Relationships matter in personality development: evidence from an 8-year longitudinal study across young adulthood

Personality-relationship transactions were investigated in a general population sample of young German adults with three assessments over 8 years. Four general findings were obtained. First, personality development was characterized by substantive individual differences in change. Second, bivariate latent growth models indicated that individual differences in personality change were substantially associated with change in peer and family relationships. Third, forming a partner relationship for the first time moderated the maturation of personality. This finding was replicated over two subsequent time intervals with independent subgroups. Fourth, higher neuroticism and higher sociability predicted which of the singles began a partner relationship during the next 8 years. The results confirm that individual differences in personality development predict and result from life transitions and relationship experiences.     

The Logic of Theory Assessment

This paper starts by indicating the analysis of Hempel’s conditions of adequacy for any relation of confirmation (Hempel, 1945) as presented in Huber (submitted). There I argue contra Carnap (1962, Section 87) that Hempel felt the need for two concepts of confirmation: one aiming at plausible theories and another aiming at informative theories. However, he also realized that these two concepts are conflicting, and he gave up the concept of confirmation aiming at informative theories. The main part of the paper consists in working out the claim that one can have Hempel’s cake and eat it too — in the sense that there is a logic of theory assessment that takes into account both of the two conflicting aspects of plausibility and informativeness. According to the semantics of this logic, α is an acceptable theory for evidence β if and only if α is both sufficiently plausible given β and sufficiently informative about β. This is spelt out in terms of ranking functions (Spohn, 1988) and shown to represent the syntactically specified notion of an assessment relation. The paper then compares these acceptability relations to explanatory and confirmatory consequence relations (Flach, 2000) as well as to nonmonotonic consequence relations (Kraus et al., 1990). It concludes by relating the plausibility-informativeness approach to Carnap’s positive relevance account, thereby shedding new light on Carnap’s analysis as well as solving another problem of confirmation theory. A precursor of this paper has appeared as “The Logic of Confirmation and Theory Assessment” in L. Běhounek & M. Bílková (eds.), The Logica Yearbook 2004, Prague: Filosofia, 2005, 161–176.     

Metachromatic leukodystrophy and nonverbal learning disability: neuropsychological and neuroradiological findings in heterozygous carriers.

Metachromatic leukodystrophy (MLD) is an autosomal recessive neurodegenerative disorder due to deficiency of the enzyme arylsulfatase A that leads to progressive, diffuse demyelination. The syndrome of nonverbal learning disability has been attributed to white matter abnormality and has been reported in children with this disorder and in some healthy family member carriers of gene. We examined the neuropsychologic profiles and MRIs of eight members of the family of a 7-year-old girl with this disease, all of whom were heterozygous carriers of the mutation and five of whom were also carriers of the MLD pseudodeficiency gene. All had low normal levels of arylsulfatase A, and seven of the eight had average or better profiles across all assessed neuropsychological domains. The patient's younger sister had a profile with features of the syndrome of nonverbal learning disability despite a normal MRI, whereas two members with minor white matter findings did not. This family does not provide evidence for the syndrome of nonverbal learning disability in heterozygous carriers of the gene for MLD, even when associated with the MLD pseudodeficiency gene.     

Mu rhythm suppression is associated with the classification of emotion in faces

The mirror neuron system (MNS) has been mooted as a crucial component underlying human social cognition. Initial evidence based on functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) suggests that the MNS plays a role in emotion classification, but further confirmation and convergent evidence is needed. This study employed electroencephalography (EEG) to examine modulations in the mu rhythm associated with the inference of emotions from facial expressions. It was hypothesised that mu suppression would be associated with classifying the emotion portrayed by facial expressions. Nineteen participants viewed pictures of facial expressions or emotion words and were asked to either match the stimulus to an emotion word or to passively observe. Mu activity following stimulus presentation was localised using a 3-D distributed inverse solution, and compared between conditions. Subtractive logic was used to isolate the specific processes of interest. Comparisons of source localisation images between conditions revealed that there was mu suppression associated with recognising emotion from faces, thereby supporting our hypothesis. Further analyses confirmed that those effects were not due to activity associated with the motor response or the observation of facial expressions, offering further support for the hypotheses. This study provides important convergent evidence for the involvement of the MNS in the inference of emotion from facial expressions.     

A psychological approach to human voluntary movement

The author argues that movements are planned, executed, and stored in memory as perceptible events, without regard to efferent patterns. Spontaneous bimanual coordination phenomena are hypothesized to originate on a perceptual-cognitive level, with the muscles automatically tuned in service to preferred perceptible movement properties. The perceptual-cognitive system is hypothesized to control skilled complex movements as well. In perceptual-cognitive control, the full potential of the perceptual-cognitive system could be exploited. Thus, movements could be enormously flexible, with a strong potential for improvisation and creativity. An effective representation might be organized in a surprisingly sparse and economic way. In sum, the author argues that a psychological approach is most promising as a possible unifying perspective for understanding human voluntary movements.     

Strategic influence on the time course of predictive inferences in reading

In the present study, we investigated how reading strategies affect the time course of online predictive inferences. Participants read sentences under instructions either to anticipate the outcomes of described events or to understand the sentences. These were followed by a target word to be named, with stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs) of 500 or 1,000 msec (50- or 550-msec interstimulus interval, respectively). Sentences either were predictive of events or were lexically matched control sentences. There was facilitation in naming latencies for predictable target words in the strategic-anticipation condition at both SOAs, but not in the read-to-understand condition, with a significant improvement in the former condition in comparison with the latter. This suggests that predictive inferences, which are typically considered to be resource demanding, can be speeded up by specific goals in reading. Moreover, this can occur at no cost to comprehension of explicit information, as was revealed by a comprehension test.