Seeing behind the surface: communicative demonstration boosts category disambiguation in 12‐month‐olds

In their first years, infants acquire an incredible amount of information regarding the objects present in their environment. While often it is not clear what specific information should be prioritized in encoding from the many characteristics of an object, different types of object representations facilitate different types of generalizations. We tested the hypotheses that 1‐year‐old infants distinctively represent familiar objects as exemplars of their kind, and that ostensive communication plays a role in determining kind membership for ambiguous objects. In the training phase of our experiment, infants were exposed to movies displaying an agent sorting objects from two categories (cups and plates) into two locations (left or right). Afterwards, different groups of infants saw either an ostensive or a non‐ostensive demonstration performed by the agent, revealing that a new object that looked like a plate can be transformed into a cup. A third group of infants experienced no demonstration regarding the new object. During test, infants were presented with the ambiguous object in the plate format, and we measured generalization by coding anticipatory looks to the plate or the cup side. While infants looked equally often towards the two sides when the demonstration was non‐ostensive, and more often to the plate side when there was no demonstration, they performed more anticipatory eye movements to the cup side when the demonstration was ostensive. Thus, ostensive demonstration likely highlighted the hidden dispositional properties of the target object as kind‐relevant, guiding infants’ categorization of the foldable cup as a cup, despite it looking like a plate. These results suggest that infants likely encode familiar objects as exemplars of their kind and that ostensive communication can play a crucial role in disambiguating what kind an object belongs to, even when this requires disregarding salient surface features.     

Psychosocial safety climate (PSC) and enacted PSC for workplace bullying and psychological health problem reduction

Bullying at work has profound effects on both the individual and organization. We aimed to determine if organizational psychosocial safety climate (PSC; a climate specific to worker psychological health) could reduce workplace bullying and associated psychological health problems (i.e., distress, emotional exhaustion, depression) if specific procedures were implemented (PSC enactment). We theorized that the PSC enactment mechanism works via psychosocial processes such as bullying mistreatment climate (anti-bullying procedures), work design (procedures reduce stress through work redesign), and conflict resolution (procedures to resolve conflict). We used two-wave national longitudinal interview data from 1,062 Australian employees (Australian Workplace Barometer project) and structural equation modelling to explore relationships over 4 years. PSC Time 1 predicted enacted PSC and reduced bullying 4 years later. PSC Time 1 was indirectly negatively related to poor psychological health Time 2 through enacted PSC and bullying. Bullying Time 1 also gave rise to procedures which in turn reduced bullying Time 2. Our findings suggest a multi-component approach to prevent or reduce bullying. Procedures (to reduce psychosocial hazards) that emerge in a high PSC context are more comprehensive than those triggered by bullying (reactive procedures), and can therefore be more effective in reducing worker mistreatment. Building PSC and a strong climate for psychological health, and enacting PSC is fundamental to bullying prevention.     

The effects of aging on the working memory processes of multimodal information

Normal aging is associated with deficits in working memory processes. However, the majority of research has focused on storage or inhibitory processes using unimodal paradigms, without addressing their relationships using different sensory modalities. Hence, we pursued two objectives. First, was to examine the effects of aging on storage and inhibitory processes. Second, was to evaluate aging effects on multisensory integration of visual and auditory stimuli. To this end, young and older participants performed a multimodal task for visual and auditory pairs of stimuli with increasing memory load at encoding and interference during retention. Our results showed an age-related increased vulnerability to interrupting and distracting interference reflecting inhibitory deficits related to the off-line reactivation and on-line suppression of relevant and irrelevant information, respectively. Storage capacity was impaired with increasing task demands in both age groups. Additionally, older adults showed a deficit in multisensory integration, with poorer performance for new visual compared to new auditory information.     

Executive functions and linguistic performance in SCD older adults and healthy controls

Subjective cognitive decline (SCD) might represent the preclinical phase of Alzheimer’s disease. Given the interest to characterize it, the present study explores (1) if there are differences in lexical retrieval (LexR) and sentence comprehension (SComp) between SCD and matched controls, and (2) the predictive value of demographic variables and executive functions in relation to LexR and SComp in each group. A sample of 135 participants voluntarily took part in this study (66 with SCD). They all completed the Trail Making, the Stroop, the Boston Naming, and the ECCO-Senior tests, as well as verbal fluency tasks (VF). Results show that (1) groups differ in LexR and in inhibition efficiency, and (2) VF is explained by years of formal education, particularly in the control group; SComp in the most complex items seems to rely in different strategies, related to flexibility in controls and to inhibition efficiency in SCD patients.     

