Recalled Parent-Child Relations and Adult Personality

Adult children's ratings of their parents' behaviors on the Parent-Child Relation Questionnaire II were correlated with self-reports and peer ratings of personality on the NEO Personality Inventory in a sample of 619 men and women aged 21 to 96. Individuals who reported that their parents were loving scored lower in neuroticism and higher in extraversion, openness to experience, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. Individuals, especially men, who described their parents as casual rather than demanding were lower in extraversion and conscientiousness, but higher in openness. Parental attention (i.e., spoiling) was associated with extraversion and low agreeableness. Several of these correlations were replicated when peer ratings of personality were examined. However, all the associations were modest, and several alternative explanations suggest that the correlations may exaggerate the influence of these child-rearing practices on adult personality. Parental behaviors and attitudes seem to have less effect on broad dimensions of adult personality than traditionally supposed.     

Declines in divergent thinking with age: cross-sectional, longitudinal, and cross-sequential analyses

Six measures of divergent thinking were administered to 825 men ranging in age from 17 to 101 over the period from 1959 to 1972; repeat administrations were given to a subset of 278 men after a 6-year interval. Cross-sectional analyses showed curvilinear trends, with an increase in scores for men under 40 and a decline thereafter. Repeated measures analyses on subjects initially aged 33 to 74 generally replicated this finding, whereas cross-sequential analyses suggested a decline for all cohorts tested at a later time. Additional analyses suggested that not all of the decline could be attributed to reduced speed of response production. These longitudinal findings confirm earlier cross-sectional reports of decline in divergent thinking abilities with age.     

Validation of the five-factor model of personality across instruments and observers

Two data sources--self-reports and peer ratings--and two instruments--adjective factors and questionnaire scales--were used to assess the five-factor model of personality. As in a previous study of self-reports (McCrae & Costa, 1985b), adjective factors of neuroticism, extraversion, openness to experience, agreeableness-antagonism, and conscientiousness-undirectedness were identified in an analysis of 738 peer ratings of 275 adult subjects. Intraclass correlations among raters, ranging from .30 to .65, and correlations between mean peer ratings and self-reports, from .25 to .62, showed substantial cross-observer agreement on all five adjective factors. Similar results were seen in analyses of scales from the NEO Personality Inventory. Items from the adjective factors were used as guides in a discussion of the nature of the five factors. These data reinforce recent appeals for the adoption of the five-factor model in personality research and assessment.     

Comprehension and production of body part labels in 2‐ to 3‐year‐old children

This study examined which body part labels children could (i) produce when the experimenter touched different locations on her own body, asking each time ‘What's this?’ and (ii) comprehend by touching the correct locations on their own bodies in response to the experimenter asking ‘Where's the [body‐part label]?’. Seventeen children aged between 26 and 41 months, tested in a repeated measures procedure, were presented with 50 different body part stimuli in 200 test trials per child. Overall, the children produced fewer body part labels than they could comprehend. The accuracy of children's responses depended on (i) the location or extent of each body part (facial and broad body features were better known; joints and features in or attached to broad body parts the least well known); (ii) the amount of sensory (but not motor) representation each body part has in the human cortex; and (iii) whether a body part was commonly named by caregivers. These results present a precise mapping of the body parts that young children are able to name and locate on their own bodies in response to body part names; they suggest several possible determinants of lexical‐semantic body knowledge and add to the understanding of how it develops in childhood.     

Performance of Faller and Nonfaller Older Adults on a Motor–Motor Interference Task

Typically, falls in older adults occur when 2 tasks are performed simultaneously, due to the increased motor demand required to maintain stability and attention to perform the other task. The authors' purpose was to investigate walking while grasping, transporting, and placing a dowel on a predetermined target while manipulating difficulty levels of the manual task. Faller and nonfaller older adults performed a walking block (manual tasks combined with gait) and a stationary block (upright stance combined with manual tasks). The manual task involved grasping, transporting, and placing the dowel over a target. The results showed that fallers underperformed when compared with nonfallers in the task of placing the dowel over the target. The main difference observed between the groups was found in the condition that required allocation of attention between tasks and greater accuracy in the final placement of the object. Fallers showed gait stability similar to the nonfallers, but fallers were less accurate than nonfallers in the object placement task, especially for the highest level of difficulty. Thus, fallers seem to use a stability-first strategy. Fallers had problems in executing the manual tasks, which suggests a more global change in motor behavior rather than specific changes to balance control.     

