Time-based prospective remembering: Interference and facilitation in a dual task

The aim of this study was to analyse prospective memory behaviour when people have to fulfil two different intentions whose retention intervals partially overlapped. More specifically, the purpose of the study was to explore the effects of a secondary PM task (either time-based or event-based) on performance of a main time-based PM task. Four embedded conditions were tested: two event-based ones and two time-based ones. The time- and event-based interpolated tasks differed in how closely their target time was to the 20-minute response required by the main time-based task (16th and 19th min., respectively). The results indicated that when a main time-based prospective memory task shares a portion of the retention interval with a second time-based prospective task, this overlapping facilitated performance on the main task. However, the interpolated tasks appeared to be affected by the moment in which they were administered during the execution of the main time-based task. More specifically, a decrease in the interpolated task performance was observed when this was time-based and had to be executed very closely to the target time of the main task. On the contrary, when the two tasks were different (event-based vs. time-based), there was neither interference, nor facilitation.     

The Relevance of Multiculturalism for Aging

Though multiculturalists focus on race and minority status, issues of central importance to the aged, multiculturalism has not infiltrated the gerontology literature. However, since the so-called natural stages of life are cultural formations, each one a valuable creation, the topic of aging would certainly benefit from a connection to multiculturalism and its critique of the demands of assimilation.     

The Relative Contribution of Diagnostic and Psychosocial Variables to Severity of Suicidal Ideation

The present study examined the relative contribution of diagnostic and psychosocial factors to the prediction of severity of suicidal ideation in a sample of 78 college students. Using hierarchical regression analyses to control for each set of factors, psychosocial variables were found to consistently predict level of suicidal ideation. In contrast, diagnostic variables including diagnosis of substance abuse and composite scores for depression and anxiety were unrelated to level of suicidality. An examination of individual diagnoses revealed no predictable relationships with severity of suicidality in this population. The results were discussed from several methodological viewpoints.     

Why are damped sounds perceived as shorter than ramped sounds?

Hearing is the most accurate sense for perceiving duration. However, rarely it produces inaccurate estimates of duration, for example when it compares the subjective duration of tones that are increasing in intensity over time (i.e., ramped) with that of tones that are decreasing in intensity over time (i.e., damped). The literature reports that the damped tones are perceived as much being shorter than the ramped tones of the same length. The short subjective duration of damped tones may originate from a decay suppression mechanism that parses the source-informative part of many natural sounds (i.e., the beginning) from the less informative part of them (the decay): listeners may interpret the tail of damped tones like an echo or like the decay portion of an impact sound and exclude it from the account of the duration of the tone. In the natural soundscape, the tail of sounds produced in reverberant environments and the tail of impact sounds have a frequency content that is constant throughout the sound’s duration. Here, the carriers used for ramped and damped sounds were a tone constant in frequency and a tone modulated in frequency. The frequency modulation was introduced to prevent the listener from interpreting the tail of these tones as the result of reverberation or the decay portion of an impact sound. Frequency constant damped tones were largely underestimated in duration whereas frequency modulated ones were not (or were only slightly), demonstrating that the decay suppression mechanism is a worthy explanation for the short subjective duration of damped tones.

     

The transmission of attachment across generations: The state of art and new theoretical perspectives

The paper reviews the body of research testing the intergenerational transmission of attachment and the theoretical shift from the linear or mediation model (van IJzendoorn, 1995), according to which parental sensitivity is the main factor responsible for the correspondence between maternal and infant's attachment, to the ecological model of the transmission of attachment (van IJzendoorn & Bakermans‐Kranenburg, 1997). This latter model has prompted researchers, over time, to identify potential mediators, other than caregiver's sensitivity, of the established association between parental representations regarding attachment and infant's attachment, as well as the potential moderators of the transmission process. Each of these two research domains will be carefully explored; lastly new perspectives on the intergenerational transmission of attachment and relevant areas of research needing more investigation are highlighted.     

The Emergence of Creativity

Creativity is one of the central dimensions of human achievement and social development and has always fascinated scientists and non-scientists alike. But what is the essential nature of creativity? And what is the role of consciousness in the emergence of creativity? If it is true that it has been explored in many aspects in the cognitive and neurobiological field, it is also true that the lore chest—from which the conscious mind through unconscious mechanisms extracts the rough material that is then brought to the surface—has been less investigated. The purpose of this article is to give an account of how the multiplicity of levels of awareness is made possible by a spontaneous order that has nothing to do with a monolithic view of creativity.     

Immigration,language proficiency,and autobiographical memories: Lifespan distribution and second-language access

This investigation examined two controversies in the autobiographical literature: how cross-language immigration affects the distribution of autobiographical memories across the lifespan and under what circumstances language-dependent recall is observed. Both Spanish/English bilingual immigrants and English monolingual non-immigrants participated in a cue word study, with the bilingual sample taking part in a within-subject language manipulation. The expected bump in the number of memories from early life was observed for non-immigrants but not immigrants, who reported more memories for events surrounding immigration. Aspects of the methodology addressed possible reasons for past discrepant findings. Language-dependent recall was influenced by second-language proficiency. Results were interpreted as evidence that bilinguals with high second-language proficiency, in contrast to those with lower second-language proficiency, access a single conceptual store through either language. The final multi-level model predicting language-dependent recall, including second-language proficiency, age of immigration, internal language, and cue word language, explained ¾ of the between-person variance and ¹/₅ of the within-person variance. We arrive at two conclusions. First, major life transitions influence the distribution of memories. Second, concept representation across multiple languages follows a developmental model. In addition, the results underscore the importance of considering language experience in research involving memory reports.     

The Bears Family Projective Test: evaluating stories of children with emotional difficulties

The aim of this study was to describe and analyze the storytelling of children with emotional difficulties. Forty children with emotional and relational difficulties (inhibited and impulsive), ages between 5.5 and 9.4 years old, were assessed by a multiaxial procedure and the bears family projective test. The bears family test is a constructive-thematic-projective method based on an anthropomorphic family of bears that children can manipulate to tell a story. The stories of 40 children without emotional difficulties (matched by IQ, socio-economic status, and gender) and 322 typically developing children, aged between four and 10 years old, were used as a reference for comparisons. Results indicated that the stories of children with emotional difficulties showed many unsolved problematic events, unclear characters, negative relationships, and negative behaviors. Unlike the stories of children without emotional difficulties, positive contents didn't prevail over negative, and there wasn't a positive compensation for negative elements.     

Emotional language processing: how mood affects integration processes during discourse comprehension

This research tests whether mood affects semantic processing during discourse comprehension by facilitating integration of information congruent with moods’ valence. Participants in happy, sad, or neutral moods listened to stories with positive or negative endings during EEG recording. N400 peak amplitudes showed mood congruence for happy and sad participants: endings incongruent with participants’ moods demonstrated larger peaks. Happy and neutral moods exhibited larger peaks for negative endings, thus showing a similarity between negativity bias (neutral mood) and mood congruence (happy mood). Mood congruence resulted in differential processing of negative information: happy mood showed larger amplitudes for negative endings than neutral mood, and sad mood showed smaller amplitudes. N400 peaks were also sensitive to whether ending valence was communicated directly or as a result of inference. This effect was moderately modulated by mood. In conclusion, the notion of context for discourse processing should include comprehenders’ affective states preceding language processing.