Fears in hearing-impaired and normally hearing children and adolescents

In this study the Revised Fear Survey Schedule for Children was administered to 138 hearing-impaired and 134 normally hearing youths. Although both groups expressed fear of potentially dangerous stimuli, significant differences in responding were evident towards other kinds of stimuli. Whereas hearing children were more fearful of failure and criticism, the hearing-impaired children were more afraid of the unknown, injury and small animals. Girls reported significantly greater levels of fear than boys thus confirming a well established research finding. Further, significant interactions were found between hearing status and gender. In contrast to previous findings, age was not related to self-reports of fear.     

Why 8-year-olds cannot tell the difference between Steve Martin and Paul Newman: factors contributing to the slow development of sensitivity to the spacing of facial features

Children are nearly as sensitive as adults to some cues to facial identity (e.g., differences in the shape of internal features and the external contour), but children are much less sensitive to small differences in the spacing of facial features. To identify factors that contribute to this pattern, we compared 8-year-olds' sensitivity to spacing cues with that of adults under a variety of conditions. In the first two experiments, participants made same/different judgments about faces differing only in the spacing of facial features, with the variations being kept within natural limits. To measure the effect of attention, we reduced the salience of featural information by blurring faces and occluding features (Experiment 1). To measure the role of encoding speed and memory limitations, we presented pairs of faces simultaneously and for an unlimited time (Experiment 2). To determine whether participants' sensitivity would increase when spacing distortions were so extreme as to make the faces grotesque, we manipulated the spacing of features beyond normal limits and asked participants to rate each face on a "bizarreness" scale (Experiment 3). The results from the three experiments indicate that low salience, poor encoding efficiency, and limited memory can partially account for 8-year-olds' poor performance on face processing tasks that require sensitivity to the spacing of features, a kind of configural processing that underlies adults' expertise. However, even when the task is modified to compensate for these problems, children remain less sensitive than adults to the spacing of features.     

Better (or worse) for some than others: Individual differences in the positivity offset and negativity bias

People tend to respond with more positive than negative affect to mildly emotional stimuli (i.e., positivity offset) and respond more strongly to very negative than to matched positive stimuli (i.e., negativity bias). In the current study, the authors examine individual differences in the positivity offset and negativity bias and demonstrate that both are stable over time and generalize across different kinds of stimuli (e.g., pictures, sounds, words, games of chance). Furthermore, the positivity offset and negativity bias are not redundant with traditional personality measures and exhibit differential predictive validity, such that both types of measures predict behavior in meaningful ways. Implications for a comprehensive understanding of affect and emotion and their relationship to physical and mental health are discussed.     

Role of motor processes in extrinsically encoding mental transformations

Previous research has shown that imagined perspective rotations elicit spatial and low-level cortical motor areas of the brain when participants rely on knowledge of their physical body, or body percept (Wraga, Flynn, Boyle, & Evans, 2010). The current study used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate whether recruitment of the body percept would activate low-level cortical motor areas of the brain within other classes of mental transformations. Participants performed imagined object and perspective rotations of three-dimensional Shephard-Metzler (1971) stimuli. For each task, participants used button presses serving as virtual pointers to locate a prescribed portion of the stimuli with respect to their "right" and "left." We found low-level cortical motor activation (M1) for both mental transformations; however, the degree to which such activation related to participants' performance differed, as well as the recruitment of additional nonmotoric strategies. The results are discussed in terms of recent hypotheses regarding the role of the body percept in extrinsically encoded mental transformations.     

