Photographs can distort memory for the news

In this experiment, we ask whether photographs can lead to false memories for elements of a newspaper story. Participants played the role of a newspaper editor, identifying minor typographical errors in three newspaper articles and marking the text where they thought an accompanying photo should be placed when the story was printed. The critical article described a hurricane's effects on a coastal region; the story made no mention of personal injury or death. We varied the accompanying critical photo: participants saw either a photo of a village before the hurricane hit or after. In a later memory test, both ‘Before’ and ‘After’ participants were equally good at correctly recognising old statements and rejecting weak lures. However, the ‘After’ participants claimed to have read information describing death and injury 32% of the time. By comparison, ‘Before’ participants claimed to have read these statements only 9% of the time. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Personality change at the intersection of autonomic arousal and stress

We hypothesized that personality change in children can be predicted by the interaction of family risk with susceptibility to autonomic arousal and that children characterized by both high-risk families and highly reactive autonomic nervous systems tend to show maladaptive change. This hypothesis was tested in a 6-year longitudinal study in which personality-type prototypicality, problem behavior, and negative emotional intensity were measured at 2-year intervals. The results indicated that children who both had exaggerated skin conductance responses (a measure of autonomic reactivity) and were living in families with multiple risk factors were most likely to develop an undercontrolled personality type and to exhibit increases in problem behavior and negative emotional intensity. The implications of the results for understanding personality change are discussed.     

Interfaces: toward a new generation of systemic models in family research and practice

After reviewing Engel's bio-psycho-social proposal and Kandel's "principles for an integration between mind and brain," the author introduces a set of akin propositions that aim at integrating neurosciences, genetics, the mind, and the social world into a succinct set of systemic formulations focusing on interlevel interfaces, with profound implications for the training, practice, and research in the field of family processes and therapy.     

Similarity structure in visual speech perception and optical phonetic signals

A complete understanding of visual phonetic perception (lipreading) requires linking perceptual effects to physical stimulus properties. However, the talking face is a highly complex stimulus, affording innumerable possible physical measurements. In the search for isomorphism between stimulus properties and phoneticeffects, second-order isomorphism was examined between theperceptual similarities of video-recorded perceptually identified speech syllables and the physical similarities among the stimuli. Four talkers produced the stimulus syllables comprising 23 initial consonants followed by one of three vowels. Six normal-hearing participants identified the syllables in a visual-only condition. Perceptual stimulus dissimilarity was quantified using the Euclidean distances between stimuli in perceptual spaces obtained via multidimensional scaling. Physical stimulus dissimilarity was quantified using face points recorded in three dimensions by an optical motion capture system. The variance accounted for in the relationship between the perceptual and the physical dissimilarities was evaluated using both the raw dissimilarities and the weighted dissimilarities. With weighting and the full set of 3-D optical data, the variance accounted for ranged between 46% and 66% across talkers and between 49% and 64% across vowels. The robust second-order relationship between the sparse 3-D point representation of visible speech and the perceptual effects suggests that the 3-D point representation is a viable basis for controlled studies of first-order relationships between visual phonetic perception and physical stimulus attributes.     

Distress in response to emotional and sexual infidelity: evidence of evolved gender differences in Spanish students

The authors studied gender differences in response to hypothetical infidelity in Spanish students. Using a forced-choice methodology, the authors asked a sample of 266 participants to indicate which kind of infidelity would be more distressing: emotional or sexual. Men were significantly more distressed by sexual infidelity than were women, and women were significantly more distressed by emotional infidelity than were men. Results supported the hypothesis that particular infidelity types, which resemble adaptive problems that human beings faced in the past, contribute to the psychology of jealousy. The results are consistent with previous cross-cultural research.     

How to Tell If a Particular Memory Is True or False

ABSTRACT— How can you tell if a particular memory belonging to you or someone else is true or false? Cognitive scientists use a variety of techniques to measure groups of memories, whereas police, lawyers, and other researchers use procedures to determine whether an individual can be believed or not. We discuss evidence from behavioral and neuroimaging studies and research on lying that have attempted to distinguish true from false memories.     

A Psychometric Analysis of the Child Behavior Checklist DSM-Oriented Scales

The Child Behavior Checklist for Ages 6–18 (CBCL/6-18) possesses newly developed DSM-Oriented Scales, constructed through expert clinical judgment to match selected categories for behavioral/emotional problems as described in the DSM-IV. The present investigation examined the basic psychometric properties for all six DSM-Oriented Scales (i.e., Affective, Anxiety, Somatic, Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity, Oppositional, and Conduct Scales) in a large clinical sample of children and adolescents (N = 673). Findings from the present study provide strong evidence for the reliability, as well as convergent and discriminative validity, of these scales. It appears that the DSM-Oriented Scales may provide accurate supplementary information that may be considered when formulating clinical diagnoses.

Fear Extinction to an Out-Group Face: The Role of Target Gender

ABSTRACT— Conditioning studies on humans and other primates show that fear responses acquired toward danger-relevant stimuli, such as snakes, resist extinction, whereas responses toward danger-irrelevant stimuli, such as birds, are more readily extinguished. Similar evolved biases may extend to human groups, as recent research demonstrates that a conditioned fear response to faces of persons of a social out-group resists extinction, whereas fear toward a social in-group is more readily extinguished. Here, we provide an important extension to previous work by demonstrating that this fear-extinction bias occurs solely when the exemplars are male. These results underscore the importance of considering how gender of the target stimulus affects psychological and physiological responses to out-group threat.     

Overvaluation of shape and weight in binge eating disorder, bulimia nervosa, and sub-threshold bulimia nervosa

Increasing empirical evidence supports the validity of binge eating disorder (BED), a research diagnosis in the appendix of DSM-IV, and its inclusion as a distinct and formal diagnosis in the DSM-V. A pressing question regarding the specific criteria for BED diagnosis is whether, like bulimia nervosa (BN), it should be characterized by overvaluation of shape and weight. This study compared features of eating disorders in 436 treatment-seeking women comprising four groups: 195 BED participants who overvalue their shape/weight, 129 BED participants with subclinical levels of overvaluation, 61 BN participants, and 51 participants with sub-threshold BN. The BED clinical overvaluation group had significantly higher levels of specific eating disorder psychopathology than the three other groups which did not differ significantly from each other. Findings suggest that overvaluation of shape and weight should not be considered as a required criterion for BED because this would exclude a substantial proportion of BED patients with clinically significant problems. Rather, overvaluation of shape and weight warrants consideration either as a diagnostic specifier or as a dimensional severity rating as it provides important information about severity within BED.