Role of psychosocial risk factors in predicting maternal and paternal depressive symptomatology during pregnancy

The aim of the present study was to investigate the role of several psychosocial risk factors in predicting depressive symptomatology during pregnancy in mothers and fathers, respectively. A total of 146 primiparous mothers and 105 primiparous fathers reporting a psychosocial risk condition were recruited independently from maternity and child health services, during the second trimester of pregnancy. All parents were evaluated for depressive symptomatology, anxiety, and perceived social support. Two hierarchical multiple regression analyses were performed to determine the role of psychosocial factors in predicting depressive symptomatology during pregnancy, in mothers and fathers. Marital dissatisfaction, personal history of depression, and personal trait anxiety were identified as significant predictors of depressive symptomatology during pregnancy, both in mothers and in fathers. Family history of substance abuse, conflictual relationship with the parents in the past year, and bereavement in the past year were identified as significant factors contributing to elevated depressive symptoms during pregnancy in mothers, but not fathers. In this study, several psychosocial risk factors were consistently related to an increase in maternal and paternal depressive symptoms during pregnancy; some of these factors seem to be specifically related to maternal depressive mood.     

Predicting the Personal Appeal of Marketing Images Using Computational Methods

Images play a central role in digital marketing. They attract attention, trigger emotions, and shape consumers’ first impressions of products and brands. We propose that the shift from one‐to‐many mass communication to highly personalized one‐to‐one communication requires an understanding of image appeal at a personal level. Instead of asking “How appealing is this image?” we ask “How appealing is this image to this particular consumer?” Using the well‐established five‐factor model of personality, we apply machine learning algorithms to predict an image's personality appeal—the personality of consumers to which the image appeals most—from a set of 89 automatically extracted image features (Study 1). We subsequently apply the same algorithm on new images to predict consequential outcomes from the fit between consumer and image personality. We show that image‐person fit adds incremental predictive power over the images’ general appeal when predicting (a) consumers’ liking of new images (Study 2) and (b) consumers’ attitudes and purchase intentions (Study 3).     

Motivation influences the underestimation of cumulative risk

Past research has shown that people typically underestimate the cumulative risk of events. This effect has mainly been interpreted as resulting from the use of cognitive heuristics and judgment strategies, such as availability or anchoring and adjustment. The authors suggest that motivational processes can be an additional force in the generation of cumulative risk estimates. Using an experimental design, Study 1 shows that people underestimate the cumulative risk of infection with sexually transmitted diseases of appealing prospective sexual partners by using risk-irrelevant information for their judgment. Using a correlational design, Study 2 demonstrates that people underestimate the cumulative risk of being infected with a sexually transmitted disease and that commitment to the present partner is directly related to a low cumulative risk estimate as well as indirectly through its effect on the perceived risk of the present partner. Together, the two studies demonstrate that motivation influences the underestimation of cumulative risk.     

Neighborhood Effects on Nonword Visual Processing in a Language with Shallow Orthography

Neighborhood size and neighborhood frequency were orthogonally varied in two experiments on Italian nonwords. In Experiment 1, an inhibitory effect of neighborhood frequency on visual lexical decision was found: The presence of one high-frequency neighbor increased response latencies and error rates to nonwords. By contrast, no effect of neighborhood size and no neighborhood size x neighborhood frequency interaction were found. In Experiment 2, a facilitatory effect of neighborhood size on nonword naming was shown: Naming latencies were faster when nonwords had a large neighborhood. In the naming experiment, there was no effect of neighbors' frequency and no neighborhood size x neighborhood frequency interaction. An additional role for bigram frequency was found whereas syllable frequency did not give any independent contribution. These results further corroborate the view that, in a language with transparent orthography like Italian, despite a substantial contribution of sublexical print-to-sound mapping due to the language's high regularity/consistency, reading aloud of nonlexical material may benefit from the contribution of the lexical component.     

Reading comprehension and understanding idiomatic expressions: a developmental study

The aim of the present study was to investigate idiom comprehension in school-age Italian children with different reading comprehension skills. According to our hypothesis, the level of a child's text comprehension skills should predict his/her ability to understand idiomatic meanings. Idiom comprehension in fact requires children to go beyond a simple word-by-word comprehension strategy and to integrate figurative meaning into contextual information. In a preliminary phase, we used a standardized battery of tests (Cornoldi & Colpo, 1998) to assess the ability of second graders and fourth graders to comprehend written texts. Three groups were identified at each age level: good, medium, and poor comprehenders. Children were then presented with familiar idiomatic expressions which also have a literal meaning (e.g., "break the ice"). Idioms were embedded in short stories: in Experiment 1 only the idiomatic interpretation was contextually appropriate, in Experiment 2 a literal reading of the string was also plausible in the context. A multiple-choice task was used in both experiments: children were asked to choose one answer among three corresponding to: (a) the idiomatic meaning; (b) the literal meaning; and (c) an interpretation contextually appropriate but not connected with the idiomatic or literal meaning of the idiom string. The results of both experiments showed that the ability to understand a text indeed predicted children's understanding of idioms in context. To verify whether possible improvements in children's comprehension skills might produce an increase in figurative language understanding, Experiment 3 was carried out. A group of poor comprehenders who participated in Experiments 1 and 2 was tested eight months later. The results of Experiment 3 showed that children whose general comprehension skills improved their performance on an idiom comprehension test.     

