Spanish adaptation of the EAS Temperament Survey for the assessment of child temperament

Better understanding of child temperament is essential, as it may predict subsequent development of psychopathology. Questionnaires which have been adapted to Spanish population include a rather restricted age range. The Emotionality Sociability and Activity (EAS) Temperament Survey has been widely used in child temperament genetic research. A Spanish version of the scale was administered to a sample of 229 mothers and to their children at 18 and 42 months of age. Its psychometric features were examined. Results showed accuracy indices akin to that obtained in prior studies. Findings suggest a three-factor structure for the assessment of temperament.     

Exposure to severe urban air pollution influences cognitive outcomes, brain volume and systemic inflammation in clinically healthy children

Exposure to severe air pollution produces neuroinflammation and structural brain alterations in children. We tested whether patterns of brain growth, cognitive deficits and white matter hyperintensities (WMH) are associated with exposures to severe air pollution. Baseline and 1 year follow-up measurements of global and regional brain MRI volumes, cognitive abilities (Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-Revised, WISC-R), and serum inflammatory mediators were collected in 20 Mexico City (MC) children (10 with white matter hyperintensities, WMH⁺, and 10 without, WMH⁻) and 10 matched controls (CTL) from a low polluted city. There were significant differences in white matter volumes between CTL and MC children - both WMH⁺ and WMH⁻ - in right parietal and bilateral temporal areas. Both WMH⁻ and WMH⁺ MC children showed progressive deficits, compared to CTL children, on the WISC-R Vocabulary and Digit Span subtests. The cognitive deficits in highly exposed children match the localization of the volumetric differences detected over the 1 year follow-up, since the deficits observed are consistent with impairment of parietal and temporal lobe functions. Regardless of the presence of prefrontal WMH, Mexico City children performed more poorly across a variety of cognitive tests, compared to CTL children, thus WMH⁺ is likely only partially identifying underlying white matter pathology. Together these findings reveal that exposure to air pollution may perturb the trajectory of cerebral development and result in cognitive deficits during childhood.     

Fundamental Beliefs,Origin Explanations and Perceived Effectiveness of Protection Measures: Exploring Laypersons' Chains of Reasoning About Influenza

Laypersons' chains of reasoning in explaining recent influenza outbreaks are investigated. Drawing on social representations theory, fundamental worldviews, that is, the belief in a dangerous world (BDW), are postulated to anchor explanations of disease origins, which in turn affect perceived effectiveness of protection measures. Our study, based on a longitudinal survey among the general public in Switzerland, showed that the lower people's BDW scores, the more they appeal to natural origins to explain outbreaks and the more they perceive official protection measures as effective. The higher people's BDW scores, the more they explain outbreaks via hygienic origins, which are linked with out‐group discrimination measures, and conspiracy origins, which are linked with lower perceived effectiveness of aid intervention measures. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The need for public policies to promote healthier food consumption: A comment on Wansink and Chandon (2014)

Current approaches to addressing obesity have fallen short. This is largely due to the many environmental forces that undermine people's self-regulatory capacity to be personally responsible for their food choices. Novel insights from the social sciences are needed to inform voluntary, health-promoting actions by companies, institutions, and citizens as well as the design of public health policies. Voluntary interventions that rely on nudges should complement traditional public health strategies such as taxation and restriction of child-targeted marketing in schools. In this commentary, we discuss four food policy issues that would benefit from consumer psychology research: (a) the restriction of food marketing to children, (b) provision of nutrition information through food labels, (c) improving school food environments, and (d) placing limits on portion sizes. Identifying effective solutions for obesity will require approaches that integrate psychological, public health, and legal perspectives and methods.     

Evidence-Based Assessment in Children and Adolescents with Obsessive–Compulsive Disorder

The assessment of varied psychiatric disorders, including obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD), is shifting towards the use of evidence-based assessments (EBAs). This shift has fostered the development, validation and adaptation of several measures to rate obsessive–compulsive symptoms and other related problematic areas such as functional impairment or family attitudes among others. The aim of this paper is to present a systematic review of psychometric studies on pediatric OCD-specific measures to classify these according to assessment evidence-based criteria. Selection criteria that determined which studies were included in the review were: (1) analyzing an OCD measure and (2) including participants’ age being 18 years or younger. The literature search procedure was conducted in Medline, PsycINFO, PsycARTICLES, ERIC, Cochrane Library, and Scholar Google databases and enabled us to locate 42 studies which analyzed psychometric properties of 14 OCD measures studied in children and adolescents. Instruments were grouped into the following assessment areas: symptom presence and severity, functional impairment, family functioning and cognitive dimensions of OCD. Psychometric data regarding internal structure, internal consistency, reliability, validity and diagnostic precision were also reported. Further, measures were classified as well-established, approaching well-established and promising assessments in terms of reliability and validity. We concluded that the assessment of OCD in pediatric populations is a growing field that in a short-medium term could provide a wide variety of EBAs for the evaluation obsessive–compulsive symptoms and other OCD-related dimensions. The paper concludes by highlighting directions for future research.     

