Mirror-mediated string-pulling task in Eurasian jays (Garrulus glandarius)

Animal Cognition - Mirror tasks can be used to investigate whether animals can instrumentally use a mirror to solve problems and can understand the correspondence between reflections and the real...     

Peer network drinking predicts increased alcohol use from adolescence to early adulthood after controlling for genetic and shared environmental selection

Research consistently links adolescents' and young adults' drinking with their peers' alcohol intake. In interpreting this correlation, 2 essential questions are often overlooked. First, which peers are more important, best friends or broader social networks? Second, do peers cause increased drinking, or do young people select friends whose drinking habits match their own? The present study combines social network analyses with family (twin and sibling) designs to answer these questions via data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. Analysis of peer nomination data from 134 schools (n = 82,629) and 1,846 twin and sibling pairs shows that peer network substance use predicts changes in drinking from adolescence into young adult life even after controlling for genetic and shared environmental selection, as well as best friend substance use. This effect was particularly strong for high-intensity friendships. Although the peer-adolescent drinking correlation is partially explained by selection, the present finding offers powerful evidence that peers also cause increased drinking. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved).     

Emotional response to musical repetition

Two experiments examined the effects of repetition on listeners' emotional response to music. Listeners heard recordings of orchestral music that contained a large section repeated twice. The music had a symmetric phrase structure (same-length phrases) in Experiment 1 and an asymmetric phrase structure (different-length phrases) in Experiment 2, hypothesized to alter the predictability of sensitivity to musical repetition. Continuous measures of arousal and valence were compared across music that contained identical repetition, variation (related), or contrasting (unrelated) structure. Listeners' emotional arousal ratings differed most for contrasting music, moderately for variations, and least for repeating musical segments. A computational model for the detection of repeated musical segments was applied to the listeners' emotional responses. The model detected the locations of phrase boundaries from the emotional responses better than from performed tempo or physical intensity in both experiments. These findings indicate the importance of repetition in listeners' emotional response to music and in the perceptual segmentation of musical structure.     

Factors Associated with Perceived Cognitive Problems in Children and Adolescents with Congenital Heart Disease

The objective of the present study was to assess demographic and disease-specific factors associated with perceived cognitive problems in children and adolescents with heart disease. 246 children with congenital heart disease ages 8–18 years and their parents completed the Cognitive Problems Scale of the Pediatric Quality of Life Inventory Cardiac Module. The 5-item Cognitive Problems Scale assesses school-related cognitive problems including attention and memory from the perspective of the child and parent. Multiple linear regression analysis was conducted with demographic variables and disease-specific factors entered as independent variables and perceived cognitive problems as the dependent variable. Socioeconomic status (SES) and cardiac disease severity were significantly associated with parent proxy-reported cognitive problems (p < .05). None of the demographic or disease-specific variables were significantly associated with child self-reported cognitive problems. In conclusion, our data suggest that assessment of perceived cognitive problems in children and adolescents with greater disease severity and from lower SES homes may facilitate early identification of children who need formal evaluation and interventions to address cognitive impairments.     

Episodic future thought: Contributions from working memory

The ability to imagine hypothetical events in one’s personal future is thought to involve a number of constituent cognitive processes. We investigated the extent to which individual differences in working memory capacity contribute to facets of episodic future thought. College students completed simple and complex measures of working memory and were cued to recall autobiographical memories and imagine future autobiographical events consisting of varying levels of specificity (i.e., ranging from generic to increasingly specific and detailed events). Consistent with previous findings, future thought was related to analogous measures of autobiographical memory, likely reflecting overlapping cognitive factors supporting both past and future thought. Additionally, after controlling for autobiographical memory, residual working memory variance independently predicted future episodic specificity. We suggest that when imagining future events, working memory contributes to the construction of a single, coherent, future event depiction, but not to the retrieval or elaboration of event details.     

