The Swedish National Adult Reading Test (NART-SWE): a test of premorbid IQ

The purpose of this study was to construct a Swedish version of the National Adult Reading Test (NART-SWE), a test for assessment of premorbid IQ, and to investigate its validity and reliability on healthy controls and patients with mild Alzheimer's disease. As Swedish pronunciation rules are fixed, NART-SWE was constructed using loan words. NART-SWE has satisfactory psychometric properties: Inter-rater and retest reliability as well as internal consistency are very high. The NART-SWE demonstrates face validity. In addition, high correlation with IQ was obtained. A significant model emerged when using NART-SWE to predict IQ. Furthermore, no significant differences were observed when comparing performance for healthy controls' with that of patients with Alzheimer's disease on NART-SWE. It does appear that reading of irregular words is intact in mild Alzheimer's disease.     

Measuring Latinos' perceptions of depression: a confirmatory factor analysis of the Illness Perception Questionnaire

This study examined the psychometric properties of the Revised Illness Perception Questionnaire adapted for a clinical sample of low-income Latinos suffering from depression. Participants (N = 339) were recruited from public primary care centers. Their average age was 49.73 years and the majority was foreign born females of either Mexican or Central American descent. Confirmatory factor analysis was used to test the factor structure of this measure. Construct and discriminant validity and internal consistency were evaluated. After the elimination of three items because of low factor loadings (< .40) and the specification of seven error covariances, a revised model composed of 24 items had adequate goodness-of-fit indices and factor loadings, supporting construct validity. Each of the subscales reported satisfactory internal consistency. Intercorrelations between the 5 illness perception factors provided initial support for the discriminant validity of these factors in the context of depression. The establishment of the psychometric properties of this adapted measure will pave the way for future studies examining the role illness perceptions play in the help seeking and management of depression among Latinos.     

What Renders a Witness Trustworthy? Ethical and Curricular Notes on a Mode of Educational Inquiry

Studies in Philosophy and Education - Bearing witness is a familiar if diversely employed concept. On the one hand, it concerns the accuracy and validity of practical affairs, for example in a...     

Online control of discrete action following visual perturbation

We examined the spatial and temporal limitations of the visual corrective process in goal-directed aiming, as well as gender differences in online control. An initial experiment was conducted to test the utility of a monocular switch procedure as a method of rapidly introducing a visual perturbation. The results revealed minimal effect of the monocular switch on movement time and the endpoint error. Following this control experiment, prismatic displacement was introduced at the initiation of and during the movement. In the third experiment, the prism was presented prior to movement initiation, and then removed at the beginning of or during the movement. Movement trajectories were most influenced by the early presentation and removal of the prism, and female performance was significantly more affected by both perturbations than male performance.     

Facets of psychopathy, heart rate variability and cognitive function

The aim of the present study was to investigate whether the four facets of Hare's Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R; Hare, 1991; Bolt, Hare, Vitale, & Newman, 2004) were related to physiological and cognitive mechanisms. Fifty-three male prisoners participated in this study. Physiological responses were measured as heart rate variability (HRV) and heart rate (HR). Cognitive functions were measured using a continuous performance test (CPT; California Computerized Assessment Package, Abbreviated version) and a working memory test (WMT); based on Baddeley & Hitch (1974). The regression analysis of the HRV revealed that the interpersonal facet explained most of the variance during baseline (28%), CPT (16%), and WMT (12%). This was also true for the HR data during baseline (28%), CPT (20%), WMT (10%), and recovery (13%). The antisocial facet explained 10% of the variance only during baseline. Subjects scoring high compared to low on the interpersonal facet also showed better cognitive functioning. The study suggests that the different facets were differently associated with both physiological and cognitive functions.     

An analogue study of the effects of Psychological Debriefing on eyewitness memory

Sixty-one participants from the community participated in a randomised controlled trial of group debriefing to assess the effect of this intervention upon memory for a stressful event. Participants were randomly allocated to one of three groups: debriefing; debriefing with an experimenter confederate present (who supplied three pieces of misinformation to the group regarding the stressful event); and a no-treatment control. All groups were shown a very stressful video and were again reviewed after 1 month. Members of the debriefing group where a confederate provided misinformation were more likely to recall this misinformation as fact than members of the other two groups. The debriefing group was also more accurate in their recall of peripheral content than the confederate group. Across all groups, participants were found to be more accurate at central rather than peripheral recall yet more confident for incorrect memories of the video than correct memories.     

"I've also experienced loss and fear": Effects of prior similar experience on empathy

Although it is frequently argued that empathy is increased by similar experiences, this idea has rarely been tested. This study investigated the relationship between empathy and prior similar experience. Participants read four different stories and rated the degree of empathy they felt. They also reported the extent to which they had prior similar experience of the events in the stories. We found that these self-reports of prior similar experience increased empathy for the persons in the stories. Similar experience may be an important situational antecedent for feeling empathy for another person. Pointing out similarities among experiences may be a fruitful means of training empathy.     

Brain dynamics of word familiarization in 20-month-olds: effects of productive vocabulary size

The present study investigated the brain mechanisms involved during young children's receptive familiarization with new words, and whether the dynamics of these mechanisms are related to the child's productive vocabulary size. To this end, we recorded event-related potentials (ERPs) from 20-month-old children in a pseudoword repetition task. Results revealed distinct patterns of repetition effects for children with large and small productive vocabularies. High producers showed evidence of recognizing the novel words already after three presentations, while the low producers needed five presentations to display a recognition effect. The familiarization process was manifested in the modulations of two components, the N200-400 and a later fronto-central component, which appeared to increase in amplitude until a certain level of encoding was reached and then decrease with further repetition. These findings suggest a relation between the onset of the productive vocabulary spurt and the rate of receptive word familiarization.     

Relationship between heart rate variability and cognitive function during threat of shock

The aim of the present study was to investigate the relationship between resting heart rate variability (HRV) and cognitive functions during threat of shock. A Continuous Performance Task and a Working Memory Task were used to measure cognitive functions. Sixty-five male participants from the Royal Norwegian Navy participated. HRV was measured during baseline, test conditions and recovery. Participants were randomly assigned into non-threat and threat groups. Based on the median split of the high frequency (HF) spectral power, groups were divided into two additional groups. Overall, the high HRV participants showed superior performance on cognitive tasks independent of non-threat or threat conditions. During threat condition the low HRV group showed improved performance. Thus, individuals with high HRV were more stress tolerant and resilient in the face of environmental changes. The results from the study might have implications with regard to performance in operational settings, but also for other fields of psychological research such as individual differences, anxiety and coping.     

The impact of regulatory focus on affective responses to social discrimination

The impact of individuals' regulatory focus and the domain of outcomes (non‐gains vs. losses) on the target's affective responses to social discrimination were tested. Based on regulatory focus theory (Higgins, 1997 ), it was predicted that a prevention focus would lead to more anger and agitation after social discrimination, because experiencing social discrimination is similar to experiencing failure. This pattern was predicted to be more pronounced when social discrimination was based on losses than when social discrimination was based on non‐gains (i.e., when the in‐group was evaluated more negatively vs. less positively compared to the out‐group). The results of three studies using chronic and situationally induced regulatory focus confirmed these predictions. No effect was found for the promotion focus. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.