during the speech task, whereas the presentation of accurate information alone did not have a comparable ameliorative effect. Thus, both experiments supported the misattribution interpretation of why neutral labels for arousal can reduce emotionality.     

MMPI characteristics of drug abusers with and without histories of suicide attempts

Compared to drug addicts without histories of suicidal attempt (n = 50), drug addicts who have attempted suicide (n = 50) were characterized by higher levels of maladjustment--particularly in the areas of depression, feelings of alienation, and use of projection and externalization--and were more emotionally withdrawn. Certain Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) codetypes appeared in the attempt group that were not present in the no history group. Drug addicts with suicidal ideation but no history of attempt (n = 13) were not significantly different from the other two groups, and their inclusion as a comparison group masked the real differences between the other two groups. The MMPI results suggest it may be possible to identify a suicide attempt group in substance abusers but not when contrasted with a suicidal ideation group. Treatment implications are considered.     

Effects of text genre and verbal ability on adult age differences in sensitivity to text structure

The present study examined the effects of verbal ability and text genre on adult age differences in sensitivity to the semantic structure of prose. Young and older adults of low or high verbal ability heard narrative and expository passages at different presentation rates. The results demonstrated that older adults recalled less than younger adults and that age differences in recall were larger for low-verbal adults and expository texts. However, subjects from all groups favored the main ideas in their recalls for both types of passages. The results indicated that adult age similarities in the ability to focus on the main ideas when processing prose was not compromised by the verbal ability of the subjects or the organization of the passages used. However, the results also demonstrate how the characteristics of the learner and the characteristics of the text modulate the size of the age differences observed.     

Early Verb Learning: How Do Children Learn How to Compare Events?

An important problem verb learners must solve is how to extend verbs. Children could use cross-situational information to guide their extensions; however, comparing events is difficult. In 2 studies, researchers tested whether children benefit from initially seeing a pair of similar events (“progressive alignment”) while learning new verbs and whether this influence changes with age. In Study 1, 2.5- and 3.5-year-old children participated in an interactive task. Children who saw a pair of similar events and then varied events were able to extend verbs at test and differed from a control group; children who saw 2 pairs of varied events did not differ from the control group. In Study 2, events were presented on a monitor. Following the initial pair of events that varied by condition, a Tobii x120 eye tracker recorded 2.5-, 3.5-, and 4.5-year-olds’ fixations to specific elements of events (areas of interest) during the 2nd pair of events, which were the same across conditions. After seeing the pair of events that were highly similar, 2.5-year-olds showed significantly longer fixation durations to agents and to affected objects as compared with the all-varied condition. At test, 3.5-year-olds were able to extend the verb, but only in the progressive alignment condition. These results are important because they show children’s visual attention to relevant elements in dynamic events is influenced by their prior comparison experience, and they show that young children benefit from seeing similar events as they learn to compare events to each other.     

Individual differences in white matter microstructure predict semantic control

In everyday conversation, we make many rapid choices between competing concepts and words in order to convey our intent. This process is termed semantic control, and it is thought to rely on information transmission between a distributed semantic store in the temporal lobes and a more discrete region, optimized for retrieval and selection, in the left inferior frontal gyrus. Here, we used diffusion tensor imaging in a group of neurologically normal young adults to investigate the relationship between semantic control and white matter tracts that have been implicated in semantic memory retrieval. Participants completed a verb generation task that taps semantic control (Snyder & Munakata, 2008; Snyder et al., 2010) and underwent a diffusion imaging scan. Deterministic tractography was performed to compute indices representing the microstructural properties of the inferior fronto-occipital fasciculus (IFOF), the uncinate fasciculus (UF), and the inferior longitudinal fasciculus (ILF). Microstructural measures of the UF failed to predict semantic control performance. However, there was a significant relationship between microstructure of the left IFOF and ILF and individual differences in semantic control. Our findings support the view put forth by Duffau (2013) that the IFOF is a key structural pathway in semantic retrieval.     

Demonic Influence: The Negative Mental Health Effects of Belief in Demons

Many religious traditions include a belief in the reality of demonic beings and evil powers. Previous research demonstrates that comforting beliefs, such as believing in an afterlife, can benefit mental health, but less is known about the potentially negative mental health effects of belief in evil supernatural powers. In cross‐sectional analyses, we find that among young adults, believing in demons is one of the strongest (negative) predictors of mental health. More importantly, using three waves of the National Study of Youth and Religion and a cross‐lagged structural equation model, we find that belief in demons can lead to lowered mental health in later waves but low mental health does not lead to greater belief in demons. In fact, when predicting changes in mental health from wave 2 to wave 3 of the study, the negative effect size of belief in demons on mental health is larger in magnitude than all other religion‐related predictors.