Volunteerism in a Community‐Based Sample of Women Aged 50 to 80 Years1

This paper has 2 purposes: (a) to present the differences in demographic and health characteristics of older women volunteers and nonvolunteers in a community‐based sample; (b) to identify the motivations of current and past volunteers, as contrasted with those who have never volunteered. A population‐based survey was conducted with a sample of 1,104 women aged 50 to 80 years in the state of Washington. Nonvolunteers were less likely to be married and were slightly less likely to be White than were current or past volunteers. Demographic variables (e. g., age) and health status predicted level of reported motivation for volunteering. These data provide us with population‐based estimates of volunteering and motivations for older women.     

Judging the animacy of words: The influence of typicality and age of acquisition in a semantic decision task

The age at which members of a semantic category are learned (age of acquisition), the typicality they demonstrate within their corresponding category, and the semantic domain to which they belong (living, non-living) are known to influence the speed and accuracy of lexical/semantic processing. So far, only a few studies have looked at the origin of age of acquisition and its interdependence with typicality and semantic domain within the same experimental design. Twenty adult participants performed an animacy decision task in which nouns were classified according to their semantic domain as being living or non-living. Response times were influenced by the independent main effects of each parameter: typicality, age of acquisition, semantic domain, and frequency. However, there were no interactions. The results are discussed with respect to recent models concerning the origin of age of acquisition effects.     

The association between avoidant personality traits and motor impairment in a population-based sample of 11-12-year-old children

The aim of the study was to examine the association between avoidant personality traits and motor impairment in childhood. The relationship between other personality traits and motor function was also explored. A population-based screened sample of 150 11-12-year-old children (50 socially anxious, 50 impulsive and 50 nonsocially anxious/nonimpulsive) was assessed using the Coolidge Personality and Neuropsycho- logical Inventory for Children (CPNI) and the Motor Assessment Battery for Children (MABC). Among the personality scales, avoidant personality traits were most strongly associated with motor impairment. Children with clinically avoidant personality traits (n = 31) showed a significantly poorer motor performance than children in the nonclinical avoidance group (n = 119). About 50% of the children with clinical avoidance obtained a motor score below the 5th percentile. No gender differences in motor performance were found in the clinical avoidance group. More research on the impact of motor impairment on psychological development is needed.     

Effects of different substance misuse in genital reflexes of paradoxical sleep deprived male rats

As psychostimulants are widely abused, their neurochemical and behavioral effects have been extensively studied for many years. Our previous data demonstrate that paradoxical sleep deprivation (PSD) enhances drug-induced penile erection and ejaculation. PSD in association to drugs of abuse like cocaine potentiated genital reflexes in male rats. In this sense, the present study investigated if three substances abused by young people--such as Delta(9)-tetrahydrocannabinol (Delta(9)THC), alcohol and caffeine--had any significant effect on the genital reflexes in PSD rats. The results indicated that PSD induced erection in 50% of the rats and 20% ejaculated. In addition, there was no significant alteration in the number of animals exhibiting genital reflexes neither on the frequency of these behaviors when challenged with Delta(9)-THC or alcohol or caffeine after 96 h of PSD. These findings show that Delta(9)THC, alcohol and caffeine when administrated isolated did not produce alterations in genital reflexes in the PSD male rats.     

Participatory sense-making

As yet, there is no enactive account of social cognition. This paper extends the enactive concept of sense-making into the social domain. It takes as its departure point the process of interaction between individuals in a social encounter. It is a well-established finding that individuals can and generally do coordinate their movements and utterances in such situations. We argue that the interaction process can take on a form of autonomy. This allows us to reframe the problem of social cognition as that of how meaning is generated and transformed in the interplay between the unfolding interaction process and the individuals engaged in it. The notion of sense-making in this realm becomes participatory sense-making. The onus of social understanding thus moves away from strictly the individual only.

Social motivation and the use of distal,but not local,featural cues are related to ranging behavior in free-range chickens (Gallus gallus domesticus)

Animal Cognition - Animals can navigate an environment relying on different sources of information, such as geometrical or featural cues. The favoring of one type of information over another...     

The relationship between monoaminergic gene expression,learning, and optimism in red junglefowl chicks

Animal Cognition - Intra-species cognitive variation is commonly observed, but explanations for why individuals within a species differ in cognition are still understudied and not yet clear....     

Expression of negative affect during face‐to‐face interaction: a double video study of young infants' sensitivity to social contingency

The purpose was to assess infants' sensitivity to social contingency, taking affective state into account, during face‐to‐face interaction with the mother in a double video set‐up. Infants' behaviour during three sequences of live face‐to‐face interaction were compared to two sequences where the interaction between the infant and the mother was set out of phase, by presenting either the infant or the mother with a replay of their partners' behaviour during earlier live interaction. We found a significant negative correlation between the infant's degree of negative affect and the average time of looking at the mother during the live sequences. A median split was calculated to separate the infants into a high‐negative‐affect group and a low‐negative‐affect group on the basis of their emotional responses during the experiment. The low‐negative‐affect infants looked significantly more at their mothers than other foci during the live but not the replay sequences, while the high‐negative‐affect infants did not show this difference. The results suggest that 2–4‐month old infants are able to distinguish between experimental distortion of contingent aspects in live and replay sequences, but that this effect of the replay condition may not be shown by moderate to highly distressed infants. Our findings underline the importance of taking infants' emotional state into account in experiments intended to assess their capacity for intersubjective communication. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.