Parent and Adolescent Reports of Parenting When a Parent Has a History of Depression: Associations with Observations of Parenting

The current study examined the congruence of parent and adolescent reports of positive and negative parenting with observations of parent-adolescent interactions as the criterion measure. The role of parent and adolescent depressive symptoms in moderating the associations between adolescent or parent report and observations of parenting also was examined. Participants were 180 parents (88.9 % female) with a history of clinical depression and one of their 9-to-15 year old children (49.4 % female). Parents and adolescents reported on parenting skills and depressive symptoms, and parenting was independently observed subsequently in the same session. Findings indicated adolescent report of positive, but not negative, parenting was more congruent with observations than parent report. For negative parenting, depressive symptoms qualified the relation between the parent or adolescent report and independent observations. For parents, higher levels of depressive symptoms were associated with more congruence with observed parenting (supporting a depressive realism hypothesis) whereas an opposite trend emerged for adolescents (providing some supporting evidence for a depression-distortion hypothesis).     

Automatic activation of categorical and abstract analogical relations in analogical reasoning

We examined activation of concepts during analogical reasoning. Subjects made either analogical judgments or categorical judgments about four-word sets. After each four-word set, they named the ink color of a single word in a modified Stroop task. Words that referred to category relations were primed (as indicated by longer response times on Stroop color naming) subsequent to analogical judgments and categorical judgments. This finding suggests that activation of category concepts plays a fundamental role in analogical thinking. When colored words referred to analogical relations, priming occurred subsequent to analogical judgments, but not to categorical judgments, even though identical four-word stimuli were used for both types of judgments. This finding lends empirical support to the hypothesis that, when people comprehend the analogy between two items, they activate an abstract analogical relation that is distinct from the specific content items that compose the analogy.     

The perception of causality in chimpanzees (Pan spp.)

Chimpanzees (Pan spp.) were tested on a habituation/dishabituation paradigm that was originally developed to test for comprehension of causality in very young human infants. Three versions of the test were used: a food item being moved by a hand, a human pushing another human off a chair to obtain a food item, and a film clip of natural chimpanzee behaviour (capturing and eating a monkey). Chimpanzees exhibited similar results to those obtained with human infants, with significantly elevated levels of looking on the dishabituation trials. Since the level of response was significantly greater on natural/unnatural sequences than on unnatural/natural sequences, we conclude that the chimpanzees were not responding just to novelty but rather to events that infringed their sense of natural causation.     

Priming,analogy, and awareness in complex reasoning

The mechanisms by which a concept used in solving one complex task can influence performance on another complex task were investigated. We tested the hypothesis that even when subjects do not spontaneously make an analogy between two domains, knowledge of one domain can still spontaneously influence reasoning about the other domain via the mechanism of priming. Four groups of subjects (two experimental and two control) were given a simulated biochemistry problem on Day 1 and a simulated molecular genetics problem on Day 2. For the two experimental groups, the solution to the biochemistry problem involved inhibition. For the two control groups, the solution did not involve inhibition. On Day 2, all subjects received the same version of the molecular genetics problem in which the solution involved the concept of inhibition. Subjects in the experimental conditions were more likely to attain the correct answer, to propose inhibition, and to propose inhibition early in the problemsolving session than were subjects in the control conditions. However, subjects in the experimental conditions made no reference to the biochemistry problem either in their verbal protocols or in a posttask questionnaire. The results are interpreted as demonstrating that an implicit process—priming— can make old knowledge available for current problem solving.     

Relationships and the social brain: integrating psychological and evolutionary perspectives

Psychological studies of relationships tend to focus on specific types of close personal relationships (romantic, parent-offspring, friendship) and examine characteristics of both the individuals and the dyad. This paper looks more broadly at the wider range of relationships that constitute an individual's personal social world. Recent work on the composition of personal social networks suggests that they consist of a series of layers that differ in the quality and quantity of relationships involved. Each layer increases relationship numbers by an approximate multiple of 3 (5-15-50-150) but decreasing levels of intimacy (strong, medium, and weak ties) and frequency of interaction. To account for these regularities, we draw on both social and evolutionary psychology to argue that relationships at different layers serve different functions and have different cost-benefit profiles. At each layer, the benefits are asymptotic but the costs of maintaining a relationship at that level (most obviously, the time that has to be invested in servicing it) are roughly linear with the number of relationships. The trade-off between costs and benefits at a given level, and across the different types of demands and resources typical of different levels, gives rise to a distribution of social effort that generates and maintains a hierarchy of layered sets of relationships within social networks. We suggest that, psychologically, these trade-offs are related to the level of trust in a relationship, and that this is itself a function of the time invested in the relationship.     

Neural correlates of creativity in analogical reasoning

Brain-based evidence has implicated the frontal pole of the brain as important for analogical mapping. Separately, cognitive research has identified semantic distance as a key determinant of the creativity of analogical mapping (i.e., more distant analogies are generally more creative). Here, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to assess brain activity during an analogy generation task in which we varied the semantic distance of analogical mapping (as derived quantitatively from a latent semantic analysis). Data indicated that activity within an a priori region of interest in left frontopolar cortex covaried parametrically with increasing semantic distance, even after removing effects of task difficulty. Results implicate increased recruitment of frontopolar cortex as a mechanism for integrating semantically distant information to generate solutions in creative analogical reasoning.     

A Single‐Stage Approach to Learning Phonological Categories: Insights From Inuktitut

To acquire one’s native phonological system, language‐specific phonological categories and relationships must be extracted from the input. The acquisition of the categories and relationships has each in its own right been the focus of intense research. However, it is remarkable that research on the acquisition of categories and the relations between them has proceeded, for the most part, independently of one another. We argue that this has led to the implicit view that phonological acquisition is a “two‐stage” process: Phonetic categories are first acquired and then subsequently mapped onto abstract phoneme categories. We present simulations that suggest two problems with this view: First, the learner might mistake the phoneme‐level categories for phonetic‐level categories and thus be unable to learn the relationships between phonetic‐level categories; on the other hand, the learner might construct inaccurate phonetic‐level representations that prevent it from finding regular relations among them. We suggest an alternative conception of the phonological acquisition problem that sidesteps this apparent inevitability and acquires phonemic categories in a single stage. Using acoustic data from Inuktitut, we show that this model reliably converges on a set of phoneme‐level categories and phonetic‐level relations among subcategories, without making use of a lexicon.     

Book reviews

Gormenzano, I., & Wasserman, E.A. (Eds.) (1992). Learning and memory: The behavioral and biological substrates. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. Pp. vii + 413. ISBN 0-8058-0888-4. £45.95 (Hbk).

Squire, L.R., Weinberger, N.M., Lynch, G., & McGaugh, J.L. (Eds.) (1991). Memory: Organization and locus of change. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pp. 438. ISBN 0-19-506921-8. £55.00.

Quiatt, D., & Reynolds, V. (1993). Primate behaviour: Information, social knowledge, and the evolution of culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pp. 322. ISBN 0-521-35255-X. £42.50 (Hbk).

Dawkins, M.S. (1993). Through our eyes only? the search for animal consciousness. Oxford: W.H. Freeman/Spektrum. Pp. x + 192. ISBN 0-7167-4501-1. £14.99 (Hbk).