Humor, abstraction, and disbelief

We investigated humor as a context for learning about abstraction and disbelief. More specifically, we investigated how parents support humor understanding during book sharing with their toddlers. In Study 1, a corpus analysis revealed that in books aimed at 1-to 2-year-olds, humor is found more often than other forms of doing the wrong thing including mistakes, pretense, lying, false beliefs, and metaphors. In Study 2, 20 parents read a book containing humorous and non-humorous pages to their 19-to 26-month-olds. Parents used a significantly higher percentage of high abstraction extra-textual utterances (ETUs) when reading the humorous pages. In Study 3, 41 parents read either a humorous or non-humorous book to their 18-to 24-month-olds. Parents reading the humorous book made significantly more ETUs coded for a specific form of high abstraction: those encouraging disbelief of prior utterances. Sharing humorous books thus increases toddlers' exposure to high abstraction and belief-based language.     

Investigating the contribution of metacontrast to the Fröhlich effect for size

According to the Fr?hlich effect, observers perceive the initial position of a fast moving stimulus displaced in the direction of motion. On the basis of Kirschfeld and Kammer's as well as Fr?hlich's original assumption that metacontrast plays an important role in the emergence of the phenomenon, we predicted different amounts of misperception for stimulus enlargement compared to stimulus reduction. These basic predictions were confirmed in Experiment 1. In Experiment 2, we investigated whether an overestimation-bias might account for these results. But the overestimation of non-changing stimuli was too small to adequately explain the dissociation. In Experiment 3, we predicted and found different effects of the factor stimulus lightness on misperception in the enlargement and reduction condition. In Experiment 4, we showed that misperception in the enlargement condition is reduced when frames are used instead of filled stimuli, as in the earlier experiments. Results are discussed with respect to the original Fr?hlich effect.     

Poor readers but compelled to read: Stroop effects in developmental dyslexia.

We studied a group of 24 children with dyslexia in second to fifth primary school grades by using a discrete-trial computerized version of the Stroop Color-Word Test. Since the classic Stroop effect depends on the interference of reading with color naming, one would expect these children to show no interference or, at least, less interference than normal readers. Children with dyslexia showed, however, a Stroop effect larger than normal readers of the same age. This suggests that reading, although difficult and slow, is an inescapable step that precedes naming both in poor and in normal readers.     

Mechanisms underlying an ability to behave ethically

Cognitive neuroscientists have anticipated the union of neural and behavioral science with ethics (Gazzaniga 2005). The identification of an ethical rule--the dictum that we should treat others in the manner in which we would like to be treated--apparently widespread among human societies suggests a dependence on fundamental human brain mechanisms. Now, studies of neural and molecular mechanisms that underlie the feeling of fear suggest how this form of ethical behavior is produced. Counterintuitively, a new theory presented here states that it is actually a loss of social information that leads to sharing others' fears with our own, thus allowing us to treat others as we would like to be treated. Adding to that hypothetical mechanism is the well-studied predilection toward affiliative behaviors. Thus, even as Chomsky hypothesizes that humans are predisposed to utter grammatical sentences, we propose that humans are 'wired for reciprocity'. However, these two neural forces supporting ethical behavior do not explain individual or collective violence. At any given moment, the ability to produce behavior that obeys this ethical rule is proposed to depend on a balance between mechanisms for prosocial and antisocial behaviors. That balance results not only from genetic influences on temperament but also from environmental effects particularly during critical neonatal and pubertal periods.     

Sensed presence as a correlate of sleep paralysis distress, social anxiety and waking state social imagery

Isolated sleep paralysis (ISP) is a common parasomnia characterized by an inability to move or speak and often accompanied by hallucinations of a sensed presence nearby. Recent research has linked ISP, and sensed presence more particularly, with social anxiety and other psychopathologies. The present study used a large sample of respondents to an internet questionnaire (N=193) to test whether these associations are due to a general personality factor, affect distress, which is implicated in nightmare suffering and hypothesized to involve dysfunctional social imagery processes. A new measure, ISP distress, was examined in relation to features of ISP experiences, to self-reported psychopathological diagnosis, to scores on the Leibowitz Social Anxiety Scale and to scores on a new questionnaire subscale assessing social imagery in a variety of waking states. Three main results were found: (1) ISP experiences are only weakly associated with a prior diagnosis of mental disorder, (2) sensed presence during ISP is associated preferentially with ISP distress, and (3) ISP distress is associated with dysfunctional social imagery. A general predisposition to affective distress may influence the distress associated with ISP experiences; overly passive social imagery may, in turn, be implicated in this affect distress influence.     

