The emergence of motor imagery in children

A total of 80 children (40 5-year-olds and 40 7-year-olds) took part in an experiment to evaluate their capacity to mentally evoke a motor image of their own displacement. Using a chronometry paradigm, movement duration was compared in a task where children were asked to move in order to take a puppet back to its home (actual) and to think about themselves executing the same action (virtual). Movement durations for actual and virtual displacements were obtained in two conditions, where either no information was provided about the weight of the puppet to be displaced (standard situation) or the puppet was described as being heavy (informed situation). A significant correlation between actual and virtual walking durations was observed for 7-year-olds in the informed condition. This result provides evidence for a motor imagery process emerging in 7-year-olds when children are required to think about themselves in action.     

Identity recognition and happy and sad facial expression recall: influence of depressive symptoms

Relatively few studies have examined memory bias for social stimuli in depression or dysphoria. The aim of this study was to investigate the influence of depressive symptoms on memory for facial information. A total of 234 participants completed the Beck Depression Inventory II and a task examining memory for facial identity and expression of happy and sad faces. For both facial identity and expression, the recollective experience was measured with the Remember/Know/Guess procedure (Gardiner & Richardson-Klavehn, 2000). The results show no major association between depressive symptoms and memory for identities. However, dysphoric individuals consciously recalled (Remember responses) more sad facial expressions than non-dysphoric individuals. These findings suggest that sad facial expressions led to more elaborate encoding, and thereby better recollection, in dysphoric individuals.     

When Is Believing “Seeing”? Hostile Attribution Bias as a Function of Self‐Reported Aggression1

Repeated exposure to adverse advents (e.g., risky driving) was thought to increase expectations for the recurrence of the event. Community‐based drivers (130 men, 133 women) were given scenarios depicting everyday road events that could be construed as benign, ambiguous, or malign by the degree of perceived provocation. Differences between levels of gender, ethnicity, age, aggressiveness, and provocation were measured by attributions of intent, hostility, and anger. Results showed that, overall, drivers accurately perceived provocation conditions. Hostile attributional biases were not evident among the sample as a whole, but were dependent on level of aggressiveness and provocation. Analysis of self‐reported driving behavior showed that young, aggressive majority group drivers who experience greater aggression on the road also were more likely to take more risks while driving. Controlling for miles driven, gender differences were not found.     

Lesions of the dorsal subiculum and the dorsal hippocampus impaired pattern separation in a task using distinct and overlapping visual stimuli

The contribution of the dorsal subiculum (DS) and of the dorsal hippocampus (DH) to memory for distinct and overlapping visual stimuli was examined. Rats with selective lesions of the DS or the DH were compared to sham-operated rats on a delayed matching-to-place task guided by distal visual cues in a modified radial-arm maze. Overlapping distal visual cues could be perceived from three arm entrances (adjacent arms) and a unique set of distal cues were more likely to be seen from the other two arm entrances (distinct arms). Rats with DS lesions were impaired on trials with baited adjacent arms, but not on trials with baited distinct arms. Rats with DH lesions were impaired on both types of trials. These results suggest that the DS and the DH are necessary for pattern separation and that they may have different contributions to memory.     

Resources,life events,and changes in psychological states: A prospective framework

As researchers, we are intrigued by the complexities and questions involved in the study of resources and life events. As community psychologists, we hope this framework will contribute to improving the well-being of human groups. We believe that knowing those resources most likely to be effective in buffering or boosting a particular event should guide the planning of programs for groups likely to experience that event. Moreover, it is hoped that this framework will promote the idea that resources may “boost” positive experiences, thus increasing the likelihood of growth. The promotion of positive health has long been a value in community psychology but has been difficult to actualize. The boosting of desirable events may be one step in that direction.     

Health Care Ethics Consultation: 'Training in Virtue'

In philosophy, intelligence is less important than character, or so Wittgenstein once argued. In this paper, in a similar vein, I suggest that in health care ethics consultation character is of preeminent importance. I suggest that the activity of ethics consultation can be understood as "training in virtue," and what distinguishes the good health care ethics consultant from his/her average colleague are differences in traits of character. The underlying assumption is that one's use of knowledge and abilities are ultimately a function of who one is and how one perceives and confronts situations of moral uncertainty and conflict. In discussing the original case presented by Mark Bliton, I focus on the virtues of wisdom, justice, courage, compassion and humility.     

High school and college students' attitudes toward rape

This study explored the relationship between agreement with myths about rape and the tendency to blame the victim in a sample of high school and college students. It was found that high school males believed more strongly than did both high school females and college males in myths about rape, and they assigned greater blame to the victims of rape. For both high school males and females, belief in myths about rape was associated with assigning more blame to the victims.     

Selective adaptation of English consonants using real speech

Most English consonant-vowel (CV) syllables have other CV syllables embedded within them. For example, splicing sufficient energy from the onset of [k^ha] yields [p^ha], splicing into [ma] or [va] yields [ba], and splicing into [?a] yields [da]. We spliced successively longer segments from naturally spoken CV syllables to produce sequences of CV syllables which varied in discrete acoustic steps from [k^ha] to [p^ha], from [?a] to [da], from [ma] to [ba], from [fa] to [ba], and from [va] to [ba]. Random presentation of syllables in each series resulted in identification functions with typically sharp phoneme boundaries. For example, in the seven-syllable [?a]-[da] series (where [?a] was the original or first syllable), there were98% [?a] responses to Syllable 3, but only 12% [?a] responses (88% [da] responses) to Syllable 5. Following the identification test, subjects listened to 180 repetitions of either the first or last syllable in the test series, and were again required to identify randomly presented syllables from the test series. A shift in the phoneme boundary toward the repeated (adapting) syllable was observed for 11 of the 12 repeated syllables. Repeated presentation of [?a], for example, resulted in fewer [?a] responses to syllables in the [?a]-[da] series, compared to performance on the previous identification test. Likewise, repeated listening to [da] resulted in a decrease in [da] responses. Adaptation was selective in that syllables near the phoneme boundary were most affected by the adapting syllable. A shift in the phoneme boundary was also observed for two different continua when the adapting stimulus contained an acoustic feature identical to syllables in the test series. Thus, selective adaptation was found along a [ma]-[ba] continuum following repeated presentation of [na] and following repeated presentation of nasal resonance removed from its syllable context. A second major result, observed in five different experiments, was an asymmetrical adaptation effect. A greater shift in the phoneme boundary was observed following repeated presentation of the first syllable in each series (e.g., [?a]) than for the final embedded syllable (e.g., [da]). The results were discussed in terms of two different models of-selective adaptation.