Paired associate learning in Chinese children with dyslexia

A total of 82 Chinese 11- and 12-year-olds with and without dyslexia were tested on four paired associate learning (PAL) tasks, phonological awareness, morphological awareness, rapid naming, and verbal short-term memory in three different experiments. Experiment 1 demonstrated that children with dyslexia were significantly poorer in visual-verbal PAL than nondyslexic children but that these groups did not differ in visual-visual PAL performance. In Experiment 2, children with dyslexia had more difficulties in transferring rules to new stimuli in a rule-based visual-verbal PAL task as compared with children without dyslexia. Long-term retention of PAL was not impaired in dyslexic children across either experiment. In Experiment 3, rates of visual-verbal PAL deficits among children with dyslexia were all at or above 39%, the highest among all cognitive deficits tested. Moreover, rule-based visual-verbal PAL, in addition to morphological awareness and rapid naming ability, uniquely distinguished children with and without dyslexia even with other metalinguistic skills statistically controlled. Results underscore the importance of visual-verbal PAL for understanding reading impairment in Chinese children.     

DEMAND EQUATIONS FOR QUALITATIVELY DIFFERENT FOODS UNDER FIXED‐RATIO SCHEDULES: A COMPARISON OF THREE DATA CONVERSIONS

Concurrent schedules were used to establish 6 hens' preferences for three foods. The resulting biases suggested wheat was preferred over honey‐puffed and puffed wheat, and puffed wheat was the least preferred food. The hens then responded under fixed‐ratio schedules for each food in 40‐min (excluding reinforcer time) sessions, with the response requirement doubling each session until no reinforcers were received. At the smaller ratios, the less preferred the food, the faster the hens' overall response rates (mainly as a result of shorter postreinforcement pauses) and the more reinforcers they received. The relations between the logarithms of the number of reinforcers obtained (consumption) and the response ratio (price) were well fitted by curvilinear demand functions. Wheat produced the smallest initial consumption (ln L), followed by honey‐puffed and puffed wheat, respectively. The response requirement at which the demand functions predicted maximal responding (P_max) were larger for wheat than for the other foods. Normalizing consumption and price, as suggested by Hursh and Winger (1995), moved the data for the three foods towards a single demand function; however, the P_max values were generally largest for puffed wheat. The results of normalization, as suggested by Hursh and Silberberg (2008), depended on the k value used. The parameter k is related to the range of the data, and the same k value needs to be used for all data sets that are compared. A k value of 8.0 gave significantly higher essential values (smaller α values) for puffed wheat as compared to honey‐puffed wheat and wheat, and the P_max values, in normalized standard price units, were largest for puffed wheat. Normalizing demand by converting the puffed and honey‐puffed wheat reinforcers to wheat equivalents (by applying the bias parameter from the concurrent‐schedules procedure) maintained separate demand functions for the foods. Those for wheat had the smallest rates of change in elasticity (a) and, in contrast to the other analyses, the largest P_max values. Normalizing demand in terms of concurrent‐schedule preference appears to have some advantages and to merit further investigation.     

Social Identity, Health and Well-Being: An Emerging Agenda for Applied Psychology

The social environment comprising communities, families, neighbourhoods, work teams, and various other forms of social group is not simply an external feature of the world that provides a context for individual behaviour. Instead these groups impact on the psychology of individuals through their capacity to be internalised as part of a person's social identity. If groups provide individuals with a sense of meaning, purpose, and belonging (i.e. a positive sense of social identity) they tend to have positive psychological consequences. The impact of these identity processes on health and well-being is explored in the contributions to this special issue. In this editorial, we discuss these contributions in light of five central themes that have emerged from research to date. These themes address the relationship between social identity and (a) symptom appraisal and response, (b) health-related norms and behaviour, (c) social support, (d) coping, and (e) clinical outcomes. The special issue as a whole points to the capacity for a social identity approach to enrich academic understanding in these areas and to play a key role in shaping health-related policy and practice.     

The role of attentional networks in voluntary task switching

Coordination of task choice and performance in multitask environments likely involves attentional processes. Subjects completed the Attention Network Test (ANT) and a voluntary task-switching procedure. Task choice, but not task performance, was correlated with the executive score from the ANT, with higher switch probabilities for subjects with more efficient executive control networks. Task performance was correlated with the alerting score, with larger response time switch costs for subjects with larger alerting scores. The dissociation of task choice and task performance measures in terms of the pattern of correlations with attentional networks suggests that these two measures may reflect different cognitive processes engaged in voluntary task switching.     