Variables that predict academic achievement in the Spanish compulsory secondary educational system: a longitudinal, multi-level analysis

This article presents a study whose objective was to identify certain personal and institutional variables that are associated with academic achievement among Spanish, secondary school students, and to analyze their influence on the progress of those students over the course of that stage of their education. In order to do this, a longitudinal, multi-level study was conducted in which a total of 965 students and 27 different schools were evaluated in Language, Math and Social Science at three different times (beginning, middle and end of the period). The results show progress in all the schools and in all areas. As for the personal, student variables, the longitudinal, HLM analyses confirmed the importance of sex and sociocultural background and, distinguishing it from other studies, also the predictive capacity of meta-cognitive abilities and learning strategies on success in school. On the institutional level, the school climate and teachers' expectations of their students were the most relevant of the variables studied. The size of the school, the percentage of students who repeat grades, and the leadership of the administration also explained a portion of the variance in some areas.     

Early Experience Predicts Later Plasticity for Face Processing: Evidence for the Reactivation of Dormant Effects

ABSTRACT— Research has shown that experience acquired in infancy dramatically affects face-discrimination abilities. Yet much less is known about whether face processing retains any flexibility after the 1st year of life. Here, we show that early experience with an individual infant face can modulate the recognition performance of 3-year-old children and the perceptual processes they use to recognize infant faces ( Experiment 1 ). Similar experience acquired in adulthood does not produce measurable effects ( Experiment 2 ). We also show that the effects of early-acquired experience with an infant face become dormant during development in the absence of continued experience ( Experiment 3 ) and can be reactivated in adulthood by reexposure to the original experience ( Experiment 2 ). Overall, the results indicate that early experience can preserve the face-processing system from the loss of plasticity that would otherwise take place between childhood and adulthood.     

Brain activation on pre-reading tasks reveals at-risk status for dyslexia in 6-year-old children

In this fMRI-study, 6-year-old children considered at risk for dyslexia were compared with an age-/gender-matched control group for differences in brain activation when presented with visual stimuli differing in demands for literacy processing. Stimuli were nameable pictures, brand logos familiar to children, and written words - these were either regularly spelled using early-acquired rules ("alphabetic") or more complex ("orthographic"). Brain responses distinguished between the presentation conditions, as a function of group, within many cortical areas. Activation in the alphabetic and orthographic conditions in the left angular gyrus correlated with individual at-risk index scores, and activation in inferior occipito-temporal regions further indicated differential activation for the two groups related to orthographic processing, especially. Since similar patterns are reported in adult dyslexics when processing written words, it appears that sensitivity to the cortical differentiation of reading networks is established prior to formal literacy training.     

Lexically restricted utterances in Russian, german, and english child-directed speech

This study investigates the child-directed speech (CDS) of four Russian-, six German, and six English-speaking mothers to their 2-year-old children. Typologically Russian has considerably less restricted word order than either German or English, with German showing more word-order variants than English. This could lead to the prediction that the lexical restrictiveness previously found in the initial strings of English CDS by Cameron-Faulkner, Lieven, and Tomasello (2003 ) would not be found in Russian or German CDS. However, despite differences between the three corpora that clearly derive from typological differences between the languages, the most significant finding of this study is a high degree of lexical restrictiveness at the beginnings of CDS utterances in all three languages.     

Lymphocyte subsets, cardiovascular measures and anxiety state before and after a professional examination

Controversies exist regarding the impact of psychological stress on the functioning of the immune system in humans. The aim of the present study, therefore, was to evaluate whether the condition of a pre-exam stress may or not modify resting lymphocyte subsets, as well as blood pressure and heart rate. About 22 medical residents of both sexes not suffering from any medical or psychiatric disorder were included in the study. Anxiety levels were measured by means of the Hamilton rating scale for anxiety (HRSA) and anxiety traits by means of the panic-agoraphobic spectrum self-report (PAS-SR) version and the obsessive-compulsive spectrum self-report (OBS-SR) version. The results showed that systolic blood pressure and heart rate increased significantly just before sitting an examination (t(1)) in all subjects, as compared with a calm situation (t(2)), in parallel with the increase in the HRSA total score, while no significant difference was observed in lymphocyte subsets at the two assessment times. However, men had a higher number of CD4+ cells than women at t(1) and t(2), while women showed a higher heart rate at t(1). In addition, significant correlations between CD4+ lymphocyte count and heart rate at t(1) or HRSA at t(2) were detected. These findings indicate that the acute stress determined by sitting for examination provokes changes in autonomic nervous system parameters, such as blood pressure and heart rate, as well as in the subjective feeling of anxiety, as shown by the increased HRSA total scores, which were not paralleled by modifications of lymphocyte subsets. However, individual differences, related to both sex and personality traits yet to be identified, seem to have an impact in shaping the stress response.