A genetically informed study of associations between family functioning and child psychosocial adjustment

Research has documented associations between family functioning and offspring psychosocial adjustment, but questions remain regarding whether these associations are partly due to confounding genetic factors and other environmental factors. The current study used a genetically informed approach, the Children of Twins design, to explore the associations between family functioning (family conflict, marital quality, and agreement about parenting) and offspring psychopathology. Participants were 867 twin pairs (388 monozygotic; 479 dizygotic) from the Twin and Offspring Study in Sweden, their spouses, and children (51.7% female; M = 15.75 years). The results suggested associations between exposure to family conflict (assessed by the mother, father, and child) and child adjustment were independent of genetic factors and other environmental factors. However, when family conflict was assessed using only children's reports, the results indicated that genetic factors also influenced these associations. In addition, the analyses indicated that exposure to low marital quality and agreement about parenting was associated with children's internalizing and externalizing problems and that genetic factors also contributed to the associations of marital quality and agreement about parenting with offspring externalizing problems.     

“Don't Tell Me,I Don't Want to Know”: Understanding People's Reluctance to Obtain Medical Diagnostic Information1

Prominent theories of health‐protective behavior predict increasing information seeking as a function of increasing disease severity, yet diagnostic screens for serious diseases are notoriously underutilized. We suggest that in addition to severity, disease treatability impacts people's willingness to submit to medical tests. In two studies, participants were relatively likely to seek a diagnostic test for a disease they believed to be serious and treatable (Study 1) and to avoid a test for a disease they believed to be serious but untreatable (Study 2). Implications for health‐behavior models and persuasive health communication are discussed.     

Sleep deprivation adversely affects interpersonal responses to frustration

Sleep deprivation produces negative effects on mood and cognitive function, but existing data have almost exclusively utilized objective rating scales, which do not permit evaluation of idiosyncratic and unstructured responses. In this study, we used a semi-projective measure, the Rosenzweig Picture-Frustration (P-F) Study, to assess subjective responses to frustration following two nights without sleep. Twenty-six healthy volunteers completed the P-F at rested baseline and again following 55 h of continuous wakefulness. Participants provided written responses for an ambiguous cartoon character confronted with various frustrating situations. Relative to rested baseline, sleep deprivation was associated with altered responses on several indices, indicating a great number of uncommon types of responses, increased tendency to blame others for problems, and a reduced willingness to alleviate a conflict situation by accepting blame. Individual differences in several aspects of emotional intelligence were predictive of the extent to which responses to frustration changed with sleep loss. These findings suggest that sleep deprivation significantly weakens the inhibition of aggression and willingness to behave in ways that facilitate effective social interaction, possibly through reduced metabolic activity in prefrontal regions of the brain important for personality, affect, and inhibitory behavior.     

Developmental perspectives on primate gesture: 100 years in the making

Animal Cognition - This paper is an introduction to the special issue entitled Evolving the study of gesture: evaluating and unifying theories of gesture acquisition in great apes. The gestures of...     

Words fail: Lesion-symptom mapping of errors of omission in post-stroke aphasia

Impaired object naming is a core deficit in post-stroke aphasia, which can manifest as errors of commission – producing an incorrect word or a non-word – or as errors of omission – failing to attempt to name the object. Detailed behavioural, computational, and neurological investigations of errors of commission have played a key role in the development of neurocognitive models of word production. In contrast, the neurocognitive basis of omission errors is radically underspecified despite being a prevalent phenomenon in aphasia and other populations. The prevalence of omission errors makes their neurocognitive basis important for characterizing an individual's deficits and, ideally, for personalizing treatment and evaluating treatment outcomes. This study leveraged established relationships between lesion location and errors of commission to investigate omission errors in picture naming. Omission error rates from the Philadelphia Naming Test for 123 individuals with post-stroke aphasia were analysed using support vector regression lesion-symptom mapping. Omission errors were most strongly associated with left frontal and mid-anterior temporal lobe lesions. Computational model analysis further showed that omission errors were positively associated with impaired semantically driven lexical retrieval rather than phonological retrieval. These results suggest that errors of omission in aphasia predominantly arise from lexical–semantic deficits in word retrieval and selection from a competitor set.     

Groups perform better than the best individuals on letters-to-numbers problems: informative equations and effective strategies

One-hundred 3-person groups and 300 individuals solved 2 letters-to-numbers problems, requiring identification of the coding of 10 letters to 10 numbers by proposing an equation in letters, receiving the answer in letters, proposing a hypothesis, and receiving feedback on the hypothesis on each trial. There were 5 instruction conditions: (a). standard, (b). use at least 3 letters on all equations, (c). use at least 4 letters on all equations, (d). number 1 known before beginning problem, and (e). number 9 known before beginning problem. The groups had fewer trials to solution, proposed more complex equations, and identified more letters per equation than the best individuals. Performance was best under instructions to use at least 4 letters and with the number 9 known.