Short-term memory performances during sustained wakefulness in patients with obstructive sleep apnea-hypopnea syndrome

Both working and immediate memories were assessed every 4h by specific short-term memory tasks over sustained wakefulness in 12 patients with obstructive sleep apnea and hypopnea syndrome (OSAHS) and 10 healthy controls. Results indicated that OSAHS patients exhibited lower working memory performances than controls on both backward digit span and complex Sternberg tasks. Speed and accuracy on Sternberg tasks were affected by memory load in both groups. However, immediate memory was not impaired in OSAHS patients. Diurnal and nocturnal SaO(2) were correlated with speed and accuracy high-speed memory scanning performance on Sternberg tasks in patients. These results suggest specific working memory deficits associated with OSAHS over sustained wakefulness with a possible deficiency in the central executive responsible for the higher information processing, in addition to a potentially insufficient storage capacity. Among OSAHS patients, working memory ability involved in high-speed memory scanning may be impaired by chronic hypoxemia.     

Family Gender Role and Guilt in Spanish Dual-Earner Families

In dual-earner families the balance between work and family demands facilitates the development of guilt feelings when parents perceive a non-fulfillment of their responsibilities in childcare. Specifically, women who aspire to personal and professional development on the basis of more egalitarian gender role models must deal with the traditional stereotypes that maintain an intensive maternity mandate that prioritizes the family. On the other hand, for men the role change is primarily in the family setting with the development of a new father role more involved in the care of their children, which is not easily compatible with the more traditional breadwinner role. This study explored the feelings of guilt about parenting in 251 employed Spanish parents with children between 3 and 6 years of age, through the Scale of Guilt Feelings about Parenting, and its relationship with traditional stereotypes of maternal and family role. The scale addresses diverse situations pertaining to child rearing in which work requirements do not allow parents full availability for the care of their children. This availability is present in the model of intensive maternity and in the new father role model. Results indicate the presence of similar and high levels of guilt in fathers and mothers, although in men guilt is related to a non-traditional family role ideology, whereas in women guilt is related to a more traditional maternal role stereotype.     

Private and inner speech and the regulation of social speech communication

To further investigate the possible regulatory role of private and inner speech in the context of referential social speech communications, a set of clear and systematically applied measures is needed. This study addresses this need by introducing a rigorous method for identifying private speech and certain sharply defined instances of inaudible inner speech. Using this classification system, longitudinal data were gathered from 10 pairs of children performing a referential communication task at 4.5, 6.5, and 8.5 years of age. Results demonstrated children's substantial production of private and inner speech in this communicative situation, with speech forms varying in amount and type as a function of age, communicative role (speaker or listener), and the complexity of the material to be communicated. It is suggested that private and inner speech embedded in discourse may serve a regulatory role in social speech communication.     

Borderline personality traits in nonclinical young adults

The main purpose of this study was to explore the dimensionality of the borderline personality disorder in nonclinical young adults by means of the Borderline Personality Questionnaire (BPQ; Poreh et al., 2006). We also studied the phenotypic expression of the borderline personality traits as a function of participants' gender and age, and the relationship between BPQ subscales and measures of depressive symptoms, anxiety, stress, hallucinatory predisposition, and paranoid ideation. The sample comprised 809 young adults, 562 (69.5%) were women, with a mean age of 20.2 years (SD = 2.9). The results indicate that the BPQ self-report has adequate psychometric properties. The levels of internal consistency for the BPQ subscales ranged between .78 and .93. Analysis of the internal structure of the BPQ subscales yielded a one-dimensional solution. In contrast, second-order principal components analysis at the item level yielded a five-dimensional solution. Likewise, statistically significant differences in the mean scores of the borderline personality traits as a function of participants' gender and age were found. The BPQ subscales correlated significantly with measures of depression, anxiety, stress, paranoid ideation, and hallucinatory predisposition. These results help to improve our understanding of the dimensional structure of the borderline personality in the general population. Future research should continue to identify participants who are at risk for the development of borderline personality disorder and facilitating the development of early detection and prevention programs.     

Growth in infancy and childhood and hospitalization for personality disorders in adulthood: the Helsinki Birth Cohort Study

This study examined the associations between infant and childhood growth and severe personality disorders. Among 4,689 men and 4,200 women of the Helsinki Birth Cohort Study 1934-1944, 81 men and 68 women had been hospitalized with an ICD (-8, -9, -10) diagnosis of personality disorder in adulthood. Among men, slower gain in BMI between birth and 6 months, faster gain in weight and BMI between 6 months and 1 year, and slower gains in them between 7 and 11 years of age predicted an increased risk of hospitalization for personality disorders. Thinness at 6 months and again at 11 years also showed significant association with personality disorders among men. Among women, slower gain in height between 2 and 7 years predicted hospitalization for personality disorders. Our findings show the importance of early growth as a vulnerability factor of personality disorders severe enough to justify hospitalization.     

