Domain‐specific impulsivity in school‐age children

Impulsivity is a salient individual difference in children with well‐established predictive validity for life outcomes. The current investigation proposes that impulsive behaviors vary systematically by domain. In a series of studies with ethnically and socioeconomically diverse samples of middle school students, we find that schoolwork‐related and interpersonal‐related impulsivity, as observed by teachers, parents, and the students themselves, are distinct, moderately correlated behavioral tendencies. Each demonstrates differentiated relationships with dimensions of childhood temperament, Big Five personality factors, and outcomes, such as report card grades. Implications for theoretical conceptions of impulsivity as well as for practical applications (e.g. domain‐specific interventions) are discussed.     

Probing the Brain Substrates of Cognitive Processes Responsible for Context Effects on Recognition Memory

ABSTRACT

Context effects on episodic recognition memory involve separable contributions of target-context binding, additive familiarity, and configural constancy. Here we examine whether these factors reflect contributions of processes attributed to different brain substrates. First, we challenged frontal and medial temporal lobe-based cognitive capacities in healthy young adults, employing divided attention tasks at encoding and retrieval, and extended retrieval delay, respectively. Target-context binding effects were specifically attenuated by delay, but not by divided attention. In a second experiment, older adults were identified by neuropsychological testing as having different levels of frontal and medial temporal lobe-dependent cognitive functions. Consistent with Experiment 1, older adults with low medial temporal lobe function exhibited reduced target-context binding effects, but levels of frontal function did not modulate binding effects. These findings indicate that unlike source memory, context effects on memory are associated with the integrity of medial temporal lobe-based processes but not with the integrity of frontal lobe-based processes. Our findings also emphasize the importance of discriminating between functional subgroups in the attempt to characterize memory processes in older adults.     

Rey AVLT: Developmental Norms for Children and the Sensitivity of Different Memory Measures to Age

Nine hundred and forty-three children (487 boys and 456 girls, age range 8 to 17 years, divided into 10 age cohorts) were administered the Hebrew version of the Rey AVLT. Separate norms for boys and girls in each age group are reported. Sensitivity to age for 14 memory measures extracted from the Rey AVLT was analyzed. One of the most consistent findings across the different scores is that memory changes in the 8- to 10- year-old age range are more dynamic than changes in the 11- to 17- year-old age range. The results also show a significant and consistent advantage for girls over boys on most of the verbal memory measures. Detailed analyses of sensitivity to age of the different measures extracted from the Rey AVLT provide very useful information for the diagnostician testing auditory-verbal memory in children.     

Unpacking grit: Motivational correlates of perseverance and passion for long-term goals

In two cross-sectional studies, we explored the motivational orientations correlates of the character strength of grit and its two component facets: perseverance of effort and consistency of interests over time. Specifically, we examined how individual differences in grit are explained by distinct approaches to pursuing happiness in life: pleasure in immediately hedonically positive activities, meaning in activities that serve a higher, altruistic purpose, and engagement in attention-absorbing activities. In both samples, grit demonstrated medium-sized associations with an orientation toward engagement, small-to-medium associations with an orientation toward meaning, and small-to-medium (inverse) associations with an orientation toward pleasure. These motivational orientations differentially related to the two facets of grit: pursuing engagement was more strongly associated with perseverance of effort, whereas pursuing pleasure was more strongly (inversely) associated with consistency of interests over time. Collectively, findings suggest that individual differences in grit may derive in part from differences in what makes people happy.     

The Suffocation of Marriage: Climbing Mount Maslow Without Enough Oxygen

This article distills insights from historical, sociological, and psychological perspectives on marriage to develop the suffocation model of marriage in America. According to this model, contemporary Americans are asking their marriage to help them fulfill different sets of goals than in the past. Whereas they ask their marriage to help them fulfill their physiological and safety needs much less than in the past, they ask it to help them fulfill their esteem and self-actualization needs much more than in the past. Asking the marriage to help them fulfill the latter, higher level needs typically requires sufficient investment of time and psychological resources to ensure that the two spouses develop a deep bond and profound insight into each other's essential qualities. Although some spouses are investing sufficient resources—and reaping the marital and psychological benefits of doing so—most are not. Indeed, they are, on average, investing less than in the past. As a result, mean levels of marital quality and personal well-being are declining over time. According to the suffocation model, spouses who are struggling with an imbalance between what they are asking from their marriage and what they are investing in it have several promising options for corrective action: intervening to optimize their available resources, increasing their investment of resources in the marriage, and asking less of the marriage in terms of facilitating the fulfillment of spouses’ higher needs. Discussion explores the implications of the suffocation model for understanding dating and courtship, sociodemographic variation, and marriage beyond American's borders.     

