Self–other awareness and peer relationships in toddlers: gender comparisons

Toddlers' growing self–other awareness has been linked with their ability to interact with peers, but there is reason to think that self–other awareness may relate to different aspects of peer relationships for boys and girls. We hypothesized that boys would express self–other awareness by separating self from other through claiming toys, while girls would express self–other awareness by creating similarities between self and other through use of the duplicate of a partner's toy. For 52 22–26 month olds, self–other awareness was assessed through four tasks: mirror self recognition, perceptual role taking, pronoun recognition and pronoun use. Each child subsequently interacted with a same‐sex peer for 30 min. Girls high in self–other awareness, and their partners were more likely to engage in duplicate toy use than girls low in self–other awareness. No differences in toy claiming were found. Future longitudinal research would clarify how the onset of self–other awareness relates to developments in peer interaction for girls and boys. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Rumination on Sadness and Dimensions of Communality and Agency: Comparing White and Visible Minority Individuals in a Canadian Context

The present study was conducted to address the relation of dimensions of communality and agency to rumination on sadness for white and visible minority individuals. A sample of Canadian undergraduates (N?=?1192) completed the Extended Personal Attributes Questionnaire (EPAQ; Spence et al. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 37:1673–1682, 1979) and the Rumination on Sadness Scale (Conway et al. Journal of Personality Assessment 75:404–425, 2000). Multiple regressions were performed with participants’ EPAQ scores as predictors of rumination. Overall, the strongest relation was that greater agency predicted less rumination. For all but visible minority men, greater communality predicted more rumination. For white men and women, greater unmitigated agency was associated with more rumination. These and other findings are discussed in terms of theoretical accounts of sex differences in rumination.     

Optimism and pessimism as predictors of physical and psychological health among grandmothers raising their grandchildren

This study examines the role of personality in predicting psychological and physical health among grandmothers who are coping with a non-normative non-traumatic stressor, i.e. serving as primary caregivers for their grandchildren. Using the Life Orientation Test-Revised (LOT-R), a measure of personality disposition, we examine the contributions of both optimism and pessimism to health outcomes. ANOVAs and regression analyses of the LOT-R and self reports of health in 67 African American and Latino grandmothers revealed psychological (obsessive compulsive symptoms, depression, hostility) and physical (sleep disorder, hypertension) health outcomes are differentially predicted by optimism and pessimism among older and younger age-groups of grandmothers. Implications for grandmothers’ response to caregiving stress and for future studies of personality’s relation to health are discussed.     

The role of control functions in mentalizing: dual-task studies of theory of mind and executive function

Conflicting evidence has arisen from correlational studies regarding the role of executive control functions in Theory of Mind. The current study used dual-task manipulations of executive functions (inhibition, updating and switching) to investigate the role of these control functions in mental state and non-mental state tasks. The 'Eyes' pictorial test of Theory of Mind showed specific dual-task costs when concurrently performed with an inhibitory secondary task. In contrast, interference effects on a verbal 'Stories' task were general, occurring on both mental state and non-mental state tasks, and across all types of executive function. These findings from healthy functioning adults should help to guide decisions about appropriate methods of assessing ToM in clinical populations, and interpreting deficits in performance in such tasks in the context of more general cognitive dysfunction.     

Flashbulb memory for 11 September 2001

The recollection of particularly salient, surprising or consequential events is often called ‘flashbulb memories’. We tested people's autobiographical memory for details of 11 September 2001 by gathering a large national random sample (N = 678) of people's reports immediately following the attacks, and then by contacting them twice more, in September 2002 and August 2003. Three novel findings emerged. First, memory consistency did not vary as a function of demographic variables such as gender, geographical location, age or education. Second, memory consistency did not vary as a function of whether memory was tested before or after the 1‐year anniversary of the event, suggesting that media coverage associated with the anniversary did not impact memory. Third, the conditional probability of consistent recollection in 2003 given consistent recollection in 2002 was p = .73. In contrast, the conditional probability of consistent recollection in 2003 given inconsistent recollection in 2002 was p = .18. Finally, and in agreement with several prior studies, confidence in memory far exceeded consistency in the long term. Also, those respondents who revealed evidence for consistent flashbulb memory experienced more anxiety in response to the event, and engaged in more covert rehearsal than respondents who did not reveal evidence for consistent flashbulb memory. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Importance of Sound for Cognitive Sequencing Abilities: The Auditory Scaffolding Hypothesis

