Aging in cognitive control of social processing: evidence from the attention network test

ABSTRACT

Aging seems to be associated with impairment of attentional network functioning. It is not known whether social information can modulate this age-related decline. We used three variants of Attention Network test to examine the age-related decline of attentional effects in response to stimuli with and without social-cognitive content. Three groups of younger, middle-aged, and older participants performed the ANT, using fish, drawings, or photographs of faces looking to the left or right as target and flanker stimuli. The results showed that both executive attention and alerting were more resistant to the age-related decline with social stimuli and that orienting attention scores showed a progressive increase with age in the presence of this kind of stimuli. These findings underline the importance of social information in modulating and contrasting the age-related decline and support the status of human faces as a special class of visual stimuli for the human attentional systems.     

Experiential avoidance in adolescents with borderline personality disorder: comparison with a non-BPD psychiatric group and healthy controls

ABSTRACT

Previous research has identified experiential avoidance (EA) as related to a host of adolescent internalizing and externalizing problems, as well as borderline personality disorder, suggesting that it is a crosscutting factor for adolescent psychopathology. It remains unclear whether EA differs among adolescents with BPD compared to adolescents with other psychiatric disorders and healthy adolescents. The aims of this study were to 1) examine EA in adolescents with BPD compared to non-BPD inpatient adolescents and healthy adolescents, and 2) to evaluate whether EA has a unique relationship to borderline pathology over and above internalizing and externalizing. Self-report measures of BPD features, EA, and psychopathology were completed by 692 adolescents (64.5% female, M_age= 15.20). This sample included a group of psychiatric inpatient youth (n = 197 BPD; n = 403 non-BPD) and a group of healthy adolescents (n = 92). Results revealed that EA differed significantly across all three groups, with the highest level of EA evidenced in adolescents who had BPD. Furthermore, there was a significant, unique association between BPD symptoms and EA over afnd above internalizing and externalizing pathology. These findings pinpoint EA as an important risk marker and possible target of prevention or intervention for adolescent BPD.     

Put yourself in my wheelchair: Perspective-taking can reduce prejudice toward people with disabilities and other stigmatized groups

This study aimed to compare perspective-taking with a hypothetical target and perspective-taking occurring during a real interaction with an outgroup member in reducing prejudice toward people with disabilities and other groups (e.g., immigrants, homosexual people), via increased empathy. We adopted an experimental design with two treatment groups (Hypothetical target vs. Real target) and one control group (no intervention), one pretest and two posttest measures. Participants, who were 437 students aged 11–17 years (M = 14.28; SD = 1.17), were randomly assigned to the various conditions on a classroom basis. Perspective-taking was facilitated asking participants to travel in a wheelchair on a path that simulated a real pavement in the presence (or not) of an individual with a motor disability. Findings showed that perspective-taking in the presence of a real target was more effective in reducing prejudice toward people with disabilities than perspective-taking task without encountering an outgroup member. Perspective-taking with a hypothetical target was not sufficient to increase participants' empathy toward people with disabilities, which instead was enhanced when the task was performed at the presence of a real member of that group. Positive effects produced by perspective-taking (with both a hypothetical and a real target) were transferred to immigrants and homosexuals. These findings suggest that, when possible, perspective-taking in the presence of the target, which can improve empathy by favoring a two-way exchange process, is highly recommended to improve attitudes toward different stigmatized groups, not necessarily targeted by the intervention.     

Semantic Similarity of Alternatives Fostered by Conversational Negation

Conversational negation often behaves differently from negation as a logical operator: when rejecting a state of affairs, it does not present all members of the complement set as equally plausible alternatives, but it rather suggests some of them as more plausible than others (e.g., “This is not a dog, it is a wolf/*screwdriver”). Entities that are semantically similar to a negated entity tend to be judged as better alternatives (Kruszewski et al., 2016). In fact, Kruszewski et al. (2016) show that the cosine similarity scores between the distributional semantics representations of a negated noun and its potential alternatives are highly correlated with the negated noun-alternatives human plausibility ratings. In a series of cloze tasks, we show that negation likewise restricts the production of plausible alternatives to similar entities. Furthermore, completions to negative sentences appear to be even more restricted than completions to an affirmative conjunctive context, hinting at a peculiarity of negation.     

An Exploration of the Experiences of Elite Youth Footballers: The Impact of Organizational Culture

The present study explored how the organizational cultural experiences of elite youth footballers shaped their identity development and behavior. The first author occupied the position of sport psychology practitioner-researcher within 1 professional football club over 3 years. Traditional ethnographic research methods were employed, including observations, field notes, reflections, and informal interviews. A cultural sport psychology perspective on identity as a social construction and research on the cultural characteristics of professional football were used as frameworks to make sense of the data. Despite the introduction of the Elite Player Performance Plan in 2012, the traditional masculine culture of professional football dominated the studied club. Creative nonfiction vignettes revealed that youth players were encouraged to develop their self-stories focused on a single-minded dedication to professional football. The limited identity-related resources offered at both club and cultural level are detrimental for players in terms of their well-being and long-term psychological development. From the results of this study, we suggest that future sports psychology practice within professional football may best be delivered at an organizational level. However, for sport psychologists to be effective in this role, they must develop an understanding of the subcultural features and characteristics of the organization. In line with this, there would be great value in introducing a focus on organizational culture within sport psychology professional training and education routes.

Lay Summary: This paper explores the impact of the professional football culture on the psychological development of elite youth footballers. From the findings we suggest that sport psychology should be delivered at an organisational level.     

Finite Mixtures of Hidden Markov Models for Longitudinal Responses Subject to Drop out

Abstract

Drop out is a typical issue in longitudinal studies. When the missingness is non-ignorable, inference based on the observed data only may be biased. This paper is motivated by the Leiden 85+ study, a longitudinal study conducted to analyze the dynamics of cognitive functioning in the elderly. We account for dependence between longitudinal responses from the same subject using time-varying random effects associated with a heterogeneous hidden Markov chain. As several participants in the study drop out prematurely, we introduce a further random effect model to describe the missing data mechanism. The potential dependence between the random effects in the two equations (and, therefore, between the two processes) is introduced through a joint distribution specified via a latent structure approach. The application of the proposal to data from the Leiden 85+ study shows its effectiveness in modeling heterogeneous longitudinal patterns, possibly influenced by the missing data process. Results from a sensitivity analysis show the robustness of the estimates with respect to misspecification of the missing data mechanism. A simulation study provides evidence for the reliability of the inferential conclusions drawn from the analysis of the Leiden 85+ data.     

Penguins perceive variations of source- and filter-related vocal parameters of species-specific vocalisations

Animal Cognition - Animal vocalisations encode a wide range of biological information about the age, sex, body size, and social status of the emitter. Moreover, vocalisations play a significant...