Maternal Expectancy Versus Objective Measures of Child Skill: Evidence for Absence of Positive Bias in Mothers’ Expectations of Children with Internalizing Disorders

Parents of anxious children are thought to be more attuned to threat, which might translate into less positive bias in parental report of child coping and ability, unlike parents of non-anxious children. Maternal expectancy bias was examined in a sample of 43 clinically anxious (51 % female), 30 clinically anxious/depressed (50 % female), and 44 non-clinical control children (46 % female), 8–14 years of age. When compared to an objective observer’s ratings of the children, mothers of non-clinical children demonstrated a positive bias (i.e., over-rated their children’s performance) for both ratings of expected speech performance in absolute terms and relative to peers. Mothers in the clinical groups did not exhibit this positive expectancy bias. Moreover, mothers of clinical children reported lower expectations in absolute terms and relative to peers than mothers of non-clinical children. The data suggest that mothers of clinical children held accurate expectations for child performance when compared to the gold standard of an objective observer.     

Abstracting and extracting: Causal coherence and the development of the life story

This study compared life story memories of emerging adults and early adolescents to other autobiographical memories. Participants described three scenes of their respective life stories, a high point, low point, and turning point narrative, and described the connections between them in a fourth narrative. Participants also related four autobiographical narratives from corresponding time periods for comparison. Narratives were analysed for two measures of causal coherence, narrative complexity and meaning making, and for thematic coherence. Life story narratives contained more self-related lessons and insights and greater recognition of complexity than non-life-story narratives, but these differences were confined to narratives of turning points and connections between events. Thematic connections between narratives were more abstract and self-related in life story narratives. Emerging adults' narratives, when compared to those of early adolescents, showed more evidence of self-related abstract thinking and recognition of multiple dimensions. Findings indicate consistent ways in which life story memories differ from other autobiographic memories, and show evidence of development in adolescence.     

Learning associations between action and perception: effects of incompatible training on body part and spatial priming

Observation of another person executing an action primes the same action in the observer's motor system. Recent evidence has shown that these priming effects are flexible, where training of new associations, such as making a foot response when viewing a moving hand, can reduce standard action priming effects (Gillmeister, Catmur, Liepelt, Brass, & Heyes, 2008). Previously, these effects were obtained after explicit learning tasks in which the trained action was cued by the content of a visual stimulus. Here we report similar learning processes in an implicit task in which the participant's action is self-selected, and subsequent visual effects are determined by the nature of that action. Importantly, we show that these learning processes are specific to associations between actions and viewed body parts, in that incompatible spatial training did not influence body part or spatial priming effects. Our results are consistent with models of visuomotor learning that place particular emphasis on the repeated experience of watching oneself perform an action.     

Resolving ambiguous behavioral intentions by means of involuntary prioritization of gaze processing

Anticipation of others' actions is of paramount importance in social interactions. Cues such as gaze direction and facial expressions can be informative, but can also produce ambiguity with respect to others' intentions. We investigated the combined effect of an actor's gaze and expression on judgments made by observers about the end-point of the actor's head rotation toward the observer. Expressions of approach gave rise to an unambiguous intention to move toward the observer, while expressions of avoidance gave rise to an ambiguous behavioral intention (as the expression and motion cues were in conflict). In the ambiguous condition, observers overestimated how far the actor's head had rotated when the actor's gaze was directed ahead of head rotation (compared to congruent or lagging behind). In the unambiguous condition the estimations were not influenced by the gaze manipulation. These results show that social cue integration does not follow simple additive rules, and suggests that the involuntary allocation of attention to another's gaze depends on the perceived ambiguity of the agent's behavioral intentions.     

The Metacognitive Model of Generalized Anxiety Disorder in Children and Adolescents

Worry is a common phenomenon in children and adolescents, with some experiencing excessive worries that cause significant distress and interference. The metacognitive model of generalized anxiety disorder (Wells 1995, 2009) was developed to explain cognitive processes associated with pathological worry in adults, particularly the role of positive and negative beliefs about worry. This review evaluates the application of the model in understanding child and adolescent worry. Other key issues reviewed include the link between cognitive and metacognitive development and worry, and the measurement of worry and metacognitive worry in young people. Implications of these findings and directions for future research are discussed.