Autobiographical memory in middle childhood: Recollections of the recent and distant past

To address the question of whether memories from early childhood survive into later childhood, participants visited the laboratory at age 3 and again at 7, 8, or 9. At age 3, each talked with a parent about six events; at the later age each child talked with a researcher about four of these distant events as well as two more recent events. School-aged children recalled fewer than half of the distant events introduced. Further, the proportion of distant events recalled was negatively correlated with age. Those distant events that were recalled, however, were recounted in an accurate, detailed manner. Importantly, reports of distant events did not reflect the full extent of children's narrative ability. Reports of recent events were more coherent and included twice the detail. Implications for existing interpretations of autobiographical memory and childhood amnesia are discussed, and the need for further research employing innovative methods is emphasised.     

Positive Psychology: What Impact has it had on Sex Research Publication Trends?

Throughout history, Americans have been bitterly divided as to whether passionate love and sexual desire are positive experiences (that give meaning to life), whether they constitute a political, social, and spiritual danger, or whether sex in itself is not inherently bad, but certain sexual behaviors are wrong or dangerous. As previously noted by H. L. Horowitz, R. L. Rapson, and L. Stone, political and religious authorities—preaching the virtues of social control, chastity, and circumspection—have prevailed over reformers advocating “free love,” gender equality, birth control, the elimination of the double standard, sex education, and the like. In this paper we ask: Do we see any bias in the publication of modern-day sexuality research—specifically, do published studies tend to focus primarily on the positive or the negative aspects of sexuality? We attempted to answer this question by conducting a content analysis of articles appearing in four prestigious journals: The Journal of Sex Research, Archives of Sexual Behavior, The New England Journal of Medicine, and Obstetrics and Gynecology, from 1960 to the present. As expected, only a slim minority of articles investigated the delights of love, sex, and intimacy; the vast majority focused on the problems associated with sexual behavior. The positive psychology movement does not appear to have altered this time-tested bias.     

From gaze cueing to perspective taking: Revisiting the claim that we automatically compute where or what other people are looking at

ABSTRACT

Two paradigms have shown that people automatically compute what or where another person is looking at. In the visual perspective-taking paradigm, participants judge how many objects they see; whereas, in the gaze cueing paradigm, participants identify a target. Unlike in the former task, in the latter task, the influence of what or where the other person is looking at is only observed when the other person is presented alone before the task-relevant objects. We show that this discrepancy across the two paradigms is not due to differences in visual settings (Experiment 1) or available time to extract the directional information (Experiment 2), but that it is caused by how attention is deployed in response to task instructions (Experiment 3). Thus, the mere presence of another person in the field of view is not sufficient to compute where/what that person is looking at, which qualifies the claimed automaticity of such computations.     

Predicting individual differences in low‐income children's executive control from early to middle childhood

The present longitudinal study tested the roles of early childhood executive control (EC) as well as exposure to poverty‐related adversity at family and school levels as key predictors of low‐income children's EC in elementary school (n = 391). Findings suggest that children's EC difficulties in preschool and lower family income from early to middle childhood are robust predictors of later EC difficulties as rated by teachers in 2nd and 3rd grades. Findings also suggest enrollment in unsafe elementary schools is significantly predictive of higher levels of teacher‐rated EC difficulty, but only for those children who showed initially elevated levels of EC difficulty in early childhood. Implications for scientific models of cognitive development and poverty‐related adversity are discussed.     

The neural correlates of processing newborn and adult faces in 3‐year‐old children

The current study examines the processing of upright and inverted faces in 3‐year‐old children (n = 35). Event‐related potentials (ERPs) were recorded during a passive looking paradigm including adult and newborn face stimuli. We observed three face‐sensitive components, the P1, the N170 and the P400. Inverted faces elicited shorter P1 latency and larger P400 amplitude. P1 and N170 amplitudes were larger for adult faces. To examine the role of experience in the development of face processing, the processing of adult and newborn faces was compared for children with a younger sibling (n = 23) and children without a younger sibling (n = 12). Age of sibling at test correlated negatively with P1 amplitude for adult and newborn faces. This may indicate more efficient processing of different face ages in children with a younger sibling and potentially reflects a more flexible face representation.     

Factors Associated with Psychological Distress among Women of African Descent at High Risk for BRCA Mutations

Little is known about psychological distress among women of African descent who are at high risk for a BRCA mutation. This is a group for whom breast cancer risk reduction is critical due to the group’s high rates of breast cancer mortality. Distress is important to consider as it may reduce the potential benefit of genetic counseling and negatively affect decision making related to risk reduction. The goals of the current study were to examine breast cancer-specific distress and depressive symptoms in women of African descent at who are at high risk for a BRCA mutation and to identify background factors associated with these outcomes. Participants were 148 high-risk African American and Caribbean women who were part of a larger study that offered participants BRCA counseling at no cost. Participants completed the Impact of Events Scale, which assessed breast cancer-specific distress, and the Center of Epidemiological Studies-Depression Scale, which assessed depressive symptoms. Results of analyses revealed that almost half of the sample achieved scores indicating high and clinically significant breast cancer-specific distress, while almost one-third had clinically significant depression scores. Results further showed that low income was significantly associated with cancer-specific distress, while having a cancer diagnosis was significantly associated with depressive symptoms. These results underscore the need for targeted psychological support throughout the genetic risk assessment process for this particular high-risk group.     

Comparisons Across Depression Assessment Instruments in Adolescence and Young Adulthood: An Item Response Theory Study Using Two Linking Methods

Item response theory (IRT) methods allow for comparing the utility of instruments based on the range and precision of severity assessed by each instrument. As adolescents and young adults can display rapid increases in depressive symptoms, there is a crucial need to sensitively assess mild elevations of symptoms (as an index of initial risk) and moderate-severe symptoms (as an indicator of treatment disposition). We compare the information assessed by the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) to the newly developed Patient Reported Outcome Measurement Information System – Depression measure (PROMIS-Depression), and the Center for Epidemiologic Studies – Depression (CES-D) scale. The present work is based on data from two fully independent samples of community adolescents and young adults. One sample completed the BDI and CES-D (n?=?1,482) and the second sample (n?=?673) completed the PROMIS-Depression measure and the CES-D. Using two different IRT-based linking methods, (1) equating based on common items and (2) concurrent calibration methods, analyses revealed that the PROMIS-Depression measure assessed information over the widest range of depressive severity with greatest measurement precision relative to the other instruments. This was true for both the 28-item and 8-item versions of the PROMIS-Depression measure. Findings suggest that the PROMIS-Depression measure assessed depression severity with greatest precision and over the widest severity range of the assessed instruments. However, future work is necessary to demonstrate that the PROMIS-Depression measure has reliable associations with external criteria and is sensitive to treatment response.     

Implicit Measures Reveal Evidence of Personal Discrimination

A well-known result, the person–group discrimination discrepancy (PGDD), shows that members of disadvantaged groups believe that other members of their social groups are discriminated against, but that they themselves are not. In this paper, we test whether this explicit self-protective strategy is also obtained on indirect measures of personal discrimination. Three experiments, using both explicit (self-report) and implicit (IAT) measures of discrimination showed that although members of disadvantaged groups do not explicitly report self-discrimination (replicating previous research), they do reveal self-discrimination on the implicit measure. That the PGDD effect is bound to explicit measurement should be recognized both when implementing research protocols and when understanding the effects of discrimination whether it is consciously recognized or not.