Is banner blindness genuine? Eye tracking internet text advertising

Over the last decade or so, the Internet has become a privileged media for advertisement. Despite this increase in popularity, several studies suggested that Internet users ‘avoid’ looking at ads (what is often referred to as the banner blindness phenomena). This conclusion, however, rests mostly on indirect evidence that participants do not remember the ad content. Therefore, it is unclear whether participants actually fixated the ads and how their gaze behaviour is related to memory for the ad. In the present study, we investigated whether Internet users avoid looking at ads inserted on a non‐search website using an analysis of eye movements, and if the ad content is kept in memory. Our results show that most participants fixate the ads at least once during their website visit. Moreover, even though the congruency between the ad and the editorial content had no effect on fixation duration on the ad, congruent ads were better memorised than incongruent ads. This study provides a novel and systematic method for assessing the processing and retention of advertisements during a website visit. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A Woman’s Place and a Man’s Duty: How Gender Role Incongruence in One’s Family Life Can Result in Home-Related Spillover Discrimination at Work

The purpose of this study was to investigate how gender role incongruence in terms of women being primary wage earners and males being secondary wage earners in their families could affect them at work. Using an experimental design and a sample of 306 college students, I explored how females who are the primary wage earners in their families and males who are the secondary wage earners are perceived and evaluated in a work setting. I proposed, and found, that female primary wage earners are seen as the least overqualified and are given lower reward recommendations than equally qualified male peers (i.e., peers with exactly the same credentials and job performance). Male secondary wage earners are seen as being the most overqualified and are given higher reward recommendations than equally qualified female peers. Results demonstrate how the lack of fit model, which has been shown to penalize women who succeed in traditionally masculine domains (Dipboye, Acad Manag Rev 10:16–127, 1985; Heilman, Res Organ Behav 5:269–298, 1983, J Soc Issues 57:657–674, 2001), can be applied to situations where gender-incongruent behavior exists in the form of women being primary wage earners in their families. I refer to this phenomenon as “home-related spillover discrimination,” named after the spillover effects that derive from societal expectations that are transferred into employment situations (Nieva and Gutek, Acad Manag Rev 5:267–276, 1980). The practical implication of this finding is that this may present a new form of sex discrimination against women that has not yet been considered. This is the first study to show how violating stereotypical roles in terms of family wage earner status can influence outcomes in work settings.     

Amniocentesis Due to Advanced Maternal Age: The Role of Marital Intimacy in Couples’ Decision-Making Process

Due to the risk of fetal anomaly, pregnant women of advanced maternal age are given the option to undergo amniocentesis. In our study we aimed to describe couples’ decision-making process regarding amniocentesis, and assess whether it is influenced by marital intimacy and men’s participation in genetic counseling. During pregnancy, 112 couples answered the Personal Assessment of Intimacy in Relationships questionnaire and scales regarding the decision to undergo amniocentesis. Most couples shared and reached an agreement regarding this decision. Higher levels of marital engagement and communication, but not men’s participation, were associated with higher agreement, influence, and decision-sharing. Clinical implications are discussed.     

Do positive illusions predict overconfidence in judgment? A test using interval production and probability evaluation measures of miscalibration

We address the question as to whether judgmental overconfidence, as assessed by probability miscalibration, is related to positive illusions about the self. We first demonstrate that judgmental overconfidence measured with interval production procedures can be considered a trait, due to correlations observed in miscalibration scores in two sets of general‐knowledge questions of varying difficulty administered at different times. In addition, the hard‐easy effect operated in different ways on overprecision and self‐placement of one's performance relative to others: The more difficult the calibration task, the greater the over precision but the greater the under placement of one's performance. Finally, there was no evidence that miscalibration was related to dispositional optimism and self‐efficacy. A second study extended these results by including further measures of disposition to experience positive illusions such as unrealistic optimism, a general tendency to consider oneself “better‐than‐average,” and two indexes of dispositional perception of control. The positive illusion measures showed considerable inter‐correlations, but did not correlate with miscalibration on the interval production task, and correlated negatively with optimism concerning societal risks. A final study replicated this pattern of findings, but showed that disposition to positive illusions did predict miscalibration on the same questions measured with a probability evaluation technique. Our research demonstrates that “overconfidence” is not a unitary construct, but a series of overlapping ones. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Children's activities and their meanings for parents: a mixed-methods study in six Western cultures

Theoretical perspectives and research in sociology, anthropology, sociolinguistics, and cultural psychology converge in recognizing the significance of children's time spent in various activities, especially in the family context. Knowing how children's time is deployed, however, only gives us a partial answer to how children acquire competence; the other part must take into account the culturally constructed meanings of activities, from the perspective of those who organize and direct children's daily lives. In this article, we report on a study of children's routine daily activities and on the meanings that parents attribute to them in six Western middle-class cultural communities located in Italy, The Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Sweden, and the United States (N = 183). Using week-long time diaries kept by parents, we first demonstrate similarities as well as significant differences in children's daily routines across the cultural samples. We then present brief vignettes--"a day in the life" --of children from each sample. Parent interviews were coded for themes in the meanings attributed to various activities. Excerpts from parent interviews, focusing on four major activities (meals, family time, play, school- or developmentally related activities), are presented to illustrate how cultural meanings and themes are woven into parents' organization and understanding of their children's daily lives. The results of this mixed-method approach provide a more reliable and nuanced picture of children's and families' daily lives than could be derived from either method alone.