Is There Room for ‘Development’ in Developmental Models of Information Processing Biases to Threat in Children and Adolescents?

Clinical and experimental theories assume that processing biases in attention and interpretation are a causal mechanism through which anxiety develops. Despite growing evidence that these processing biases are present in children and, therefore, develop long before adulthood, these theories ignore the potential role of child development. This review attempts to place information processing biases within a theoretical developmental framework. We consider whether child development has no impact on information processing biases to threat (integral bias model), or whether child development influences information processing biases and if so whether it does so by moderating the expression of an existing bias (moderation model) or by affecting the acquisition of a bias (acquisition model). We examine the extent to which these models fit with existing theory and research evidence and outline some methodological issues that need to be considered when drawing conclusions about the potential role of child development in the information processing of threat stimuli. Finally, we speculate about the developmental processes that might be important to consider in future research.     

Liberty to Decide on Dual Use Biomedical Research: An Acknowledged Necessity

Humanity entered the twenty-first century with revolutionary achievements in biomedical research. At the same time multiple “dual-use” results have been published. The battle against infectious diseases is meeting new challenges, with newly emerging and re-emerging infections. Both natural disaster epidemics, such as SARS, avian influenza, haemorrhagic fevers, XDR and MDR tuberculosis and many others, and the possibility of intentional mis-use, such as letters containing anthrax spores in USA, 2001, have raised awareness of the real threats. Many great men, including Goethe, Spinoza, J.B. Shaw, Fr. Engels, J.F. Kennedy and others, have recognized that liberty is also a responsibility. That is why the liberty to decide now represents an acknowledged necessity: biomedical research should be supported, conducted and published with appropriate measures to prevent potential “dual use”. Biomedical scientists should work according to the ethical principles of their Code of Conduct, an analogue of Hippocrates Oath of doctors; and they should inform government, society and their juniors about the problem. National science consulting boards of experts should be created to prepare guidelines and control the problem at state level. An international board should develop minimum standards to be applicable by each country. Bio-preparedness is considered another key-measure.     

Prenatal dysthymia versus major depression effects on the neonate

Depressed pregnant women were classified as dysthymic or major depression disorder based on the Structured Clinical Interview for Depression and followed to the newborn period. The newborns of dysthymic versus major depression disorder mothers had a significantly shorter gestational age, a lower birthweight, shorter birth length and less optimal obstetric complications scores. The neonates of dysthymic mothers also had lower orientation and motor scores and more depressive symptoms on the Brazelton Neonatal Behavioral Assessment Scale. These findings were not surprising given the elevated cortisol levels and the inferior fetal measures including lower fetal weight, fetal length, femur length and abdominal circumference noted in our earlier study on fetuses of dysthymic pregnant women.     

The effects of social influence on children's memory reports: the omission and commission error asymmetry

Children in two age groups (7 vs. 12 yrs, N= 174) individually interacted with a stranger and were later interviewed about this event. Right before the interview, each child encountered the stranger once again and he engaged in a conversation where he either suggested that a (central or peripheral) detail originally present in the event had actually not been there or that an originally non-present (central or peripheral) detail had in fact been there. It was hypothesized that the two types of misinformation would result in omission and commission errors respectively. The results showed that the social influence resulted in an asymmetric effect (i.e., more commission than omission errors). Importantly, we also found that the children made more errors with respect to the peripheral detail (a suitcase), compared to the central detail (a passenger). Younger children did not make more errors (neither omission nor commission errors) than older children.     

Hebb learning, verbal short-term memory, and the acquisition of phonological forms in children

Recent work using the Hebb effect as a marker for implicit long-term acquisition of serial order has demonstrated a functional equivalence across verbal and visuospatial short-term memory. The current study extends this observation to a sample of five- to six-year-olds using verbal and spatial immediate serial recall and also correlates the magnitude of Hebb learning with explicit measures of word and nonword paired-associate learning. Comparable Hebb effects were observed in both domains, but only nonword learning was significantly related to the magnitude of Hebb learning. Nonword learning was also independently related to individuals' general level of verbal serial recall. This suggests that vocabulary acquisition depends on both a domain-specific short-term memory system and a domain-general process of learning through repetition.     

