Sad and happy emotion discrimination in music by children with cochlear implants

Children using cochlear implants (CIs) develop speech perception but have difficulty perceiving complex acoustic signals. Mode and tempo are the two components used to recognize emotion in music. Based on CI limitations, we hypothesized children using CIs would have impaired perception of mode cues relative to their normal hearing peers and would rely more heavily on tempo cues to distinguish happy from sad music. Study participants were children with 13 right CIs and 3 left CIs (M = 12.7, SD = 2.6 years) and 16 normal hearing peers. Participants judged 96 brief piano excerpts from the classical genre as happy or sad in a forced-choice task. Music was randomly presented with alterations of transposed mode, tempo, or both. When music was presented in original form, children using CIs discriminated between happy and sad music with accuracy well above chance levels (87.5%) but significantly below those with normal hearing (98%). The CI group primarily used tempo cues, whereas normal hearing children relied more on mode cues. Transposing both mode and tempo cues in the same musical excerpt obliterated cues to emotion for both groups. Children using CIs showed significantly slower response times across all conditions. Children using CIs use tempo cues to discriminate happy versus sad music reflecting a very different hearing strategy than their normal hearing peers. Slower reaction times by children using CIs indicate that they found the task more difficult and support the possibility that they require different strategies to process emotion in music than normal.     

One of the troubles with outcome measures: Lost in translation

This paper presents the concerns of a client diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder about completing outcome measures. He was asked to complete CORE‐10 each time he attended a therapy session with the first author. This paper takes an epistemological position of co‐production, and written in response to the client's concerns, but this is limited by the client's wish and capacity to be involved in the writing up of this article. Implications of his experiences are drawn out for both clients with this diagnosis and more generally for all clients. Recommendations are made to recognise the limitations of measures and how to use outcome measures with more validity.     

Effects of neuroimaging evidence on mock juror decision making

During the penalty phase of capital trials, defendants may introduce mitigating evidence that argues for a punishment "less than death." In the past few years, a novel form of mitigating evidence-brain scans made possible by technological advances in neuroscience-has been proffered by defendants to support claims that brain abnormalities reduce their culpability. This exploratory study assessed the impact of neuroscience evidence on mock jurors' sentencing recommendations and impressions of a capital defendant. Using actual case facts, we manipulated diagnostic evidence presented by the defense (psychosis diagnosis; diagnosis and neuropsychological test results; or diagnosis, test results, and neuroimages) and future dangerousness evidence presented by the prosecution (low or high risk). Recommendations for death sentences were affected by the neuropsychological and neuroimaging evidence: defendants deemed at high risk for future dangerousness were less likely to be sentenced to death when jurors had this evidence than when they did not. Neuropsychological and neuroimaging evidence also had mitigating effects on impressions of the defendant. We describe study limitations and pose questions for further research.     

Initial Evidence for the Reliability and Validity of the Sexual Experiences Survey-Short Form Perpetration (SES-SFP) in College Men

This study provides psychometric data on the Sexual Experiences Survey—Short Form Perpetration (SES-SFP), a revision of one of the most widely used measures of sexual perpetration, in a sample of college men. Participants (n = 402) completed a web survey containing the study measures; a subset of 66 participants completed the SES-SFP again 2 weeks later. Our results provide initial evidence of internal consistency and convergent evidence of validity for the SES-SFP in college men but question the measure’s test-retest reliability. The severity of tactics used to coerce sexually aggressive behaviors was more strongly associated with rape empathy than sexual outcome severity scores, indicating utility of assessing coercive tactics. Additional research is needed regarding the psychometric properties of the SES-SFP and other measures of sexual perpetration in order to accurately assess rates of these behaviors and inform preventive interventions.     

Dissociative effects of orthographic distinctiveness in pure and mixed lists: an item-order account

We apply the item-order theory of list composition effects in free recall to the orthographic distinctiveness effect. The item-order account assumes that orthographically distinct items advantage item-specific encoding in both mixed and pure lists, but at the expense of exploiting relational information present in the list. Experiment 1 replicated the typical free recall advantage of orthographically distinct items in mixed lists and the elimination of that advantage in pure lists. Supporting the item-order account, recognition performances indicated that orthographically distinct items received greater item-specific encoding than did orthographically common items in mixed and pure lists (Experiments 1 and 2). Furthermore, order memory (input–output correspondence and sequential contiguity effects) was evident in recall of pure unstructured common lists, but not in recall of unstructured distinct lists (Experiment 1). These combined patterns, although not anticipated by prevailing views, are consistent with an item-order account.     

阅读预期对快速阅读理解的影响的实验研究

探讨阅读预期对快速阅读的理解水平与进程的影响。实验１探讨阅读预期对快速阅读理解水平的影响。阅读文章前分别给予被试正确、中性与误导的标题提示,结果表明,不同类型的标题提示对快速阅读的理解成绩有显著的影响,而对正常速度阅读的理解成绩影响效果不显著。实验２探讨阅读预期对快速阅读过程的词句加工程度的影响。结果表明,对优生来说,正确标题提示组发现文章中锗字的成绩显著低于误导标题提示组,差生的不同标题提示组发现错字的成绩差异不显著。两个实验的结果初步表明,快速阅读文章过程会更多地利用概念推动,较少地需要材料信息。     

Glucocorticoid release and memory consolidation in men and women

Glucocorticoid hormones have been shown to enhance memory consolidation when applied at low doses posttraining, but are ineffective or impair memory at high doses. In a test of whether this quadratic relationship also exists for endogenously released glucocorticoids, healthy men and women received cold-pressor stress (CPS) or a control procedure immediately after reading a relatively neutral story and were tested for retention 1 week later. Cortisol levels in response to the stressor were assayed from saliva. CPS significantly elevated salivary cortisol in both sexes, but enhanced memory only in male subjects. Among CPS-treated male subjects, there was a significant quadratic correlation between cortisol release posttraining and subsequent memory. Thus, these findings represent the first demonstration of an inverted-U relationship between activity of endogenous stress hormones and human memory.