Cultural Values Influence Relations Between Parent Emotion Socialization and Adolescents’ Neural Responses to Peer Rejection

Research on Child and Adolescent Psychopathology - Adolescents’ responses to negative social experiences can be influenced by parenting behaviors. This includes how parents react to their...     

Psychiatric Distress and Suicidal Tendencies in Adult Cancer Survivors: Verifying the Validity of the Brief Symptom Inventory-18 for Identifying Suicidal Ideation in the Hospitalized Population of Mainland China

The Brief Symptom Inventory-18 (BSI-18) is widely used to assess psychiatric distress but has not been verified in the Chinese population. From March to April 2019, 293 hospitalized cancer patients, aged 20–87, completed the cross-sectional survey with demographics questionnaire, BSI-18, and PHQ-9. We analyzed the single suicide-related item of PHQ-9 with the full score clinical outpoint for BSI-18 and PHQ-9 using SPSS 22.0 and R 2.15, including Pearson's χ² test and ROC curve analyses. A Pearson's χ² test was carried out to compare the three different methods with the gold screening criteria. The p-value was correspondingly to .006, .066, .838. When the PHQ-9?≥?10 criteria for the BSI-18, receiver operating characteristic analysis revealed that AUC values were 0.839, optimal cut-off points for both BSI-18?≥?50, the sensitivity of 85.8%, and 62.5%, respectively. The BSI-18 is suitable for a screening tool for psychological distress and could also be used in clinical settings for preliminary screening of hospitalized cancer patients.

     

Correction to: Medical Students’ Efforts to Integrate and/or Reclaim Authentic Identity: Insights from a Mask-Making Exercise

Journal of Medical Humanities - The authors would like to correct a misspelling in the name of one of the authors due to a typographical error. The name should read Atur Turakhia, not Artur...     

The Satisfaction with Life Scale in Adolescent Samples: Measurement Invariance across 24 Countries and Regions,Age, and Gender

Measurement of adolescent life satisfaction across cultures has not received much attention in previous empirical research. The present study evaluated measurement invariance of the Satisfaction with Life Scale (SWLS) among adolescents in 24 countries and regions (N = 22,710; age range = 13–19 years; 53% female). A single-factor model with residual covariance between a pair of items tapping past life satisfaction fitted well in 19 countries and regions and showed a partial metric invariance. In a subset of nine countries and regions, partial scalar invariance was supported. Partial metric invariance across all 24 countries and regions was achieved when custom model modifications in five countries and regions were included. Three SWLS items showed evidence of noninvariance across cultures. The measurement model was found to operate similarly across gender and age. Our findings suggest that caution is needed when using the SWLS for measuring life satisfaction among adolescents from different cultures.

     

Can a mind have two time lines? Exploring space-time mapping in Mandarin and English speakers

Spatial representations of time are a ubiquitous feature of human cognition. Nevertheless, interesting sociolinguistic variations exist with respect to where in space people locate temporal constructs. For instance, while in English time metaphorically flows horizontally, in Mandarin an additional vertical dimension is employed. Noting that the bilingual mind can flexibly accommodate multiple representations, the present work explored whether Mandarin–English bilinguals possess two mental time lines. Across two experiments, we demonstrated that Mandarin–English bilinguals do indeed employ both horizontal and vertical representations of time. Importantly, subtle variations to cultural context were seen to shape how these time lines were deployed.     

Virtual social environments as a tool for psychological assessment: dynamics of interaction with a virtual spouse

Computer games are advocated as a promising tool bridging the gap between the controllability of a lab experiment and the mundane realism of a field experiment. At the same time, many authors stress the importance of observing real behavior instead of asking participants about possible or intended behaviors. In this article, the authors introduce an online virtual social environment, which is inhabited by autonomous agents including the virtual spouse of the participant. Participants can freely explore the virtual world and interact with any other inhabitant, allowing the expression of spontaneous and unprompted behavior. The authors investigated the usefulness of this game for the assessment of interactions with a virtual spouse and their relations to intimacy and autonomy motivation as well as relationship satisfaction with the real-life partner. Both the intimacy motive and the satisfaction with the real-world relationship showed significant correlations with aggregated in-game behavior, which shows that some sort of transference between the real world and the virtual world took place. In addition, a process analysis of interaction quality revealed that relationship satisfaction and intimacy motive had different effects on the initial status and the time course of the interaction quality. Implications for psychological assessment using virtual social environments are discussed.     

The basis of shared intentions in human and robot cognition

There is a fundamental difference between robots that are equipped with sensory, motor and cognitive capabilities, vs. simulations or non-embodied cognitive systems. Via their perceptual and motor capabilities, these robotic systems can interact with humans in an increasingly more “natural” way, physically interacting with shared objects in cooperative action settings. Indeed, such cognitive robotic systems provide a unique opportunity to developmental psychologists for implementing their theories and testing their hypotheses on systems that are becoming increasingly “at home” in the sensory--motor and social worlds, where such hypotheses are relevant. The current research is the result of interaction between research in computational neuroscience and robotics on the one hand, and developmental psychology on the other. One of the key findings in the developmental psychology context is that with respect to other primates, humans appear to have a unique ability and motivation to share goals and intentions with others. This ability is expressed in cooperative behavior very early in life, and appears to be the basis for subsequent development of social cognition. Here we attempt to identify a set of core functional elements of cooperative behavior and the corresponding shared intentional representations. We then begin to specify how these capabilities can be implemented in a robotic system, the Cooperator, and tested in human–robot interaction experiments. Based on the results of these experiments we discuss the mutual benefit for both fields of the interaction between robotics and developmental psychology.     

Magnitude comparison revisited: An alternative approach to binary choice under uncertainty

Two generations of psychologists have been interested in understanding binary choice under uncertainty. In the 1970s and 1980s, researchers assumed that people rely on a two-stage magnitude comparison process to make these decisions (Banks, 1977; Moyer & Dumais, 1978). More recently, the focus has shifted to approaches that rely on probabilistic cues and simple heuristics (Gigerenzer & Goldstein, Psychological Review 103, 650-669, 1996). Here, we test competing predictions derived from these two very different approaches and conclude that the magnitude comparison process plays a central role in this task. In support of this conclusion, we present an experiment in which participants were timed as they decided which of two vehicles was more expensive. Pairs composed of one luxury vehicle (e.g., BMW 323i) and one nonluxury vehicle (e.g., Toyota 4Runner) were critical because the magnitude comparison approach correctly predicted that reaction times would decrease with subjective distance, whereas the heuristics approach incorrectly predicted that there would be no relation.     

抑郁绝望理论在我国儿童中适用性的追踪研究

摘 要 以抑郁的绝望理论和最弱联结假设为基础,采用纵向追踪研究设计,应用多层线性模型分析考察抑郁绝望理论在我国儿童中的适用情况。结果表明：1、应激事件水平能预测抑郁症状的程度,并且在较大年龄儿童中具有更强的预测性; 2、虽然研究结果的统计显著性不支持以最弱联结假设为认知依据的绝望理论,但在一定程度上还是反应了该理论的适用性;3、个体认知归因方式可能在儿童阶段开始形成并逐渐发展成熟。