Effects of Multiple Maternal Relationship Transitions on Offspring Antisocial Behavior in Childhood and Adolescence: A Cousin-Comparison Analysis

Previous studies of the association between multiple parental relationship transitions (i.e., when a parent begins or terminates an intimate relationship involving cohabitation) and offspring antisocial behavior have varied in their efforts to rule out confounding influences, such as parental antisocial behavior and low income. They also have been limited in the representativeness of their samples. Thus, it remains unclear to what degree parents’ multiple relationship transitions have independent effects on children’s antisocial behavior. Analyses were conducted using data on 8,652 6–9-year-old, 6,911 10–13-year-old, and 6,495 14–17-year-old offspring of a nationally representative sample of U.S. women. Cousin-comparisons were used in combination with statistical covariates to evaluate the associations between maternal relationship transitions and offspring antisocial behavior in childhood and adolescence. Cousin-comparisons suggested that associations between maternal relationship transitions and antisocial behavior in childhood and early adolescence are largely explained by confounding factors. In contrast, the associations between maternal relationship transitions and offspring delinquency in late adolescence were robust to measured and unmeasured confounds. The present findings suggest that interventions aimed at reducing exposure to parental relationship transitions or addressing the psychosocial consequences of exposure to parental relationship transitions could reduce risk for offspring delinquency in late adolescence.     

Consciousness or the Physical Universe – Which Came First?

Historically, many have seen the intelligibility of the physical universe as showing that it is somehow ultimately dependent upon conscious intelligent pre‐existing being – ‘God’. Today, however, many believe that modern advances in our scientific understanding of the origins and nature of the universe, and of the conscious intelligent beings it contains, render God, as Laplace said, an ‘unnecessary hypothesis’. This article considers whether the findings of modern science do indeed diminish the plausibility of belief in a creator God. Or, on the contrary, whether there are features of current scientific understanding which may reasonably be thought to support the belief that conscious intelligent being pre‐existed the physical universe and caused it to be. In short: can science reasonably be thought to support the view that consciousness created the physical universe rather than that the physical universe created consciousness?     

Actualism without Presentism? Not by way of the Relativity Objection

Actualism is the view that only actually existing things exist. Presentism is the view that only presently existing things exist. In this paper, I argue that being an actualist without also being a presentist is not as easy as many philosophers seem to think. A common objection to presentism is that there is an unavoidable conflict between presentism and relativity theory. But actualists who do not wish to be presentists cannot point to this relativity objection alone to support their position. Unless they have some antecedent reason for thinking that actualism is more plausible than presentism, anyone who is moved by the relativity objection to give up presentism should be moved by a related objection to give up actualism as well. If there is a reason to be an actualist without also being a presentist, it must go beyond the relativity objection to presentism.     

Deeper into divorce: using actor-partner analyses to explore systemic differences in coparenting conflict following custody dispute resolution

Divorce is an inherently interpersonal experience, yet too often adults' reactions to marital dissolution are investigated as intrapersonal experiences that unfold outside of the relational context in which they exist. This article examines systemic patterns of interpersonal influence between divorced parents who were randomly assigned to either mediate or litigate a child custody dispute in the mid-1980s. Reports of coparenting conflict and nonacceptance of the divorce were assessed 5 weeks after the dispute settlement, 13 months after the settlement, and then again 12 years later. One hundred nine (N = 109) parents provided data over this 12-year period. Fathers reported the highest initial levels of conflict when their ex-partners were more accepting of the divorce. Mediation parents reported decreases in coparenting conflict in the year after dispute settlement, whereas litigation parents reported increases in conflict. Litigation parents evidenced the greatest long-term increases and decreases in coparenting conflict. Mediation is a potent force for reducing postdivorce conflict, and this article highlights the usefulness of adopting a systemic lens for understanding the long-term correlates of marital dissolution.     

Marital conflict and support seeking by parents in adolescence: empirical support for the parentification construct

Parentification, a parent-child dynamic wherein children come to provide ongoing emotional support for their parents, has been documented extensively in the clinical literature; however, it rarely has been studied systematically. Using a community sample of 83 couples and their adolescent children (mean age = 15.26 years; 52% male, 48% female), the authors linked adolescent self-report of parentification to specific youth and adult behaviors using multiple methods and examined its associations with youth adjustment problems. The parentification measure demonstrated strong internal consistency and 1-year stability. Parentification was associated with marital conflict, youth perceptions of threat, low warmth in the parent-child relationship, and the tendency for youths to intervene in marital conflict. Links were also found with youth reports of internalizing and externalizing behavior and poorer competency in close friendships. These findings thus support the parentification construct and provide evidence that parentification may contribute to poor youth outcomes by burdening children with developmentally inappropriate responsibilities.