The impact of aging and hearing status on verbal short-term memory

The aim of this study is to assess the impact of hearing status on age-related decrease in verbal short-term memory (STM) performance. This was done by administering a battery of verbal STM tasks to elderly and young adult participants matched for hearing thresholds, as well as to young normal-hearing control participants. The matching procedure allowed us to assess the importance of hearing loss as an explanatory factor of age-related STM decline. We observed that elderly participants and hearing-matched young participants showed equal levels of performance in all verbal STM tasks, and performed overall lower than the normal-hearing young control participants. This study provides evidence for recent theoretical accounts considering reduced hearing level as an important explanatory factor of poor auditory-verbal STM performance in older adults.     

From species ethics to social concerns: Habermas’s critique of “liberal eugenics” evaluated

Three arguments of Habermas against “liberal eugenics”—the arguments from consent, responsibility, and instrumentalization—are critically evaluated and explicated in the light of his discourse ethics and social theory. It is argued that these arguments move partly at a too deep level and are in part too individualistic and psychological to sufficiently counter the liberal position that he sets out to criticize. This is also due to limitations that prevent discourse ethics from connecting effectively to the moral and political domains, e.g., through a discussion of justice. In spite of these weaknesses, Habermas’s thesis is of major relevance and brings up neglected issues in the discussion about eugenic reproductive practices. This relevance has not been duly recognized in bioethics, largely because of the depth of his speculations of philosophical anthropology. It is argued that Habermas’s notion of the colonization of the lifeworld could provide the analytical tool needed to build that bridge to the moral and political domain.     

Gaze-following behind barriers in domestic dogs

Although gaze-following abilities have been demonstrated in a wide range of species, so far no clear evidence has been available for dogs. In the current study, we examined whether dogs follow human gaze behind an opaque barrier in two different contexts, in a foraging situation and in a non-foraging situation (food involved vs. food not involved in the situation). We assumed that dogs will spontaneously follow the human gaze and that the foraging context will have a positive effect on dogs’ gaze-following behaviour by causing an expectation in the dogs that food might be hidden somewhere in the room and might be communicated by the experimenter. This expectation presumably positively affects their motivational and attentional state. Here, we report that dogs show evidence of spontaneous gaze-following behind barriers in both situations. According to our findings, the dogs gazed earlier at the barrier in the indicated direction in both contexts. However, as we expected, the context also has some effect on dogs’ gaze-following behaviour, as more dogs gazed behind the barrier in the indicated direction in the foraging situation. The present results also support the idea that gaze-following is a characteristic skill in mammals which may more easily emerge in certain functional contexts.     

What chance-credence norms should be

Synthese - Multiple realizability says that the same kind of mental states may be manifested by systems with very different physical constitutions. Putnam (1967) supposed it to be...     

Longitudinal Associations Between the Five-Factor Model of Personality and The Bi-Factor Model of Psychopathology: Continuity,Pathoplasty and Complication Effects in Adolescents

The study of the bifactor structure of psychopathology, which includes a general factor of psychopathology (or p factor) in addition to the internalizing and externalizing factors, has gained attention. However, its associations with the Five-Factor Model (FFM) of personality has been addressed in few studies, and none has examined different plausible etiological models (i.e., continuity, pathoplasty, complication) to explain its relationship, which is the aim of the present research. Additionally, the longitudinal association of the General Factor of Personality (GFP) and the p factor will be also explored. Personality and psychopathological symptoms of high school students were assessed at three time points (once a year) (n?=?655; M?=?13.79, SD?=?1.24; 49.8% girls). Confirmatory Factor Analysis (and measurement invariance across waves) were tested for the traits, the GFP and the bifactor model of psychopathology. While the bifactor model and the one-factor solution for each personality trait displayed good fit to the data and remained invariant over time, the structure of the GFP was adequate and invariant in two of the three waves. The resulting factors were included in cross-lagged panel models and showed that the FFM traits and the psychopathology factors influenced each other reciprocally. Most associations fell in line with the continuity model, but minor pathoplastic and complication effects were also reported. Similar associations were found between the GFP and the p factor. These results suggest that interventions in riskier personality profiles might prevent the development of general and more specific psychopathology spectra.