一种对动物学习记忆能力突变筛查的新途

本文详细描述了一种全自动化的行为检测方案。在自然饲养环境/检测环境(24/7)中, 我们测量了小鼠针对两个给食器中获得食物的比例与它们在相应给食器停留时长的比例进行匹配的精确性与准确性。该方案是对传统条件性习得 (trials-to-acquisition) 行为测验设备的改进, 可以检测动物时间间隔能力的精确性与准确性, 对定时目标选择的相关概率的效果, 以及记忆一天中从不同给食器中获得食物次数的精确性与准确性。该压缩系统避免了在整个实验过程中对小鼠的持握操作, 可忽略实验者/技术员的实验操作时间, 而且可以递送小鼠置入实验环境后, 7~9个实验日中全部3组实验流程产生的大量结果。其中, 第一个实验流程为单个24小时周期内完成的时间匹配能力的筛查, 它对动物的时间、空间估计能力的记忆机制进行精确检测。因此, 该系统允许在有限的实验空间、较短的实验周期内, 对大量的实验小鼠进行有可能存在的学习记忆能力缺陷进行大规模筛查。此外, 该系统运行所依赖的软件可以在公共开放平台获得。     

Conceptualizing ‘social capital’ for health promotion in small local communities: a micro‐qualitative study

This paper reports on a micro‐qualitative case study of peoples' experiences of local community life in a south‐east English town. This material is used as the basis for a critical discussion of the suitability of Putnam's notion of social capital as a conceptual tool for the design and evaluation of ‘community strengthening’ policies and interventions. The study was motivated by a concern that too much debate about social capital has been conducted by academics and policy‐makers in a top‐down manner, with inadequate attention to the realities of life in the local communities that they refer to. Three‐hour semi‐structured interviews were conducted with 37 residents in two less affluent wards in our town of interest. Informants—half men and half women, and spread across the 15–75 age group—were encouraged to talk about their personal experiences of local community life. Interview findings are presented within the ‘norm’ categories of trust, neighbourliness and reciprocal help and support, and the ‘network’ categories of participation in informal networks, voluntary groupings and community activist groupings. Our case study points to a number of ways in which Putnam's concept needs to be refined if it is to inform ‘community strengthening’ policies and interventions in England. Far more notice needs to be taken of the role played by informal networks of friends and neighbours in the construction of local community life. Attention also needs to be given to the complex and shifting geographical spread of peoples' significant social networks. Putnam's conceptualization of cohesive local communities and his unitary notions of trust and local identity may also be unduly essentialist. In our particular communities of interest, they failed to capture the fluidity of local community norms and networks in a rapidly changing society. They also failed to do justice to the extent to which social distinctions—such as age, gender, ethnicity and housing tenure—shape and constrain the way in which people create, sustain and access social capital. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Maternal responsiveness to young children at three ages: longitudinal analysis of a multidimensional, modular, and specific parenting construct

Responsiveness defines the prompt, contingent, and appropriate reactions parents display to their children in the context of everyday exchanges. Maternal responsiveness occupies a theoretically central position in developmental science and possesses meaningful predictive validity over diverse domains of children's development, yet basic psychometric features of maternal responsiveness are still poorly understood. In this prospective longitudinal study, the authors examined structure, individual variation, and continuity of multiple dimensions of responsiveness in 40 mothers to their infants' activities at 10, 14, and 21 months during natural home-based play interactions. Both age-general and age-specific patterns emerged in maternal responding. The study's developmental results support the multidimensionality, modularity, and specificity of this central parenting construct.     

Rapid facial reactions to emotional facial expressions in typically developing children and children with autism spectrum disorder

Typical adults mimic facial expressions within 1000 ms, but adults with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) do not. These rapid facial reactions (RFRs) are associated with the development of social-emotional abilities. Such interpersonal matching may be caused by motor mirroring or emotional responses. Using facial electromyography (EMG), this study evaluated mechanisms underlying RFRs during childhood and examined possible impairment in children with ASD. Experiment 1 found RFRs to happy and angry faces (not fear faces) in 15 typically developing children from 7 to 12 years of age. RFRs of fear (not anger) in response to angry faces indicated an emotional mechanism. In 11 children (8-13 years of age) with ASD, Experiment 2 found undifferentiated RFRs to fear expressions and no consistent RFRs to happy or angry faces. However, as children with ASD aged, matching RFRs to happy faces increased significantly, suggesting the development of processes underlying matching RFRs during this period in ASD.