How do Children Evaluate the Gossiper of Negative Gossip?

In this study, we investigated how children evaluate gossipers. There are two conflicting ways in which children evaluate the gossiper of negative gossip about another person. One is that they perceive the gossiper of negative gossip as bad because saying something negative about another person can be seen as indirect aggression. The other is that they perceive the gossiper of negative gossip as good because such gossip is beneficial to regulate their relationship with the gossip's target. To address the issue, we asked 7- and 8-year-olds to choose the gossiper of negative gossip or the gossiper of neutral gossip as a cooperative partner and to distribute resources between the gossipers. We found that the children often did not choose the gossiper of negative gossip as a partner and did not distribute many resources to her, indicating a perception of the negative gossiper as bad. This suggests that children's evaluation of a gossiper is influenced by the valence of gossip rather than the value of gossip.     

Audiovisual matching of lips and non-canonical sounds in 8-month-old infants

Japanese 8-month-olds were tested to investigate the matching of particular lip movements to corresponding non-canonical sounds, namely a bilabial trill (BT) and a whistle (WL). The results showed that the infants succeeded in lip-voice matching for the bilabial trill, whereas they failed to do so for the whistle.     

TMS suppression of right pars triangularis, but not pars opercularis, improves naming in aphasia

This study sought to discover if an optimum 1 cm² area in the non-damaged right hemisphere (RH) was present, which could temporarily improve naming in chronic, nonfluent aphasia patients when suppressed with repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS). Ten minutes of slow, 1 Hz rTMS was applied to suppress different RH ROIs in eight aphasia cases. Picture naming and response time (RT) were examined before, and immediately after rTMS. In aphasia patients, suppression of right pars triangularis (PTr) led to significant increase in pictures named, and significant decrease in RT. Suppression of right pars opercularis (POp), however, led to significant increase in RT, but no change in number of pictures named. Eight normals named all pictures correctly; similar to aphasia patients, RT significantly decreased following rTMS to suppress right PTr, versus right POp. Differential effects following suppression of right PTr versus right POp suggest different functional roles for these regions.     

Physical and motor skill training for children with intellectual disabilities

This study investigated the effectiveness of using special training machines for children with intellectual disabilities to strengthen their body's inner muscles and improve their ability to maintain standing posture and improve walking movement. The participants were 23 high school age boys with intellectual disabilities who had difficulties expressing greetings, and needed to be led by the hand when walking. Four special training machines were used for walking movements, for standing and walking balance, for leg-hip extension, and for ipsilateral movement in a sitting position. Each participant underwent 30 min. of training once a week over a 3-mo. period during school time. Body control ability required to perform each training exercise was improved over the training period. A significant improvement was observed in the 50-m dash, mean 10-m walk time, and 10-m obstacle course walk. The hip joint split angle showed a significant increase. Legal guardians all reported their child had "improved and/or progressed" for each of the targeted movements.     

No trust on the left side: Hemifacial asymmetries for trustworthiness and emotional expressions

People can discriminate cheaters from cooperators by their appearance. However, successful cheater detection can be thwarted by a posed smile, which cheaters display with greater emotional intensity than cooperators. The present study investigated the underlying neural and cognitive mechanisms of a posed smile, which cheaters use to conceal their anti-social attitude, in terms of hemifacial asymmetries of emotional expressions. Raters (50 women and 50 men) performed trustworthiness judgments on composite faces of cheaters and cooperators, operationally defined by the number of deceptions in an economic game. The left–left composites of cheaters were judged to be more trustworthy than the right–right composites when the models posed a happy expression. This left-hemiface advantage for the happy expression was not observed for cooperators. In addition, the left-hemiface advantage of cheaters disappeared for the angry expression. These results suggest that cheaters used the left hemiface, which is connected to the emotional side of the brain (i.e., the right hemisphere), more effectively than the right hemiface to conceal their anti-social attitude.     

Ultrafine grain development in copper during multidirectional forging at 195 K

Strain-induced evolution of ultrafine grains in pure copper was studied in multidirectional forging (MDF) at 195?K. The stress–strain behaviour was characterized by rapid strain hardening during early processing and the rate of strain hardening gradually decreased with straining, leading to an apparent steady-state flow at large cumulative strains of more than 5. The structural changes were associated with the development of high-density microshear bands crossed by MDF. The new fine grains 0.16?µm in size, which was smaller than the subgrain size evolved during early deformation, were evolved primarily at microshear band intersections, and then the new fine grains filled out the whole sample as the number of microshear band intersections increased at large strains. This is essentially similar to continuous dynamic recrystallization. The size of new grains can be expressed by a power law function of flow stress with a grain size exponent of about –0.3. The kinetics of the strain-induced grain evolution is analyzed and the mechanisms are discussed.