The effect of self-distancing on adaptive versus maladaptive self-reflection in children

Although children and adolescents vary in their chronic tendencies to adaptively versus maladaptively reflect over negative feelings, the psychological mechanisms underlying these different types of self-reflection among youngsters are unknown. We addressed this issue in the present research by examining the role that self-distancing plays in distinguishing adaptive versus maladaptive self-reflection among an ethnically and socioeconomically diverse sample of fifth-grade public schoolchildren. Children were randomly assigned to analyze their feelings surrounding a recent anger-related interpersonal experience from either a self-immersed or self-distanced perspective. They then rated their negative affect and described in writing the stream of thoughts they experienced when they analyzed their feelings. Children's stream-of-thought essays were content analyzed for the presence of recounting statements, reconstruing statements, and blame attributions. Path analyses indicated that children who analyzed their feelings from a self-distanced perspective focused significantly less on recounting the "hot," emotionally arousing features of their memory (i.e., what happened to me?) and relatively more on reconstruing their experience. This shift in thought content--less recounting and more reconstruing--led children in the self-distanced group to blame the other person involved in their recalled experience significantly less, which in turn led them to display significantly lower levels of emotional reactivity. These findings help delineate the psychological mechanisms that distinguish adaptive versus maladaptive forms of self-reflection over anger experiences in children. Their basic findings and clinical implications are discussed.     

Continuous visual control of interception

People generally try to keep their eyes on a moving target that they intend to catch or hit. In the present study we first examined how important it is to do so. We did this by designing two interception tasks that promote different eye movements. In both tasks it was important to be accurate relative to both the moving target and the static environment. We found that performance was more variable in relation to the structure that was not fixated. This suggests that the resolution of visual information that is gathered during the movement is important for continuously improving predictions about critical aspects of the task, such as anticipating where the target will be at some time in the future. If so, variability in performance should increase if the target briefly disappears from view just before being hit, even if the target moves completely predictably. We demonstrate that it does, indicating that new visual information is used to improve precision throughout the movement.     

Judgments of reachability are independent of visuomotor adaptation

The furthest distance that is judged to be reachable can change after participants have used a tool or if they are led to misjudge the position of their hand. Here we investigated how judged reachability changed when visual feedback about the hand was shifted. We hoped to distinguish between various ways in which visuomotor adaptation could influence judged reachability. Participants had to judge whether they could reach a virtual cube without actually doing so. They indicated whether they could reach this virtual cube by moving their hand. During these hand movements, visual feedback about the position of the hand was shifted in depth, either away from or toward the participant. Participants always adapted to the shifted feedback. In a session in which the hand movements in the presence of visual feedback were mainly in depth, perceived reachability shifted in accordance with the feedback (more distant cubes were judged to be reachable when feedback was shifted further away). In a second session in which the hand movements in the presence of visual feedback were mainly sideways, for some participants perceived reachability shifted in the opposite direction than we expected. The shift in perceived reachability was not correlated with the adaptation to the shift in visual feedback. We conclude that reachability judgments are not directly related to visuomotor adaptation.     

Self‐Control Inhibits Aggression

Aggression brings tremendous costs to individuals, relationships, and society. Yet, people behave aggressively toward strangers and close others at alarmingly high rates. The current article seeks to unlock part of the mystery of why people behave aggressively. We review evidence that self‐control failure plays an integral role in many acts of aggression and violence. We begin by reviewing theoretical models that emphasize the importance of self‐control processes in understanding aggressive and other criminal behaviors. We also discuss how a theoretical model that originally neglected self‐control processes can be extended to incorporate self‐control theorizing. We then discuss recent empirical evidence (a) showing that self‐control failure is a crucial predictor of aggression toward strangers and romantic partners and (b) identifying the neural processes relevant to the self‐control of aggression. Finally, we review evidence that self‐control processes can also explain why people engage in displaced aggression toward bystanders. By appreciating the importance of self‐control processes, researchers and laypersons can gain a better understanding of why people behave aggressively – and how aggression can be prevented.     

Psychometric functions for detection and discrimination with and without flankers

Recent studies have reported that flanking stimuli broaden the psychometric function and lower detection thresholds. In the present study, we measured psychometric functions for detection and discrimination with and without flankers to investigate whether these effects occur throughout the contrast continuum. Our results confirm that lower detection thresholds with flankers are accompanied by broader psychometric functions. Psychometric functions for discrimination reveal that discrimination thresholds with and without flankers are similar across standard levels, and that the broadening of psychometric functions with flankers disappears as standard contrast increases, to the point that psychometric functions at high standard levels are virtually identical with or without flankers. Threshold-versus-contrast (TvC) curves with flankers only differ from TvC curves without flankers in occasional shallower dippers and lower branches on the left of the dipper, but they run virtually superimposed at high standard levels. We discuss differences between our results and other results in the literature, and how they are likely attributed to the differential vulnerability of alternative psychophysical procedures to the effects of presentation order. We show that different models of flanker facilitation can fit the data equally well, which stresses that succeeding at fitting a model does not validate it in any sense.