Prospective Memory Impairment in Mild Cognitive Impairment: An Analytical Review

Mild cognitive impairment (MCI) is a heterogeneous condition characterized by the presence in an otherwise healthy elderly individual of cognitive deficits involving specific domains in the absence of significant functional impairments. Reports indicate that prospective memory (PM), that is, the ability to remember to execute delayed intentions, is impaired in individuals with MCI. The present review discusses the current debate in the literature on PM functioning in MCI by focusing on the relationship between prospective retrieval and retrospective memory functioning. Analysis of the reported evidence revealed that both the prospective component and the retrospective component of PM can be impaired in MCI. Declarative memory dysfunction may account for the retrospective memory impairment, while either reduced executive abilities or a deficit of reflexive mechanisms could explain the prospective component impairment.     

Conditioned fear is modulated by D2 receptor pathway connecting the ventral tegmental area and basolateral amygdala

Excitation of the mesocorticolimbic pathway, originating from dopaminergic neurons in the ventral tegmental area (VTA), may be important for the development of exaggerated fear responding. Among the forebrain regions innervated by this pathway, the amygdala is an essential component of the neural circuitry of conditioned fear. The functional role of the dopaminergic pathway connecting the VTA to the basolateral amygdala (BLA) in fear and anxiety has received little attention. In vivo microdialysis was performed to measure dopamine levels in the BLA of Wistar rats that received the dopamine D(2) agonist quinpirole (1 μg/0.2 μl) into the VTA and were subjected to a fear conditioning test using a light as the conditioned stimulus (CS). The effects of intra-BLA injections of the D(1) antagonist SCH 23390 (1 and 2 μg/0.2 μl) and D(2) antagonist sulpiride (1 and 2 μg/0.2 μl) on fear-potentiated startle (FPS) to a light-CS were also assessed. Locomotor performance was evaluated by use of open-field and rotarod tests. Freezing and increased dopamine levels in the BLA in response to the CS were both inhibited by intra-VTA quinpirole. Whereas intra-BLA SCH 23390 did not affect FPS, intra-BLA sulpiride (2 μg) inhibited FPS. Sulpiride's ability to decrease FPS cannot be attributed to nonspecific effects because this drug did not affect motor performance. These findings indicate that the dopamine D(2) receptor pathway connecting the ventral tegmental area and the basolateral amygdala modulates fear and anxiety and may be a novel pharmacological target for the treatment of anxiety.     

Technology, Methodology and Intervention: Performing Nanoethics in Portugal

During the last few decades we have witnessed a proliferation of exercises dealing with the public participation of citizens in various different dimensions of their societies, including issues of science and technology. On the one hand, these mechanisms provide more robust forms of public engagement with matters that were traditionally dealt with by experts; on the other hand, they raise concerns relating to their design, efficiency or potential for the empowerment of citizens. As part of the EC-funded project DEEPEN (Deepening Ethical Engagement and Participation in Emerging Nanotechnologies) a research team in Coimbra, Portugal, was put in charge of identifying the ethical and social “impacts” of emerging nanotechnologies, transforming the traditional focus groups through the incorporation of two methodological innovations: the Pedagogy of the Oppressed and the Theatre of the Oppressed. This article reflects on the outcomes and complexities of the introduction of these two methodologies. Since the participants had little or no information on nanotechnologies, we reflect on the politics of these focus groups by exploring how issues of intervention, subjectivity, representation and agency were interconnected during this exercise of public participation in Science and Technology, analyzing the role of social sciences in developing nanoethics.     

First and second language vowel perception in early bilinguals

Previous research has shown that the perception of speech sounds is strongly influenced by the internal structure of maternal language categories. Specifically, it has been shown that stimuli judged as good exemplars of a phonemic category are more difficult to discriminate from similar sounds than bad exemplars from equally similar sounds. This effect seems to be restricted to phonemes present in the maternal language, and is acquired in the first months of life. The present study investigates the malleability of speech acquisition by analysing the discrimination capacities for L2 phonemes in highly proficient Spanish-Catalan bilinguals born in monolingual families. In Experiment I subjects were required to give goodness of fit judgments to establish the best exemplars corresponding to three different vowel categories (Catalan /e/ and /ε/ Spanish /e/). In Experiments 2 and 3, bilinguals were asked to perform a discrimination task with materials in their maternal language (Exp. 2) and in their second language (Exp. 3). Results reveal that bilinguals show a reduced discrimination capacity only for good exemplars of their maternal language, but not for good exemplars of their second language. The same pattern of results was obtained in Experiment 4, using a within-subjects design and a bias-free discrimination measure (d'). These findings support the hypothesis that phonemic categories are not only acquired early in life, but under some circumstances, the acquisition of new phonemic categories can be seriously compromised, in spite of early and extensive exposure to L2.