Stress regularity or consistency? Reading aloud Italian polysyllables with different stress patterns

Stress assignment to three- and four-syllable Italian words is not predictable by rule, but needs lexical look-up. The present study investigated whether stress assignment to low-frequency Italian words is determined by stress regularity, or by the number of words sharing the final phonological segment and the stress pattern (stress neighborhood or consistency). Experiment 1 showed an effect of stress neighborhood: words were read aloud faster and more accurately when they had a prevalence of stress "friends," irrespective of stress regularity. Moreover, when irregularly stressed words have a higher number of stress friends compared to regularly stressed words, they are read even faster (Experiment 2). In Experiment 3, using visual lexical decision, no difference related to the numerosity of stress friends was found. It is concluded that reading aloud Italian low-frequency words with different stress patterns is mainly affected by the numerosity of lexical types that share a given final sequence and the stress pattern. The phonological nature of the numerosity of lexical representations affecting reading aloud finds support in the absence of such effect in visual lexical decision. These results have implications for models of reading aloud that go beyond monosyllables.     

Productive use of the English past tense in children with focal brain injury and specific language impairment

In this study, 22 children with early left hemisphere (LHD) or right hemisphere (RHD) focal brain lesions (FL, n=14 LHD, n=8 RHD) were administered an English past tense elicitation test (M=6.5 years). Proportion correct and frequency of over-regularization and zero-marking errors were compared to age-matched samples of children with specific language impairment (SLI, n=27) and with typical language development (TD, n=27). Similar rates of correct production and error patterns were observed for the children with TD and FL; whereas, children with SLI produced more zero-marking errors than either their FL or TD peers. Performance was predicted by vocabulary level (PPVT-R) for children in all groups, and errors did not differ as a function of lesion side (LHD vs. RHD). Findings are discussed in terms of the nature of brain-language relations and how those relationships develop over the course of language learning.     

Level of processing and age affect involuntary conceptual priming of weak but not strong associates

Memory for weak and strong semantic associates was compared in intentional associate-cued-recall and incidental free-association tests. This design yielded four conditions (weak/intentional, strong/intentional, weak/incidental, and strong/ incidental) on which younger and older adults were compared. Level of processing (LOP) and age effects occurred for the weak/intentional, strong/intentional, and weak/incidental conditions, but not for the strong/incidental condition. Because participants could not distinguish weak from strong associates during the memory tests, these results suggest that free-association priming was involuntary and was not contaminated by voluntary retrieval strategies. Instead, they suggest that encoding deficits related to shallower LOP and older age reduce involuntary free-association priming mainly for associates without cohesive preexperimental representations.     

On the automatic evaluation of social exemplars

The present article focuses on the automatic evaluation of exemplars whose category membership has been learned in the past. Studies 1 and 2 confirmed the hypothesis that once an exemplar has been encoded as a member of a given group, at a later encounter the evaluation associated with the group will be unintentionally retrieved from memory, even when no perceptual cue indicates the exemplar's category membership. Study 3 extended the results to the domain of in-group/out-group differentiation. In addition. Studies 4 and 5 confirmed the hypothesis that stored evaluations can be retrieved and affect responses even when the semantic information on which the evaluations were originally based is no longer available for retrieval. Finally, Study 6 investigated spontaneous approach-avoidance behavior tendencies. Overall, results demonstrate the pervasive effects of person-based representations, and they are discussed in terms of recent models of person perception and out-group discrimination.     

Preschoolers' current desires warp their choices for the future

We introduce a new paradigm to assess how children's choices for the future are influenced by their current desires. Forty-eight 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds were assigned to one of four conditions. In two of these conditions (intervention), we manipulated children's current state of thirst by allowing them to eat pretzels. In the remaining two conditions (baseline), we did not give them pretzels. The children were then asked to choose between water and pretzels. In one intervention and one baseline condition, they chose what they would like "now," whereas in the other intervention and baseline conditions, they chose what they would like "tomorrow." Results revealed that, despite children's overwhelming desire for pretzels in the baseline conditions, children in both intervention conditions chose water. The data support the notion that children's current state influences not only their choices for the present, but also their choices for the future. We discuss this finding in terms of both cognitive-developmental and adult social-cognitive theory.