The Relationship Between Perceived Parenting Style and Emotion Regulation Abilities in Adulthood

Emotion regulation abilities are very important for psychological and social wellbeing during the whole course of life. By contrast, emotion dysregulation is a significant risk factor for several psychological disorders. According to developmental research, an optimal parenting style, described as warmth and affectionate, promotes the development of an adequate emotion regulation in children and adolescents. However, little research has examined the relationship between parenting style and emotion regulation in adulthood. In the present study, we tested the relationship between perceived experiences with parents, in terms of parental care and parental overprotection, during childhood, and emotion regulation abilities in a sample of adults. One hundred participants completed the Parental Bonding Instruments, the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire, and the Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale. Hierarchical multiple regression analyses revealed that perceived parental care was more related to emotion regulation abilities than perceived parental overprotection. In particular, perceived paternal care was strictly linked to several difficulties in emotion regulation. By contrast, perceived maternal care was negatively associated with the use of maladaptive emotion regulation strategies, and a specific emotion dysregulation dimension, that is lack of emotional awareness. In summary, perceived parental care seemed to have a key role to protect individuals from emotion dysregulation. These results demonstrate that parenting styles still exert their influence on emotion regulation abilities also in adulthood. Limitations and directions for future research are discussed.     

Attentional distractor interference may be diminished by concurrent working memory load in normal participants and traumatic brain injury patients

A reduction in congruency effects under working memory (WM) load has been previously described using different attentional paradigms (e.g.,  and ). One hypothesis is that different types of WM load have different effects on attentional selection, depending on whether a specific memory load demands resources in common with target or distractor processing. In particular, if information in WM is related to the distractors in the selective attention task, there is a reduction in distraction (Kim et al., 2005). However, although previous results seem to point to a decrease in interference under high WM load conditions (Kim et al., 2005), the lack of a neutral baseline for the congruency effects makes it difficult to differentiate between a decrease in interference or in facilitation. In the present work we included neutral trials in the task introduced by Kim et al. (2005) and tested normal participants and traumatic brain injury patients. Results support a reduction in the processing of distractors under WM load, at least for incongruent trials in both groups. Theoretical as well as applied implications are discussed.     

Comprehension of two types of negative comparisons in children

English-speaking and Italian-speaking children between the ages of 6 years 8 months and 9 years 10 months were asked to solve instructional relation problems (i.e., to complete a picture on the basis of a sentence). Sentences contained either marked or unmarked adjectival forms in one of three types of comparative construction:positive comparative (e.g., bigger più grande),negative-equative constructions as explicit negative forms (e.g., not as big as, non è grande come), orcomparative-with-less constructions e.g., less big, meno grande) as implicit negative forms. Subjects had to focus on either the grammatical subject or the grammatical object of a sentence to complete, the picture. Three findings were consistent with predictions derived by considering syntactic and pragmatic differences between explicit and implicit types of negative comparisons. First, comprehension depended on the type of comparative construction, with the poorest comprehension for the implicit comparative-with-less construction. Second, the effect of the marked adjective depended on the type of comparison. Third, in all three types of comparison, accuracy was greater when the question was focused on the grammatical subject instead of the grammatical object.     

Do the young and the old perceive emotional intervals differently when shown on a younger or older face?

Cognitive Processing - Many authors have analysed the effects of emotion recognition on time perception, showing that the more arousing the stimuli are the greater is the effect on duration...     

ERP components activated by the "GO!" and "WITHHOLD!" conflict in the random Sustained Attention to Response Task

The present study investigates the event related potential (ERP) components associated with the random version of the Sustained Attention to Response Task (SART). The random SART is a Go/No-Go task in which the No-Go target appears unpredictably and rarely. In the present experiment, the EEG was recorded from 58 electrodes with mastoids as reference. As expected, the N2 and P3 were larger in the No-Go trials compared to the Go trials, with the P3 more frontal for the No-Go trials compared to the Go trials. The functional role of the N2 and P3 in the No-Go trials is discussed comparing our results to the fixed SART results obtained by Dockree et al. [Dockree P. M., Kelly S. P., Robertson I. H., Reilly R. B., & Foxe J. J. (2005). Neurophysiological markers of alert responding during goal-directed behaviour: A high-density electrical mapping study. NeuroImage, 27, 587-601]. In addition, the lateralized readiness potential (LRP) was computed. The absence of an LRP in the No-Go trials suggests that a central inhibitory mechanism intervenes to prevent the preparation and execution of a dominant motor response.     

