Self-reported attachment, interpersonal aggression, and personality disorder in a prospective community sample of adolescents and adults

Anxious and avoidant attachment were assessed in the Children in the Community (CIC) Study during adolescence and adulthood using self-report scales developed for this prospective study. The convergent and discriminant validity of the new CIC attachment scales were evaluated and their stability was assessed across a 17-year interval. Attachment scales predicted DSM-IV personality disorders in theoretically coherent and clinically meaningful ways, especially when supplemented with a separate measure of interpersonal aggression. Cluster B and C personality disorder symptoms were associated with elevated anxious attachment. Avoidant attachment was positively associated with Cluster A symptoms and inversely associated with Cluster B and C symptoms. Interpersonal aggression was higher in Cluster B symptoms and lower in Cluster C symptoms, thus differentiating between these symptom clusters.     

Cross-language lexical connections in the mental lexicon: evidence from a case of trilingual aphasia

Despite anecdotal data on lexical interference among the languages of multilingual speakers, little research evidence about the lexical connections among multilinguals' languages exists to date. In the present paper, two experiments with a multilingual speaker who had suffered aphasia are reported. The first experiment provides data about inter-language activation during natural conversations; the second experiment examines performance on a word-translation task. Asymmetric patterns of inter-language interference and translation are evident. These patterns are influenced by age of language learning, degree of language recovery and use, and prevalence of shared lexical items. We conclude that whereas age of language learning plays a role in language recovery following aphasia, the degrees of language use prior to the aphasia onset and of shared vocabulary determine the ease with which words are accessed. The findings emphasize the importance of patterns of language use and the relations between the language pair under investigation in understanding lexical connections among languages in bilinguals and multilinguals.     

Effects of task interdependence and communication technologies synchrony on performance in virtual teams

Effects of task interdependence and communication technologies synchrony on performance in virtual teams. Survey results of 197 employees from 41 work groups in a large multinational software firm were used to investigate the effects of within-group task interdependence and the degree of communication synchrony on performance in virtual teams (VTs). The analyses revealed a moderating effect of task interdependence on the relationship between the degree of communications synchrony and performance in VT. We found that superior VTs performance is contingent on the fit between the nature of the task (i.e., task interdependence) and the choice of communications modality. This study complements previous research providing additional evidence of how task-technology interaction affects VTs performance, and extends previous findings obtained with ad-hoc groups in laboratory settings to natural, organizational teams.     

Contextual knowledge reduces demands on working memory during reading

An experiment is reported in which young, middle-aged, and older adults read and recalled ambiguous texts either with or without the topic title that supplied contextual knowledge. Within each of the age groups, the participants were divided into those with high or low working memory (WM) spans, with available WM capacity further manipulated by the presence or absence of an auditory target detection task concurrent with the reading task. Differences in reading efficiency (reading time per proposition recalled) between low WM span and high WM span groups were greater among readers who had access to contextual knowledge relative to those who did not, suggesting that contextual knowledge reduces demands on WM capacity. This position was further supported by the finding that increased age and attentional demands, two factors associated with reduced WM capacity, exaggerated the benefits of contextual knowledge on reading efficiency. The relative strengths of additional potential predictors of reading efficiency (e.g., interest, effort, and memory beliefs), along with knowledge, WM span, and age, are reported. Findings showed that contextual knowledge was the strongest predictor of reading efficiency even after controlling for the effects of all of the other predictors.     

The physics of optimal decision making: a formal analysis of models of performance in two-alternative forced-choice tasks

In this article, the authors consider optimal decision making in two-alternative forced-choice (TAFC) tasks. They begin by analyzing 6 models of TAFC decision making and show that all but one can be reduced to the drift diffusion model, implementing the statistically optimal algorithm (most accurate for a given speed or fastest for a given accuracy). They prove further that there is always an optimal trade-off between speed and accuracy that maximizes various reward functions, including reward rate (percentage of correct responses per unit time), as well as several other objective functions, including ones weighted for accuracy. They use these findings to address empirical data and make novel predictions about performance under optimality.     

The role of perceived similarity in supportive responses to victims of negative life events

The authors examined whether participants' perceived similarity to an ostensible victim of a negative life event influenced their supportiveness during a live interaction. Two competing models were considered: (a) increased similarity would be associated with increased supportiveness through attraction to the target and (b) increased similarity would be associated with decreased supportiveness through anxiety (due to heightened vulnerability). Participants (N = 241) met individually with a confederate posing as a cancer patient. Reactions were assessed, including verbal and nonverbal behaviors, both before and after the interaction, by participants themselves and by observers of the interaction. Results supported a model based on the classic similarity/attraction paradigm: Perceived similarity indirectly predicted participant-reported supportiveness/warmth and smiling through its relationship to attraction. Results extend the literature on similarity and attraction to the stress and coping arena and suggest that emphasizing perceived similarities to victims would be beneficial.     

Group morality and intergroup relations: cross-cultural and experimental evidence

An observational, cross-cultural study and an experimental study assessed behaviors indicative of a moral code that condones, and even values, hostility toward outgroups. The cross-cultural study, which used data from the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample (Murdock & White, 1969), found that for preindustrial societies, as loyalty to the ingroup increased the tendency to value outgroup violence more than ingroup violence increased, as did the tendencies to engage in more external than internal warfare, and enjoy war. The experimental study found that relative to guilt-prone group members who were instructed to remain objective, guilt-prone group members who were instructed to be empathic with their ingroup were more competitive in an intergroup interaction. The findings from these studies suggest that group morality is associated with intergroup conflict.     

Conflict monitoring and cognitive control

A neglected question regarding cognitive control is how control processes might detect situations calling for their involvement. The authors propose here that the demand for control may be evaluated in part by monitoring for conflicts in information processing. This hypothesis is supported by data concerning the anterior cingulate cortex, a brain area involved in cognitive control, which also appears to respond to the occurrence of conflict. The present article reports two computational modeling studies, serving to articulate the conflict monitoring hypothesis and examine its implications. The first study tests the sufficiency of the hypothesis to account for brain activation data, applying a measure of conflict to existing models of tasks shown to engage the anterior cingulate. The second study implements a feedback loop connecting conflict monitoring to cognitive control, using this to simulate a number of important behavioral phenomena.     

The role of prosody in discourse processing

The influence of prosody and its visual analog, punctuation, in text comprehension was investigated in two experiments. In the first experiment 20 subjects listened to three taped passages of equal length and difficulty varying in intonation (normal, monotonous, or altered) and were tested on tasks of text comprehension and word recognition. In the second experiment 20 new subjects read the same passages but with varying punctuation (appropriate, no punctuation, or altered) and were also tested on text comprehension and word recognition. Subjects' reading time was also recorded. ANOVA results revealed that altered prosody and punctuation affect performance in a similar fashion and seriously impair text comprehension and word recognition. This sensitivity to altered intonation suggests that linguistic prosody not only supplies redundant cues for judging sentence structure but that it also manages attentional resources to help with semantic encoding of lexical units and with the organization of linguistic information in long term memory.