The abstraction of visual prototypes by children

The present studies demonstrated that children as young as second graders could form prototypical representations from a set of highly similar stimuli. The prototype-plus-transformation model of this performance (Franks & Bransford, 1971) was contrasted with an attribute-frequency model (Neumann, 1974). Results supported the latter model when trigram stimuli were used to test differential predictions from the models.     

A pilot study of the effects of expressive writing on psychological and behavioral adjustment in patients enrolled in a Phase II trial of vaccine therapy for metastatic renal cell carcinoma.

Forty-two patients with metastatic renal cell carcinoma who were participating in a Phase II clinical trial were randomly assigned to an expressive writing (EW) or neutral writing (NW) group. Patients in the EW group wrote about their cancer, and patients in the NW group wrote about health behaviors. No statistically significant group differences were found in symptoms of distress, perceived stress, or mood disturbance, except for the Vigor subscale of the Profile of Mood States. However, patients in the EW group reported significantly less sleep disturbance, better sleep quality and sleep duration, and less daytime dysfunction compared with patients in the NW group. The results suggest that EW may have sleep-related health benefits in terminally ill cancer patients.     

The Use of Simulations to Assess the Impact of an Adolescent Suicide Response Curriculum

This study employed simulations of encounters with suicidal peers to assess the impact of classroom suicide response lessons. Students were asked to anonymously write how they would respond, and how concerned they would be in regard to two vignettes of troubled peers. On the posttest, students who had participated in the classes provided significantly more “tell an adult” responses than those in the control group, whereas no differences existed between the groups on the pretest. On both the pretest and posttest, all students expressed greater concern on the unambiguous vignette (student said that he has been thinking about killing himself) than on the ambiguous vignette (student wrote an essay about final decisions); and, overall, females expressed greater concern than males. These results provide evidence for the efficacy of the classes and the utility of the simulations for assessing their impact.     

Predictors of childhood trajectories of overt and indirect aggression: An interdisciplinary approach

The aim of this study was to advance our understanding of the development of aggression in boys and girls by testing a model combining insights from both evolutionary theory and developmental psychology. A sample of 744 children (348 girls) between six and 13 years old was recruited in schools with high deprivation indices. Half of the sample (N = 372; 40.1% girls) had received special educational services for behavioral and/or socio‐emotional problems. Two trajectories for overt aggression and two trajectories for indirect aggression were identified and binomial logistic regressions were used to identify environmental predictors and sex‐specific patterns of these trajectories. Results indicated that peer rejection predicted overt aggression and indirect aggression and that extraversion and male sex predicted overt aggression. The results also showed that interaction between parental practices and some child temperament traits predicted overt aggression (coercion and lack of supervision associated with extraversion or low effortful control) or indirect aggression (coercion and neglect associated with negative affect or low effortful control), and the absence of a father figure predicted high indirect aggression in girls.

     

Life Experiences Throughout the Lifespan: What Do People Say (or Not) About Them?

Life experiences have been a topic of interest for researchers and clinicians for decades. Current knowledge is rooted in two distinct approaches, i.e., personality psychology and psychosomatics. Whereas the first is interested in ordinary life stories of nonclinical individuals, based on a more qualitative, in-depth, and person-driven approach, psychosomatics stresses negative events, mainly in clinical samples, and presents a more quantitative, general, and construct-driven approach. Consequently, available evidence is dispersed and unrelated and many basic questions remain unanswered. This study aimed to explore occurrence, developmental stage, valence, and impact of life experiences and to analyze critical answering patterns (i.e., “I don’t remember,” missingness). Through a cross-sectional retrospective design, 394 adults from the community answered the Lifetime Experiences Scale, which covers 75 life experiences organized in eight domains (i.e., school, job, health, leisure, living conditions, adverse experiences, achievements, and people and relationships). Occurrence of life experiences varied greatly, and the mean number of experiences reported was approximately 30. Regarding developmental stage, most experiences were reported in just one stage—mainly adulthood—however, some could be considered chronic. Globally, life experiences tended to be clearly rated as positive or as negative; additionally, assessed experiences were mainly appraised as positive. Moreover, participants presented their experiences as significant, rating them as high impact. Overall, critical answering patterns were not very expressive: “I don’t remember” and missing answers were below 2 and 5%, respectively, in the majority of experiences. These findings offer several important new insights, suggesting that life experiences are mainly an idiosyncratic topic.     

De-polarizing verbal irony

In three studies participants were asked to rate the degree of irony perceived in comments relating to five variations of a scenario, ranging from one pole to the opposite pole and passing through three in-between states. In study 1, the comments pertained to the polar extremes of a dimension, e.g. “It’s uphill!” stated with reference to varying degrees of steepness both uphill and downhill (i.e. steep, slightly steep, flat, slightly sloping downhill and steeply sloping downhill). In study 2, the comments were of an “intermediate” nature (e.g. “This hill is neither uphill nor downhill!”) and, as in Study 1, they were used to refer to the same five varying degrees of the same dimension. Study 3 involved the stimuli from both of the first two experiments in a between-participants design.

The results consistently demonstrated that verbal irony does not only apply to (weakly or strongly) polarised statements and situations, but it can also apply to intermediate comments and experiences. The perceptual structure of the dimensions involved modulates the effect.