The Well- and Unwell-Being of a Child

The concept of the ‘well-being of the child’ (like the ‘child’s welfare’ and ‘best interests of the child’) has remained underdetermined in legal and ethical texts on the needs and rights of children. As a hypothetical construct that draws attention to the child’s long-term welfare, the well-being of the child is a broader concept than autonomy and happiness. This paper clarifies some conceptual issues of the well-being of the child from a philosophical point of view. The main question is how well-being could in practice acquire a concrete meaning and content for a particular issue or situation. A phenomenological-hermeneutic research perspective will be outlined that allows the child’s well-being to be elucidated and specified as an anthropological and ethical idea. It is based on a contextual understanding of generative relationships, a combination of the theory and practice of making sense, here described as ‘generative insight’, which could provide ethical guidance for decision making in families, legal practice, medicine or biomedical research.     

The Existential Consequences of an Unjust World: The Effects of Individual Differences in Belief in a Just World and Just World Threats on Death-Thought Accessibility

Research has demonstrated that undermining cultural worldviews increases death-thought accessibility (DTA). However, individual differences in commitment to a particular worldview may predict DTA when that belief is challenged. In the present research, we tested if individual differences in belief in a just world (BJW) relate to DTA when the BJW is undermined. In Studies 1 and 3, BJW was associated with DTA when people reflected on an unfair experience. Study 3 indicated that this effect is driven by general BJW. In Study 2, BJW was associated with DTA after the 2012 presidential election among individuals who supported the losing candidate.     

Psychometric properties and clinical cut-off scores of the Spanish version of the Social Anxiety Scale for Adolescents

This study examined the reliability and validity evidence drawn from the scores of the Spanish version of the Slovenian-developed Social Anxiety Scale for Adolescents (SASA; Puklek, 1997; Puklek & Vidmar, 2000) using a community sample (Study 1) and a clinical sample (Study 2). Confirmatory factor analysis in Study 1 replicated the 2-factor structure found by the original authors in a sample of Slovenian adolescents. Test-retest reliability was adequate. Furthermore, the SASA correlated significantly with other social anxiety scales, supporting concurrent validity evidence in Spanish adolescents. The results of Study 2 confirmed the correlations between the SASA and other social anxiety measures in a clinical sample. In addition, findings revealed that the SASA can effectively discriminate between adolescents with a clinical diagnosis of social anxiety disorder (SAD) and those without this disorder. Finally, cut-off scores for the SASA are provided for Spanish adolescents.     

Language and executive functioning skills of students with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and in reading comprehension difficulties (RCD)

The aim of this work was to study the specificity of deficits in linguistic and executive functioning of students with ADHD and with RCD and to determine the profile of deficits in the comorbid group (ADHD+RCD). Participants in the study were 84 students, ages 12-16 years divided into four groups with an equal number of subjects (N= 21): ADHD, RCD, ADHD+RCD and comparison group (without ADHD and without RCD). We measured vocabulary, oral comprehension, lexical access, verbal and visual working memory, inhibition and attention. The results show that the ADHD+RCD group presents the most important linguistic deficits, followed by the RCD group. On the other hand, the three clinical groups (ADHD, RCD and ADHD+RCD) display greater performance problems in working memory than the comparison group, whereas the two groups with ADHD had more problems in attention and inhibition. These results suggest the dissociation of linguistic and executive deficits that affect the RCD group and ADHD group to a greater extent, respectively. Lastly, the comorbid group showed deficits both in language and in executive skills. We discuss the implications of these findings for designing interventions.     

Relation priming in established compounds: facilitation?

Gagné and Spalding (Brain and Language, 90, 478–486, 2004, Journal of Memory and Language, 60, 20–35, 2009) have shown that the difficulty of interpreting an established compound (e.g., snowball) can be influenced by recent exposure to a compound with the same modifier and that this influence depends on the relation linking the constituents of the compound. For example, snowball (a ball made of snow) was processed more quickly following snowfort (a fort made of snow; same relation) than following snowshovel (a shovel for snow; different relation). In three experiments, we investigated the basis of this relation-priming effect. The results indicated that the relation-priming effect in established compounds is due to slower processing in the different-relation condition rather than to faster processing in the same-relation condition. These results pose a challenge for most models of compound-word processing.     

Alone and happy: Personality moderates the effect of happy mood on social approach

Happy moods are believed to evoke an approach orientation and to broaden one’s potential courses of action. Although positivity is strongly associated with approach, social approach is a more complex behavior because interacting with other individuals can offer either positive or negative consequences. We provide novel experimental evidence that happiness actually reduces social approach among individuals whose happiness might be threatened by social interaction. Specifically, experimentally induced mood interacted with participants’ personality, such that participants who were high in social inhibition (e.g., shyness, rejection sensitivity) sat further away from another individual when in a happy mood. We suggest that happiness may produce a general orientation to approach other individuals except when such approach threatens mood.     

Mental time travel into the past and the future in healthy aged adults: an fMRI study

Remembering the past and envisioning the future rely on episodic memory which enables mental time travel. Studies in young adults indicate that past and future thinking share common cognitive and neural underpinnings. No imaging data is yet available in healthy aged subjects. Using fMRI, we scanned older subjects while they remembered personal events (PP: last 12 months) or envisioned future plans (FP: next 12 months). Behaviorally, both time-periods were comparable in terms of visual search strategy, emotion, frequency of rehearsal and recency of the last evocation. However, PP were more episodic, engaged a higher state of autonoetic consciousness and mental visual images were clearer and more numerous than FP. Neuroimaging results revealed a common network of activation (posterior cingulate cortex, precuneus, prefrontal cortex, hippocampus) reflecting the use of similar cognitive processes. Furthermore, the episodic nature of PP depended on hippocampal and visuo-spatial activations (occipital and angular gyri), while, for FP, it depended on the inferior frontal and lateral temporal gyri, involved in semantic memory retrieval. The common neural network and behavior suggests that healthy aged subjects thought about their future prospects in the past. The contribution of retrospective thinking into the future that engages the same network as the one recruited when remembering the past is discussed. Within this network, differential recruitment of specific areas highlights the episodic distinction between past and future mental time travel.     

How to switch on and switch off semantic priming effects for natural and artifactual categories: activation processes in category memory depend on focusing specific feature dimensions

"Semantic priming" refers to the phenomenon that people react faster to target words preceded by semantically related rather than semantically unrelated words. We wondered whether momentary mind sets modulate semantic priming for natural versus artifactual categories. We interspersed a category priming task with a second task that required participants to react to either the perceptual or action features of simple geometric shapes. Focusing on perceptual features enhanced semantic priming effects for natural categories, whereas focusing on action features enhanced semantic priming effects for artifactual categories. In fact, significant priming effects emerged only for those categories thought to rely on the features activated by the second task. This result suggests that (a) priming effects depend on momentary mind set and (b) features can be weighted flexibly in concept representations; it is also further evidence for sensory-functional accounts of concept and category representation.