ABSTRACT— Sound is inherently a temporal and sequential signal. Experience with sound therefore may help bootstrap—that is, provide a kind of "scaffolding" for—the development of general cognitive abilities related to representing temporal or sequential patterns. Accordingly, the absence of sound early in development may result in disturbances to these sequencing skills. In support of this hypothesis, we present two types of findings. First, normal-hearing adults do best on sequencing tasks when the sense of hearing, rather than sight, can be used. Second, recent findings suggest that deaf children have disturbances on exactly these same kinds of tasks that involve learning and manipulation of serial-order information. We suggest that sound provides an "auditory scaffolding" for time and serial-order behavior, possibly mediated through neural connections between the temporal and frontal lobes of the brain. Under conditions of auditory deprivation, auditory scaffolding is absent, resulting in neural reorganization and a disturbance to cognitive sequencing abilities.     

The self and recollection reconsidered: how a ‘failure to replicate’ failed and why trace strength accounts of recollection are untenable

Hirshman and Lanning ( 1999 ) ‘failed to replicate’ findings reported by Conway and Dewhurst ( 1995 ). There were, however, critical differences in design between the two sets of experiments. For example, Hirshman and Lanning used a within‐subject design and a short retention interval, whereas Conway and Dewhurst used a between‐subjects design and longer retention intervals. We demonstrate in a new series of experiments that the Conway and Dewhurst findings do replicate when the correct design is used and, moreover, we show that the design differences in Hirshman and Lanning's experiments account for their findings. Finally, we develop an account in terms of the self that can explain the complex pattern of findings, a pattern which lies beyound the scope of simple trace strength models of memory. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The self and recollective experience

Three experiments investigated the hypothesis that self-reference at encoding increases the probability of recollective experience in recognition memory. In all three experiments separate groups of subjects studied words naming personality traits. One group judged the self-relevance of the traits, the other groups performed orientating tasks low in self-reference. In a recognition test subjects first identified old items and then indicated which of these were accompanied by recollective experience ('remember' responses) and which were recognized on some other basis ('know' responses). No reliable differences in overall recognition performance between self-referent and semantic encoding tasks were observed. However, subjects who encoded trait adjectives with reference to the self produced reliably more remember responses and few know responses than subjects who had encoded the items in the low self-referent tasks. Experiment 1 demonstrated a self-reference effect in recognition accompanied by recollective experience after 1-hour retention interval, while Experiment 2 found this effect to persist over a 24-hour retention interval. Experiment 3 demonstrated that this self-reference effect is obtained under incidental as well as under intentional learning conditions. Taken together these findings demonstrate the importance of self-reference as a factor in determining the likelihood that recognition judgements will be accompanied by recollective experience.     

Perceived intimacy of expressed emotion

Research on norms for emotional expression and self-disclosure provided the basis for two hypotheses concerning the perceived intimacy of emotional self-disclosure. The first hypothesis was that the perceived intimacy of negative emotional disclosure would be greater than that of positive emotional disclosure; the second was that disclosures of more intense emotional states would be perceived as more intimate than disclosures of less intense emotional states for both negative and positive disclosures. Both hypotheses received support when male students in Canada rated the perceived intimacy of self-disclosures that were equated for topic and that covered a comprehensive sample of emotions and a range of emotional intensities. The effects were observed across all the topics of disclosure examined.     

Ego-involvement leads to positive self-schema activation and to a positivity bias in information processing

Study 1 examined the hypothesis that ego-involvement leads to positive self-schema activation. Ego-involvement was induced by having experimental subjects anticipate a difficult test of intelligence. Noninvolved control subjects did not anticipate the test. All subjects completed a depth-of-processing task, following which incidental recall was assessed. Ego-involved relative to noninvolved subjects tended to recall a greater number of positive and fewer negative words at both the self-referent and semantic processing levels. Study 2 was conducted to address further the self-schema hypothesis and to address the hypothesis suggested by the results of Study 1 that ego-involvement leads to a positivity bias in information processing. The design of Study 2 was similar to that of Study 1. Results revealed that the self-favorability of negative words recalled at the self-referent level was greater for ego-involved than for noninvolved subjects, suggesting positive self-schema activation. In addition, ego-involved subjects recalled a greater number of positive words at the semantic level, suggesting a positivity bias in information processing.Study 2 was conducted by Andrew Howell in partial fulfillment of the requirements of a Master of Arts degree at Concordia University, under the supervision of Michael Conway. The authors thank Karin Stiefenhofer for her work on the project. The research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Fonds pour la Formation de Chercheurs et l'Aide à la Recherche du Québec grants to Michael Conway.