Examination of the effects of traditional and modern martial arts training on aggressiveness

This study addresses two issues associated with the relationship between martial arts training and aggressiveness. The first is a replication of two recent findings, that for students trained traditionally, length of training varies inversely with aggressiveness, whereas for students trained in a “modern” style, length of training and aggressiveness are related directly. Second, we examine two competing explanations for the findings above. One is the training hypothesis, which holds that elements present in traditional approaches to martial arts but absent in modern approaches act to reduce aggression levels of students. These may include meditation, philosophy, emphasis on the kata (the forms of combat), etc. The alternate hypothesis, selection, holds instead that these findings are artifactual, a result of differential mortality in a setting characterized by high drop-out rates. Two categories of students were interviewed: “movers,” students who had trained in more than one school, and “quitters,” students who had terminated their training, for any reason. These students were compared with “stayers” from an earlier study. Our results are consistent with the opposite effects of traditional and modern martial arts training on aggressiveness. Further, the data generally support the training hypothesis as against selection.     

Promoting Recovery Identities Among Mothers with Histories of Addiction: Strategies of Family Engagement

Changes in identity are critical to managing transitions to recovery from substance and alcohol addictions. Identity change is particularly important for mothers, whose recovery processes are often in the context of critical but complex family relationships and societal expectations. But research and practice often underestimate the relational dimensions that promote or inhibit changes in one's identity during recovery. Here we analyze data from a study that involved interviews with 30 formerly incarcerated women participating in a community-based substance use treatment program in the Midwest. Drawing from Constructivist Grounded Theory Methods, our analysis identified three factors shaping levels of engagement with family members: (1) the relational consequences of a shared past; (2) ascribing permanence to the old identity of “addict” versus the ability to see women's capacity to change; and (3) the current provision of caregiving support to participants’ children. Our analysis supports and extends existing research by highlighting how family can both promote and inhibit a recovery identity process. We discuss potential implications for theorizing “recovery” and “identity” as relational and identify key elements to support practices more attuned to the hidden complexity of family support.     

Community group membership protects the well‐being of adults experiencing socio‐economic disadvantage

The present research examined the mechanisms through which community groups improve well‐being in adults (N = 156) experiencing socio‐economic disadvantage. Analysis showed that joining a group improved outcomes by enhancing people's group identification and wider sense of belonging to multiple groups and that this effect was stronger for more socio‐economically disadvantaged participants.     

Challenging socioeconomic status: A cross‐cultural comparison of early executive function

The widely and internationally replicated socioeconomic status (SES) gradient of executive function (EF) implies that intervention approaches may do well to extrapolate conditions and practices from contexts that generate better child outcomes (in this case, higher SES circumstances) and translate these to contexts with comparatively poorer outcomes (often low‐SES populations). Yet, can the reverse also be true? Using data from equivalent assessments of 1,092 pre‐schoolers’ EFs in South Africa and Australia, we evaluated: the SES gradient of EF within each sample; and whether this SES gradient extended cross‐culturally. The oft‐found EF‐SES gradients were replicated in both samples. However, contrary to the inferences of EF‐SES associations found nationally, the most highly disadvantaged South African subsample outperformed middle‐ and high‐SES Australian pre‐schoolers on two of three EFs. This suggests the possibility of EF‐protective and ‐promotive practices within low‐ and middle‐income countries that may aid understandings of the nature and promotion of EFs.     

Visual configural processing in adults born at extremely low birth weight

Being born at extremely low birth weight (ELBW; ≤1,000 g) is associated with enduring visual impairments. We tested for long‐term, higher order visual processing problems in the oldest known prospectively followed cohort of ELBW survivors. Configural processing (spacing among features of an object) was examined in 62 adults born at ELBW (M_age = 31.9 years) and 82 adults born at normal birth weight (NBW; ≥2,500 g: M_age = 32.5 years). Pairs of human faces, monkey faces, or houses were presented in a delayed match‐to‐sample task, where non‐matching stimuli differed only in the spacing of their features. Discrimination accuracy for each stimulus type was compared between birth weight groups, adjusting for neurosensory impairment, visual acuity, binocular fusion ability, IQ, and sex. Both groups were better able to discriminate human faces than monkey faces (p < .001). However, the ELBW group discriminated between human faces (p < .001), between monkey faces (p < .001), and to some degree, between houses (p < .06), more poorly than NBW control participants, suggesting a general deficit in perceptual processing. Human face discrimination was related to performance IQ (PIQ) across groups, but especially among ELBW survivors. Coding (a PIQ subtest) also predicted human face discrimination in ELBW survivors, consistent with previously reported links between visuo‐perceptive difficulties and regional slowing of cortical activity in individuals born preterm. Correlations with Coding suggested ELBW survivors may have used a feature‐matching approach to processing human faces. Future studies could examine brain‐based anatomical and functional evidence for altered face processing, as well as the social and memory consequences of face‐processing deficits in ELBW survivors.     

Interpretation And Understanding

To understand a term or other symbol, I argue that it is generally neither necessary nor sufficient to assign it a unique determinate reference. Independent of and prior to investigation, it is frequently indeterminate not only whether a sentence is true, but also what its truth conditions are. Nelson Goodman's discussions of likeness of meaning are deployed to explain how this can be so.