Latent class analysis of anxiety and depressive symptoms of the Youth Self-Report in a general population sample of young adolescents

This study examined whether distinct groups of young adolescents with mainly anxiety or mainly depression could be identified in a general population sample. Latent class analysis was used on self-report ratings of DSM-IV symptoms of anxiety and depressive disorders, because it was hypothesized that these ratings provide a bigger chance to identify distinct groups than parent ratings of symptoms that are poorly associated with DSM-IV. Results from exploratory and confirmatory latent class analysis showed that only very small numbers of young adolescents had mainly anxiety or mainly depressive symptoms. Instead, a five-group model fitted the data best. These five groups contained young adolescents who either had a high, intermediate, or low probability to have comorbid symptoms of anxiety and depression. It was concluded that symptoms of DSM-IV anxiety and depressive disorders co-occur in young adolescents, and that latent class analysis on items that capture also severe symptoms like suicidal thoughts are needed to derive groups with specific comorbidity patterns in a general population sample.     

Is the genetic structure of human personality universal? A cross-cultural twin study from North America, Europe, and Asia

This study examined whether universality of the 5-factor model (FFM) of personality operationalized by the Revised NEO Personality Inventory is due to genetic influences that are invariant across diverse nations. Factor analyses were conducted on matrices of phenotypic, genetic, and environmental correlations estimated in a sample of 1,209 monozygotic and 701 dizygotic twin pairs from Canada, Germany, and Japan. Five genetic and environmental factors were extracted for each sample. High congruence coefficients were observed when phenotypic, genetic, and environmental factors were compared in each sample as well as when each factor was compared across samples. These results suggest that the FFM has a solid biological basis and may represent a common heritage of the human species.     

When memory fails, intuition reigns: midazolam enhances implicit inference in humans

People often make logically sound decisions using explicit reasoning strategies, but sometimes it pays to rely on more implicit "gut-level" intuition. The transitive inference paradigm has been widely used as a test of explicit logical reasoning in animals and humans, but it can also be solved in a more implicit manner. Some researchers have argued that the hippocampus supports relational memories required for making logical inferences. Here we show that the benzodiazepene midazolam, which inactivates the hippocampus, causes profound explicit memory deficits in healthy participants, but enhances their ability in making implicit transitive inferences. These results are consistent with neurocomputational models of the basal ganglia-dopamine system that learn to make decisions through positive and negative reinforcement. We suggest that disengaging the hippocampal explicit memory system can be advantageous for this more implicit form of learning.     

Implications of direct and indirect range restriction for meta-analysis methods and findings

Range restriction in most data sets is indirect, but the meta-analysis methods used to date have applied the correction for direct range restriction to data in which range restriction is indirect. The authors show that this results in substantial undercorrections for the effects of range restriction, and they present meta-analysis methods for making accurate corrections when range restriction is indirect. Applying these methods to a well-known large-sample empirical database, the authors estimate that previous meta-analyses have underestimated the correlation between general mental ability and job performance by about 25%, indicating that this is potentially an important methodological issue in meta-analysis in general.     

Walter Miles, Pop Warner, B. C. Graves, and the psychology of football

In 1926-1927, a graduate student, B. C. Graves, working with Stanford University psychologist Walter Miles and legendary football coach Pop Warner, conducted an investigation of variations in signal calling as they affected the charging times of football players. The study was one of two that involved Miles and the ingenious multiple chronograph that he had invented to time the reactions of seven players simultaneously. These studies represented a brief digression in the career of Miles, who certainly was no sport psychologist. They tell of an interesting collaboration between scientist and coaches that produced one of the richest studies in sport psychology in the first half of the twentieth century.     

Neural modeling and imaging of the cortical interactions underlying syllable production

This paper describes a neural model of speech acquisition and production that accounts for a wide range of acoustic, kinematic, and neuroimaging data concerning the control of speech movements. The model is a neural network whose components correspond to regions of the cerebral cortex and cerebellum, including premotor, motor, auditory, and somatosensory cortical areas. Computer simulations of the model verify its ability to account for compensation to lip and jaw perturbations during speech. Specific anatomical locations of the model's components are estimated, and these estimates are used to simulate fMRI experiments of simple syllable production.     

Feature-based memory-driven attentional capture: visual working memory content affects visual attention

In 7 experiments, the authors explored whether visual attention (the ability to select relevant visual information) and visual working memory (the ability to retain relevant visual information) share the same content representations. The presence of singleton distractors interfered more strongly with a visual search task when it was accompanied by an additional memory task. Singleton distractors interfered even more when they were identical or related to the object held in memory, but only when it was difficult to verbalize the memory content. Furthermore, this content-specific interaction occurred for features that were relevant to the memory task but not for irrelevant features of the same object or for once-remembered objects that could be forgotten. Finally, memory-related distractors attracted more eye movements but did not result in longer fixations. The results demonstrate memory-driven attentional capture on the basis of content-specific representations.     

Communication between clergy and laity

Pastoral Psychology -     

Modeling human performance in statistical word segmentation

The ability to discover groupings in continuous stimuli on the basis of distributional information is present across species and across perceptual modalities. We investigate the nature of the computations underlying this ability using statistical word segmentation experiments in which we vary the length of sentences, the amount of exposure, and the number of words in the languages being learned. Although the results are intuitive from the perspective of a language learner (longer sentences, less training, and a larger language all make learning more difficult), standard computational proposals fail to capture several of these results. We describe how probabilistic models of segmentation can be modified to take into account some notion of memory or resource limitations in order to provide a closer match to human performance.