Visual processing and the bodily self

The 'body schema' has traditionally been defined as a passively updated, proprioceptive representation of the body. However, recent work has suggested that body representations are more complex and flexible than previously thought. They may integrate current perceptual information from all sensory modalities, and can be extended to incorporate indirect representations of the body and functional portions of tools. In the present study, we investigate the source of a facilitatory effect of viewing the body on speeded visual discrimination reaction times. Participants responded to identical visual stimuli that varied only in their context: being presented on the participant's own body, on the experimenter's body, or in a neutral context. The stimuli were filmed and viewed in real-time on a projector screen. Careful controls for attention, biological saliency, and attribution confirmed that the facilitatory effect depends critically on participants attributing the context to a real body. An intermediate effect was observed when the stimuli were presented on another person's body, suggesting that the effect of viewing one's own body might represent a conjunction of an interpersonal body effect and an egocentric effect.     

The role of control functions in mentalizing: dual-task studies of theory of mind and executive function

Conflicting evidence has arisen from correlational studies regarding the role of executive control functions in Theory of Mind. The current study used dual-task manipulations of executive functions (inhibition, updating and switching) to investigate the role of these control functions in mental state and non-mental state tasks. The 'Eyes' pictorial test of Theory of Mind showed specific dual-task costs when concurrently performed with an inhibitory secondary task. In contrast, interference effects on a verbal 'Stories' task were general, occurring on both mental state and non-mental state tasks, and across all types of executive function. These findings from healthy functioning adults should help to guide decisions about appropriate methods of assessing ToM in clinical populations, and interpreting deficits in performance in such tasks in the context of more general cognitive dysfunction.     

Intergenerational transmission of values: family generativity and adolescents' narratives of parent and grandparent value teaching

In this longitudinal study, we compared family stories told by 32 Canadian adolescents at ages 16 and 20 about how parents and grandparents had taught them values. Relations to parents' and children's levels of generativity were also examined. Adolescents' stories of grandparent value teaching were less readily recalled and less interactive in their content compared with stories about parents. Stories of value teaching by more generative parents were more likely to involve specific episodes, to be more interactive, to be more likely to emphasize caring content, and to be less likely to have their message rejected by the teens. Similarly, when parents were more generative, adolescents' stories about grandparents' value teaching were also more likely to involve specific and interactive episodes. Finally, stories told about parents and grandparents that were more positive on these dimensions predicted higher generative concern scores for the adolescents themselves, measured subsequently at age 24. Adolescents' stories about parent and grandparent socialization in more generative family contexts thus have features that suggest a more compelling process of intergenerational value transmission.     

Familiarity breeds distortion: the effects of media exposure on false reports concerning media coverage of the terrorist attacks in london on 7 July 2005

The present experiment investigated whether increased media exposure could lead to an increase in memory distortions regarding a traumatic public event: the explosion of the No. 30 bus in Tavistock Square, London on 7 July 2005. A total of 150 Swedish and 150 UK participants completed a series of questionnaires about their memory of either (i) the aftermath of the explosion, (ii) a non-existent computerised reconstruction of the moment of the explosion, or (iii) non-existent closed circuit television footage of the moment of the explosion. In line with the availability heuristic, U.K. participants were more likely than Swedish participants to claim to have seen all three types of footage. Furthermore, a subsample of U.K. participants who appeared to have developed false "memories" of seeing the No. 30 bus explode scored significantly higher on measures of dissociation and fantasy proneness than participants who did not develop false "memories". This experiment provides further support for the role of imaginative processes in the development of false memories.     

Impairment in attentional processing in a field survival environment

The suggestion that maladaptive behaviour often observed in survival incidents may be due to a restriction in attentional processing was tested using sub‐components of the Test of Everyday Attention in participants undergoing a field survival exercise. Compared to a baseline condition and control group those undergoing environmental duress showed significant impairment in selective and sustained attention which taken together suggests dysfunction in controlled attention. No impairment was found in either attentional switching or auditory‐verbal working memory. It is argued that this type of cognitive impairment makes flexible interaction with the survival environment difficult and the victim's behaviour becomes dominated by environmental cues at the expense of wilful, goal‐directed survival behaviour. This would begin to answer at least one anomaly that exists in survivorship: why so many people perish when there is no need. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.