Parental coping socialization is associated with healthy and anxious early‐adolescents’ neural and real‐world response to threat

The ways parents socialize their adolescents to cope with anxiety (i.e., coping socialization) may be instrumental in the development of threat processing and coping responses. Coping socialization may be important for anxious adolescents, as they show altered neural threat processing and over reliance on disengaged coping (e.g., avoidance and distraction), which can maintain anxiety. We investigated whether coping socialization was associated with anxious and healthy adolescents’ neural response to threat, and whether neural activation was associated with disengaged coping. Healthy and clinically anxious early adolescents (N = 120; M = 11.46 years; 71 girls) and a parent engaged in interactions designed to elicit adolescents’ anxiety and parents’ response to adolescents’ anxiety. Parents’ use of reframing and problem solving statements was coded to measure coping socialization. In a subsequent visit, we assessed adolescents’ neural response to threat words during a neuroimaging task. Adolescents’ disengaged coping was measured using ecological momentary assessment. Greater coping socialization was associated with lower anterior insula and perigenual cingulate activation in healthy adolescents and higher activation in anxious adolescents. Coping socialization was indirectly associated with less disengaged coping for anxious adolescents through neural activation. Findings suggest that associations between coping socialization and early adolescents’ neural response to threat differ depending on clinical status and have implications for anxious adolescents’ coping.     

Non‐Classical Knowledge

The Knower paradox purports to place surprising a priori limitations on what we can know. According to orthodoxy, it shows that we need to abandon one of three plausible and widely‐held ideas: that knowledge is factive, that we can know that knowledge is factive, and that we can use logical/mathematical reasoning to extend our knowledge via very weak single‐premise closure principles. I argue that classical logic, not any of these epistemic principles, is the culprit. I develop a consistent theory validating all these principles by combining Hartry Field's theory of truth with a modal enrichment developed for a different purpose by Michael Caie. The only casualty is classical logic: the theory avoids paradox by using a weaker‐than‐classical K₃ logic. I then assess the philosophical merits of this approach. I argue that, unlike the traditional semantic paradoxes involving extensional notions like truth, its plausibility depends on the way in which sentences are referred to—whether in natural languages via direct sentential reference, or in mathematical theories via indirect sentential reference by Gödel coding. In particular, I argue that from the perspective of natural language, my non‐classical treatment of knowledge as a predicate is plausible, while from the perspective of mathematical theories, its plausibility depends on unresolved questions about the limits of our idealized deductive capacities.     

Mental Models: An Alternative Evaluation of a Sensemaking Approach to Ethics Instruction

In spite of the wide variety of approaches to ethics training it is still debatable which approach has the highest potential to enhance professionals' integrity. The current effort assesses a novel curriculum that focuses on metacognitive reasoning strategies researchers use when making sense of day-to-day professional practices that have ethical implications. The evaluated trainings effectiveness was assessed by examining five key sensemaking processes, such as framing, emotion regulation, forecasting, self-reflection, and information integration that experts and novices apply in ethical decision-making. Mental models of trained and untrained graduate students, as well as faculty, working in the field of physical sciences were compared using a think-aloud protocol 6 months following the ethics training. Evaluation and comparison of the mental models of participants provided further validation evidence for sensemaking training. Specifically, it was found that trained students applied metacognitive reasoning strategies learned during training in their ethical decision-making that resulted in complex mental models focused on the objective assessment of the situation. Mental models of faculty and untrained students were externally-driven with a heavy focus on autobiographical processes. The study shows that sensemaking training has a potential to induce shifts in researchers' mental models by making them more cognitively complex via the use of metacognitive reasoning strategies. Furthermore, field experts may benefit from sensemaking training to improve their ethical decision-making framework in highly complex, novel, and ambiguous situations.     

Hearing Voices: The Impact of Announcer Speech Characteristics on Consumer Response to Broadcast Advertising

Virtually every broadcast advertisement uses the voice of an announcer, but due to lack of guidance from the marketing literature, managers must rely on gut feel when choosing a voice. Drawing on research from psycholinguistics, we identify 3 important voice characteristics —syllable speed, interphrase pausation, and pitch — and link these characteristics to key advertising response variables. By considering these 3 variables simultaneously, we test competing explanations previously offered to explain the process by which speech rate affects consumer response to advertising. Specifically, we assess whether an increase in speech rate enhances or reduces processing of the advertisement and whether this effect is driven primarily by syllable speed or interphrase pausation. Consideration of these 2 aspects of speech rate independently helps identify whether the changes in processing stem from changes in the opportunity to process and/or the motivation to process. Our results show that a voice with faster‐than‐normal syllable speed and low pitch produces less negative advertisement‐directed cognitive responses and more favorable ad attitudes, as well as more favorable brand attitudes, lending support to a motivational process explanation. No significant effects were found for interphrase pausation, suggesting that the results cannot be accounted for by the reduced opportunity to process in the compressed conditions.     

Analysis of word comprehension in a case of pure word deafness

A case of pure word deafness due to a left temporal infarct is reported. The results of dichotic tests suggest that auditory verbal material may be processed in the right hemisphere. The inability to repeat nonsense words, the frequent semantic paraphasias in real-word repetition tasks, and the capacity to give a partial account of the meaning of a word that the patient cannot repeat show that despite the impairment of the phonological analysis, lexical semantic processing is possible. An attempt is made to demonstrate that the patient resorts to this semantic processing and that this reflects the linguistic competence of the right hemisphere.     

Failure to delay gratification following septal lesions in rats: Implications for an animal model of disinhibitory psychopathology

It has been proposed that dysfunction within a neural system composed of the medial septum, the posterior hippocampus and the orbito-frontal cortex (SHF system) may constitute the physiological basis of several disinhibitory syndromes in humans—psychopathy, hyperkinesis, alcoholism and extraversion. Consequently, the syndrome produced by lesions of the SHF system in animals is offered as a tentative behavioral model that may elucidate basic psychological components of human disinhibitory psychopathology. As predicted from this model, rats with septal lesions, like disinhibited humans, were less likely to delay gratification than controls when given a choice between waiting 10 sec for an assured reinforcement and an immediately available, though infrequently delivered, reinforcement. Inquiry into the nature of this deficit suggested that these rats are subject to an interference effect, such that the influence of future rewards on behavior could be disrupted or ‘eclipsed’ by the presence of more immediate, prominent, motivationally significant cues. The possibility that various disinhibitory syndromes in humans may also be due to a similar rigid focus of attention upon the most immediate or prominent motivationally significant event was briefly discussed.     

Schedule thinning following communication training: using competing stimuli to enhance tolerance to decrements in reinforcer density

Functional communication training (FCT) is a widely used treatment for individuals with developmental disabilities who exhibit severe behavior problems. One inherent challenge of employing FCT as a treatment in the community is that reinforcement for appropriate communication cannot always be immediate or even possible in some circumstances. Of the few studies that have incorporated some form of schedule thinning for communication, most have reported disruption of communication or increases in problem behavior when the schedule of reinforcement is thinned. In the current study, we compared FCT with extinction to FCT with extinction and access to competing stimuli. After conducting a functional analysis, a competing stimulus assessment was performed to identify stimuli that produce reinforcement that ostensibly competes with reinforcement that maintains problem behavior. It was hypothesized that FCT with competing stimuli would result in more stable reductions in problem behavior during schedule thinning, which would ultimately result in quicker achievement of the treatment goal (low levels of problem behavior under the terminal reinforcement schedule for communication) than FCT without competing stimuli. Results confirmed this hypothesis.