Do ‘literate’ pigeons (<Emphasis Type="Italic">Columba livia</Emphasis>) show mirror-word generalization?

Many children pass through a mirror stage in reading, where they write individual letters or digits in mirror and find it difficult to correctly utilize letters that are mirror images of one another (e.g., b and d). This phenomenon is thought to reflect the fact that the brain does not naturally discriminate left from right. Indeed, it has been argued that reading acquisition involves the inhibition of this default process. In the current study, we tested the ability of literate pigeons, which had learned to discriminate between 30 and 62 words from 7832 nonwords, to discriminate between words and their mirror counterparts. Subjects were sensitive to the left–right orientation of the individual letters, but not the order of letters within a word. This finding may reflect the fact that, in the absence of human-unique top-down processes, the inhibition of mirror generalization may be limited.     

Social Comparisons on Subjective Well-Being: The Role of Social and Cultural Capital

Using the German Socio-Economic Panel, we analyze the relevance of modeling social comparisons to determine their effect on subjective well-being. We find that it is important to model social comparisons in such a way that captures the sensitivity of individuals to proximity. The impact on subjective well-being differs depending on the manner in which proximity is modeled, revealing that the underlying processes in comparisons are not homogenous along the income distribution. Additionally, our results point out that social and cultural capital modify the effect of social comparisons and such modification depends on the sensitivity to proximity.     

Individual Social Capital and Subjective Wellbeing: The Relational Goods

In this paper we analyze the non-instrumental dimension of social capital and its effects on subjective well-being. In the first part, we define the characteristics of production and consumption of relational goods. The second section analyses the influence of the different expressions of relational goods and social capital on individual subjective well-being. In the third, we test the explanatory power of this variable on the Easterlin’s paradox using the results of a survey on individual social capital in Spain. The main findings from the empirical analysis for Spanish society allow us to strengthen the hypothesis. We found a weak explanatory capacity of income or educational level or instrumental dimensions of social capital (expert mobilization) while a strong link between expressions of relational goods (domestic mobilization, household stability, partnership, trust and security in the environment) was found.     

Identity Status,Gender, and Social Comparison Among Young Adults

The aim of this study was to investigate identity status globally and across identity domains among young Swedish adult women and men. Also, potential differences in social comparison among identity statuses were evaluated. The results showed that most of the 124 participants (50% women, M_age 33.29 years) were assigned to an achieved global identity and had made identity-defining commitments across domains. Gender differences in identity status were found in the occupational and parenthood domains. In addition, differences in social comparison orientation were found only in the parenthood domain, whereas those assigned to moratorium scored higher in social comparison than did those assigned to foreclosure and diffusion. These results bring important knowledge to our understanding of identity during young adulthood.     

Brain activity underlying negative self- and other-perception in adolescents: The role of attachment-derived self-representations

One of teenagers’ key developmental tasks is to engage in new and meaningful relationships with peers and adults outside the family context. Attachment-derived expectations about the self and others in terms of internal attachment working models have the potential to shape such social reorientation processes critically and thereby influence adolescents’ social-emotional development and social integration. Because the neural underpinnings of this developmental task remain largely unknown, we sought to investigate them by functional magnetic resonance imaging. We asked n = 44 adolescents (ages 12.01–18.84 years) to evaluate positive and negative adjectives regarding either themselves or a close other during an adapted version of the well-established self-other trait-evaluation task. As measures of attachment, we obtained scores reflecting participants’ positive versus negative attachment-derived self- and other-models by means of the Relationship Questionnaire. We controlled for possible confounding factors by also obtaining scores reflecting internalizing/externalizing problems, schizotypy, and borderline symptomatology. Our results revealed that participants with a more negative attachment-derived self-model showed increased brain activity during positive and negative adjective evaluation regarding the self, but decreased brain activity during negative adjective evaluation regarding a close other, in bilateral amygdala/parahippocampus, bilateral anterior temporal pole/anterior superior temporal gyrus, and left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. These findings suggest that a low positivity of the self-concept characteristic for the attachment anxiety dimension may influence neural information processing, but in opposite directions when it comes to self- versus (close) other-representations. We discuss our results in the framework of attachment theory and regarding their implications especially for adolescent social-emotional development and social integration.