Broad versus narrow personality measures and the prediction of behaviour across cultures

Measures of several personality variables, from both within and beyond the domain of the Big Five personality factors, were used to predict a variety of complex behaviour outcomes of some social and cultural significance (e.g. alcohol consumption and grade point average). Analyses focused on replicated predictions across participants in four countries (Canada, England, Germany, and Finland) and on the relative predictive accuracies of narrow trait predictors versus broad factor predictors. The results indicated substantial consistency in those predictions across cultures for several of the criteria. Furthermore, the narrow traits were able to account for more criterion variance than were the broad factors underlying those traits. Our data contraindicate the increasingly common practice of using only a few personality factor measures to predict complex human behaviours. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

How Many Casualties Are Too Many? Proportional Reasoning in the Valuation of Military and Civilian Lives1

People frequently judge saved lives as less valuable and deaths more acceptable when they are characterized as small fractions of larger “at‐risk” groups. Two studies with U.S. college students demonstrated this effect in judgments concerning acceptable numbers of U.S. military and Middle Eastern civilian casualties. At the beginning of the current U.S.–Iraq conflict ( Study 1 ), priming cost–benefit reasoning produced greater proportional devaluation for Iraqi civilian than for U.S. military lives. In a hypothetical armed intervention in Iran to halt weapons development ( Study 2 ), women but not men showed greater proportional devaluation for U.S. military than for Iranian civilian lives. In both studies, proportional reasoners were willing to accept more casualties. Implications for public perceptions and attitudes are discussed.     

Interruption of phonological coding in conduction aphasia

A case study of conduction aphasia, investigating single word repetition, phonological coding, and short-term memory, is reported. Evidence from intact adults suggests that repetition can occur through either a lexical route or a direct auditory-articulatory link. For this conduction aphasic, E.A., the direct link was impaired, although the lexical route could be used to produce accurate single word repetition. Several experiments demonstrated a significant impairment in the generation and maintenance of an abstract phonological code. The consequences of a disruption of phonological coding on speech perception and on verbal short-term memory are discussed.     

Rhétorique

Sans résuméCours prononcé par Nietzsche à Bâle en 1872. Ces notes de Nietzsche font partie desPhilologica des éditions Kröner 1912–1913 (vol. XVIII) et Musarion 1922 (Vorlesungen 1872–1876).     

Learning categories by touch: On the development of holistic and analytic processing

The development of holistic and analytic processing often studied in the visual domain was investigated in haptics. Children 3 to 9 years of age and adults had to categorize haptic exemplars that varied systematically in four attributes (size, shape, surface texture, and weight). The subjects could learn the categories either analytically--that is, by focusing on a single attribute--or holistically--that is, in terms of overall similarity. The data show that even the youngest children learned the haptic categories far more often in an analytic mode than in a holistic mode. Nevertheless, an age trend was observed, referring to the attributes that the analytic learners used for their categorization. The children preferred substance-related attributes, especially surface texture, whereas the adults preferred structure-related attributes, especially shape. Thus, it appears that analytic and/or holistic processing in category learning develops in a similar manner in the visual and haptic domains.     

Youth suicide risk factors and attitudes in New York and Vienna: a cross-cultural comparison

The prevalence of suicide risk factors and attitudes about suicide and help-seeking among New York and Viennese adolescents were compared in order to explore possible cross-cultural differences. Viennese adolescents exhibited higher rates of depressive symptomatology than their New York counterparts and had more first-hand experience with suicidal peers. More attribution of suicide to mental illness was reported in Vienna; yet Viennese youth were less likely than New York adolescents to recognize the seriousness of suicide threats. Help-seeking patterns of Viennese adolescents were influenced by their setting a high value on confidentiality. These cross-cultural differences may reflect the limited exposure of Austrian youth to school-based suicide prevention programs. The findings highlight the need of taking the sociocultural context into consideration in the planning of youth suicide prevention strategies.     

Bi-hemispheric engagement in the retrieval of autobiographical episodes

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to study the neural correlates of neutral, stressful, negative and positive autobiographical memories. The brain activity produced by these different kinds of episodic memory did not differ significantly, but a common pattern of activation for different kinds of autobiographical memory was revealed that included (1) largely bilateral portions of the medial and superior temporal lobes, hippocampus and parahippocampus, (2) portions of the ventral, medial, superior and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, (3) the anterior and posterior cingulate, including the retrosplenial, cortex, (4) the parietal cortex, and (5) portions of the cerebellum. The brain regions that were mainly activated constituted an interactive network of temporal and prefrontal areas associated with structures of the extended limbic system. The main bilateral activations with left-sided preponderance probably reflected reactivation of complex semantic and episodic self-related information representations that included previously experienced contexts. In conclusion, the earlier view of a strict left versus right prefrontal laterality in the retrieval of semantic as opposed to episodic autobiographical memory, may have to be modified by considering contextual variables such as task demands and subject variables. Consequently, autobiographical memory integration should be viewed as based on distributed bi-hemispheric neural networks supporting multi-modal, emotionally coloured components of personal episodes.     

Na+,K(+)-ATPase activity is reduced in hippocampus of rats submitted to an experimental model of depression: effect of chronic lithium treatment and possible involvement in learning deficits

This study was undertaken to verify the effects of chronic stress and lithium treatments on the hippocampal Na+,K(+)-ATPase activity of rats, as well as to investigate the effects of stress interruption and post-stress lithium treatment on this enzyme activity and on spatial memory. Two experiments were carried out; in the first experiment, adult male Wistar rats were divided into two groups: control and submitted to a chronic variate stress paradigm, and subdivided into treated or not with LiCl. After 40 days of treatment, rats were killed, and Na+,K(+)-ATPase activity was determined. In the second experiment, rats were stressed during 40 days, and their performance was evaluated in the Water Maze task. The stressed group was then subdivided into four groups, with continued or interrupted stress treatment and treated or not with lithium for 30 additional days. After a second evaluation of performance in the Water Maze, rats were killed and Na+,K(+)-ATPase activity was also measured. Results showed an impairment in Na+,K(+)-ATPase activity and in Water Maze performance of chronically stressed rats, which were prevented by lithium treatment and reversed by lithium treatment and by stress interruption. These results suggest that the modulation of Na+,K(+)-ATPase activity may be one of the mechanisms of action of lithium in the treatment of mood disorders.