Global/local processing and negative priming: the influence of selection difficulty and stimulus exposure

Negative priming is a decrement in performance observed when a previously ignored stimulus is re-presented as a target. The present study examined the relation between selection difficulty and negative priming in five experiments that used hierarchical stimuli (large letters made up by small letters). The results show that negative priming is greater when subjects direct attention to the local level (more difficult selection) than when they direct attention to the global level (less difficult selection). However, that occurs only when exposure of prime and probe is sufficiently long. With shorter presentations, negative priming is still observed but is no longer modulated by selection difficulty. These results suggest that both anticipatory and reactive mechanisms are responsible for the occurrence of negative priming and that instantiation of the reactive mechanism depends on the time available for prime and probe selection. Received: 17 January 2000 / Accepted: 3 July 2000     

Time-based prospective memory difficulties in children with ADHD and the role of time perception and working memory

Time-based prospective memory (PM) is the ability to remember to perform an intended action at a given time in the future. It is a competence that is crucial for effective performance in everyday life and may be one of the main causes of problems for individuals who have difficulty in planning and organizing their life, such as children with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). This study systematically examines different aspects of time-based PM performance in a task that involves taking an action at a given future time in a group of 23 children with ADHD who were compared with a matched group of typically-developing (TD) children. The children were asked to watch a cartoon and then answer a questionnaire about its content (ongoing task). They were also asked to press a key every 2 minutes while watching the cartoon (PM task). The relationships of time perception and verbal working memory with PM performance were examined by administering appropriate tasks. The results showed that the children with ADHD were less accurate than the TD children in the PM task and exhibited less strategic time-monitoring behavior. Time perception was found to predict PM accuracy, whereas working memory was mainly involved in time-monitoring behavior, but this applied more to the TD group than to the ADHD group, suggesting that children with ADHD are less able to use their cognitive resources when meeting a PM request.     

Parental influences on memories of parents and friends

The authors evaluated the role parent-child relationship quality has on two types of memories, those of parents and those of friends. Participants were 198 Italian university students who recalled memories during 4 separate timed memory-fluency tasks about their preschool, elementary school, middle school, high school and university years. Half were instructed to recall memories involving parents and the remainder memories involving friends. Moreover, parent-child relationships were assessed by the Network of Relationships Inventory (NRI; W. Furman & D. Buhrmester, 1985) and Adolescents' Report of Parental Monitoring (D. M. Capaldi & G. R. Patterson, 1989). Results showed that men with positive parent-son relationships had more memories of parents and more affectively positive memories of friends, supporting a consistency model positing similarity between parent-child relationships and memories of friends. Women with positive parental relationship quality had more affectively positive memories of parents but for friends, positive relationship quality only predicted positive memories when young. At older ages, especially middle school-aged children, negative parent-daughter relationships predicted more positive memories of friends, supporting a compensatory model. The gender of parent also mattered, with fathers having a more influential role on affect for memories of friends.     

Changing history: doctored photographs affect memory for past public events

We investigated how doctored photographs of past public events affect memory for those events. Italian participants viewed either original images or misleading digitally doctored images depicting the 1989 Tiananmen Square protest in Beijing and a 2003 protest in Rome against the war in Iraq, and they subsequently answered questions about those events. Viewing the doctored images affected the way participants remembered the events. Those who viewed the doctored photograph of the Beijing event estimated that a larger number of people participated in it. Those who viewed the doctored photograph of the Rome event rated the event as more violent and more negative, recalled more physical confrontation, damage to property, and injuries to demonstrators, and were less inclined to participate in future protests. Both younger and older adult participants were affected by the manipulation. Results indicate that doctored photographs of past public events can influence memory, attitudes and behavioural intentions. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.