Goals and everyday problem solving: examining the link between age-related goals and problem-solving strategy use

Qualitative interviews on family and financial problems from 332 adolescents, young, middle-aged, and older adults, demonstrated that developmentally relevant goals predicted problem-solving strategy use over and above problem domain. Four focal goals concerned autonomy, generativity, maintaining good relationships with others, and changing another person. We examined both self- and other-focused problem-solving strategies. Autonomy goals were associated with self-focused instrumental problem solving and generative goals were related to other-focused instrumental problem solving in family and financial problems. Goals of changing another person were related to other-focused instrumental problem solving in the family domain only. The match between goals and strategies, an indicator of problem-solving adaptiveness, showed that young individuals displayed the greatest match between autonomy goals and self-focused problem solving, whereas older adults showed a greater match between generative goals and other-focused problem solving. Findings speak to the importance of considering goals in investigations of age-related differences in everyday problem solving.     

Receiver operating characteristics for the brief symptom inventory depression, paranoid ideation, and psychoticism scales in a large sample of clinical inpatients

A commonly used screening tool for psychopathology, the Brief Symptom Inventory, provides normative data for assessing current mental functioning across multiple domains. Using data from 654 psychiatric inpatients, receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analyses were conducted for three scales, Depression, Paranoid Ideation, and Psychoticism. t ratios identified significant group differences on the Depression scale between patients diagnosed with or without depression but no differences on the Paranoid Ideation and Psychoticism scales between patients diagnosed with or without schizophrenia. Area under the curve for Depression was .65, indicating that the scale improved diagnostic prediction somewhat beyond chance; for Paranoid Ideation, the area was .52 and for Psychoticism, the area was .53, indicating that these two scales did not significantly improve diagnostic prediction beyond chance.     

A new method of monitoring motor activity in baboons

Movement activity of a normal baboon and of a baboon with induced Parkinsonism by unilateral administration of 1-methyl-4-phenyl-1,2,3,6-tetrahydropyridine (MPTP) was recorded by the Walter Reed Activity Monitor (or actigraph). Mean activity in the lesioned baboon was 41% less than that of the nonlesioned baboon measured over a 14-day period. In addition, the daily maximum activity value was significantly less in the MPTP-treated baboon. Moreover, resting and sleeping periods were 30% greater in the lesioned animal. The akinesia and resting and sleeping periods were displayed by the lesioned baboon throughout the day, whereas the control baboon showed them only at night. The data representing summarized movement activity are in accordance with observations of bradykinesia, hypokinesia, and akinesia of the MPTP-treated baboon. The actigraph was well tolerated by the animal because its small size and weight made it largely unobtrusive. We suggest that the actigraph is an appropriate device for measuring motor activity in nonhuman primates.     

Extraversion and rapid tapping: reactive inhibition or general cortical activation as determinants of performance differences

Two samples of subjects (n_tot = 22) scoring high or low on EPI-E tapped a morse-key as fast as possible over a 2-min period. As predicted, extraverts showed a lower tapping performance than introverts with differences between groups increasing significantly over time due to greater delays among the extraverts. Within the E dimension tapping differences could be shown to depend significantly only on the subfactor impulsiveness but not on sociability. There were no differences between groups, however, in frequency of involuntary rest pauses. Therefore the effects of extraversion on tapping performance should be explained more in terms of underlying differences in cortical arousal level than in terms of intermittent blocks as part of inhibitory potentials.     

Experience,Effectiveness, and Perceptions Toward Sport Psychology Consultants: A Critical Review of Peer-Reviewed Articles

The first scientific papers on sport psychology consultants (SPCs) focused primarily on the professional practice of experienced SPCs. Since then, the scientific literature on SPCs has greatly diversified. The purpose of this review is to summarize and critically examine the findings of three scientifically studied topics on SPCs: SPCs' experiences, perceptions toward SPCs, and SPCs' effectiveness. Peer-reviewed scientific articles published in English were found in the main sport and psychology databases. The primary results in relation to each topic and the limitations of these papers are presented. The discussion examines future avenues from which to develop research on SPCs.     

When preschoolers follow their eyes and older children follow their noses: visuo‐olfactory social affective matching in childhood

Recognition of emotional facial expressions is a crucial skill for adaptive behavior that most often occurs in a multi‐sensory context. Affective matching tasks have been used across development to investigate how people integrate facial information with other senses. Given the relative affective strength of olfaction and its relevance in mediating social information since birth, we assessed olfactory–visual matching abilities in a group of 140 children between the ages of 3 and 11 years old. We presented one of three odor primes (rose, fish and no‐odor, rated as pleasant or unpleasant by individual children) before a facial choice task (happy vs. disgusted face). Children were instructed to select one of two faces. As expected, children of all ages tended to choose happy faces. Children younger than 5 years of age were biased towards choosing the happy face, irrespective of the odor smelled. After age 5, an affective matching strategy guided children's choices. Smelling a pleasant odor predicted the choice of happy faces, whereas smelling the unpleasant or fish odor predicted the choice of disgusted faces. The present study fills a gap in the developmental literature on olfactory‐visual affective strategies that affect decision‐making, and represents an important step towards understanding the underlying developmental processes that shape the typical social mind.     

Spatial inattention abolishes voice adaptation

Adaptation to male voices causes a subsequent voice to be perceived as more female, and vice versa. Similar contrastive aftereffects have been reported for phonetic perception, and in vision for face perception. However, while aftereffects in the perception of phonetic features of speech have been reported to persist even when adaptors were processed inattentively, face aftereffects were previously reported to be abolished by inattention to adaptors. Here we demonstrate that auditory aftereffects of adaptation to voice gender are eliminated when the male and female adaptor voices are spatially unattended. Participants simultaneously heard gender-specific male or female adaptor voices in one ear and gender-neutral (androgynous) adaptor voices in the contralateral ear. They selectively attended to the adaptor voices in a designated ear, by either classifying voice gender (Exp. 1) or spoken syllable (Exp. 2). Voice aftereffects were found only if the gender-specific voices were spatially attended, suggesting capacity limits in the processing of voice gender for the unattended ear. Remarkably, gender-specific adaptors in the attended ear elicited comparable aftereffects in test voices, regardless of prior attention to voice gender or phonetic content. Thus, within the attended ear, voice gender was processed even when it was irrelevant for the task at hand, suggesting automatic processing of gender along with linguistic information. Overall, voice gender adaptation requires spatial, but not dimensional, selective attention.     

Social psychology at the crossroads: Its encounter with cognitive and ecological psychology and the interactive perspective

This article discusses the implications for social psychology of recent developments in the neighbouring fields of cognitive and ecological psychology. The authors stress the importance of studying the cognitive processes directly instead of inferring them as hypothetical constructs from aggregate responses. This paradigmatic shift implies a change in the conduct of research from the traditional nomothetic perspective to a neo-idiographic one. A method of representational contextualization is offred to generate the affective and cognitive deep structure from surface, first order data. This structure identified as the internal environment, reflects simultaneously the construction of reality by a situated individual and the recoding rules operating in such a construction.