Country-specific or convergent? A typology of immigrant policies in Western Europe

This article raises the question as to whether European immigrant policies are shaped by country-specific traditions of nation-state building or whether, on the contrary, they are converging toward the same policy goals. On the basis of four case studies of 30 years of policy development (United Kingdom, France, Germany, and the Netherlands), the authors develop a broad typology of immigrant policies in Western Europe. This typology shows that in the shadow of the debate on different “integration models”, Western European countries have implemented a whole range of similar immigrant policies. However, in policy fields touching the core of historically established notions of how state and society should relate to each other—notably the struggle against discrimination and the opening of public institutions to immigrants—significant differences persist.     

Comparison of Mothers', Fathers', and Teachers' Reports on Problem Behavior in 5- to 6-Year-Old Children

Evidence exists that there is low agreement between multiple informants reporting on children's and adolescents' behavior problems. Few studies, however, focus on agreement between informants in specific age groups. This study examined correspondence and disagreement between mother, father, and teacher reports of problem behavior by analyzing CBCL and TRF data of 2 nonclinical samples of 5- to 6-year-old preschool children (N = 424). Findings indicated that interrater agreement was low to moderate. This was shown by the intercorrelations, the explained variance in regression analyses and the little overlap in the number of children rated as behaviorally disturbed by all 3 informants. Agreement between mother and father reports was highest, whereas agreement between mother and teacher reports was lowest. Disagreement between informants was highest for internalizing problems. Potential explanations for the lack of agreement are discussed. Guidelines are formulated to refine assessment and optimize clinical decision-making processes.     

The effect of category learning on the representation of shape: dimensions can be biased but not differentiated

Recent studies have suggested a profound influence of category learning on visual perception, resulting in independent processing of previously integral dimensions. The authors reinvestigate this issue for shape dimensions. They first extend previous findings that some shape dimensions (aspect ratio and curvature) are processed in a separable way, whereas others (radial frequency components) are not. They then show that a category-learning phase improved the discrimination of a relevant with respect to an irrelevant dimension, but only for separable dimensions. No similar effect was found on the relative sensitivity for integral shape dimensions. Thus, category learning is capable of biasing separable shape dimensions but does not alter the status of dimensions in the visual system as either separable or integral.     

You Wouldn’t Like Me When I’m Angry: A Daily Diary Study of Displaced Online Aggression in Dual-Earner Couples

Modern technologies can aid working processes as well as provide individuals with an opportunity to connect and form interpersonal relationships. However, they can also create a context for displaced aggression. In this study, we examine whether people experiencing work stressors may engage in online antisocial behavioral as a means of venting their negative emotions. Specifically, we investigate whether experiencing stressors at work fuels anger in the private context and whether this anger triggers subsequent displaced aggression in the form of antisocial online behavior (AOB) throughout the evening. Additionally, we examine the crossover of anger to AOB in couples in their private context. We conducted a diary study amongst 95 dual-earner couples, twice a day, during five consecutive working days. Results confirmed that men’s daily work stressors spilled over to their private context in the form of anger after work and AOB throughout the evening. No crossover effects were found from their partner. For women, a crossover effect was found of their partner’s work stressors and anger on their own AOB. These results demonstrate gender differences in displaced online aggression.     

Equal performance but distinct behaviors: sex differences in a novel object recognition task and spatial maze in a highly social cichlid fish

Animal Cognition - Sex differences in behavior and cognition can be driven by differential selection pressures from the environment and in the underlying neuromolecular mechanisms of...     

Dissociative style and individual differences in verbal working memory span

Dissociative style is mostly studied as a risk factor for dissociative pathology, but it may also reflect a fundamental characteristic of healthy information processing. Due to the close link between attention and working memory and the previous finding of enhanced attentional abilities with a high dissociative style, a positive relationship was also expected between dissociative style and verbal working memory span. In a sample of 119 psychology students, it was found that the verbal span of the high-dissociative group was about half a word larger than of the medium and low-dissociative groups. It is suggested that dissociative style may be one of only very few individual differences that is directly relevant to consciousness research.     

Loading working memory enhances affective priming

Stronger affective priming (Murphy & Zajonc, 1993) with suboptimal (i.e., reduced consciousness) than with optimal (i.e., full consciousness) prime presentation suggests that nonconscious processes form an important part of emotions. Merikle and Joordens (1997) have argued that both impoverished presentation and divided attention can produce suboptimal conditions and result in parallel effects. We manipulated attention by means of a concurrent working memory load while keeping presentation duration constant, as participants evaluated Japanese ideographs that were preceded by happy, neutral, or angry faces (affective priming) and male or female faces (nonaffective priming). In contrast to nonaffective priming, affective priming was larger with divided attention than with focused attention. It is concluded that manipulations of stimulus quality and of attention can both be used to probe the distinction between conscious and nonconscious processes and that the highest chances of obtaining the pattern of stronger priming with suboptimal presentation than with optimal presentation occur in the affective domain.     

Why aren’t all deep superior colliculus neurons multisensory? A Bayes’ ratio analysis

Multisensory neurons in the deep superior colliculus (SC) show response enhancement to cross-modal stimuli that coincide in time and space. However, multisensory SC neurons respond to unimodal input as well. It is thus legitimate to ask why not all deep SC neurons are multisensory or, at least, develop multisensory behavior during an organism's maturation. The novel answer given here derives from a signal detection theory perspective. A Bayes' ratio model of multisensory enhancement is suggested. It holds that deep SC neurons operate under the Bayes' ratio rule, which guarantees optimal performance-that is, it maximizes the probability of target detection while minimizing the false alarm rate. It is shown that optimal performance of multisensory neurons vis-à-vis cross-modal stimuli implies, at the same time, that modality-specific neurons will outperform multisensory neurons in processing unimodal targets. Thus, only the existence of both multisensory and modality-specific neurons allows optimal performance when targets of one or several modalities may occur.