ESCOLEX: A grade-level lexical database from European Portuguese elementary to middle school textbooks

In this article, we introduce ESCOLEX, the first European Portuguese children’s lexical database with grade-level-adjusted word frequency statistics. Computed from a 3.2-million-word corpus, ESCOLEX provides 48,381 word forms extracted from 171 elementary and middle school textbooks for 6- to 11-year-old children attending the first six grades in the Portuguese educational system. Like other children’s grade-level databases (e.g., Carroll, Davies, & Richman, 1971; Corral, Ferrero, & Goikoetxea, Behavior Research Methods, 41, 1009–1017, 2009; Lété, Sprenger-Charolles, & Colé, Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, & Computers, 36, 156–166, 2004; Zeno, Ivens, Millard, Duvvuri, 1995), ESCOLEX provides four frequency indices for each grade: overall word frequency (F), index of dispersion across the selected textbooks (D), estimated frequency per million words (U), and standard frequency index (SFI). It also provides a new measure, contextual diversity (CD). In addition, the number of letters in the word and its part(s) of speech, number of syllables, syllable structure, and adult frequencies taken from P-PAL (a European Portuguese corpus-based lexical database; Soares, Comesaña, Iriarte, Almeida, Simões, Costa, …, Machado, 2010; Soares, Iriarte, Almeida, Simões, Costa, França, …, Comesaña, in press) are provided. ESCOLEX will be a useful tool both for researchers interested in language processing and development and for professionals in need of verbal materials adjusted to children’s developmental stages. ESCOLEX can be downloaded along with this article or from http://p-pal.di.uminho.pt/about/databases.     

The Relationships Among Parental Anxiety, Parenting, and Children’s Anxiety: The Mediating Effects of Children’s Cognitive Vulnerabilities

Theoretical models have emphasized the roles played by parental anxiety and behavior in the development of childhood anxiety problems. Little is known regarding the differential impacts of mothers and fathers or regarding the processes that mediate these influences. The present study examines the relationships between maternal and paternal trait anxiety, overprotection, and emotional support on the one hand and anxiety symptoms in children on the other hand. This study also explores the mediating role of children’s cognitive vulnerabilities to anxiety disorders in the relationship between parental variables and children’s anxiety. A sample of 80 children and their parents (fathers and mothers), selected from an initial screening of 905 school-aged children, participated in this study. The results indicate that both parents had unique influences on children’s anxiety symptoms: maternal trait anxiety and paternal overprotection and concern were found to independently and positively contribute to children’s anxiety. Furthermore, children’s interpretative biases mediated the relation between maternal trait anxiety and children’s anxiety symptoms. The results of this study underline the importance of considering both paternal and maternal factors in the development of children’s anxiety problems. These findings also have implications for theoretical models of the etiology of anxiety and for the treatment of these problems in children.     

Gender‐typing of leadership: Evaluations of real and ideal managers

This research focuses on female underrepresentation in managerial positions. Specifically, two studies examine gender‐typing for managerial roles in Spain using ratings for real and ideal managers. In addition, we analyse the existence of same‐gender bias on evaluations of the behavior of actual leaders. In the first study, 195 Spanish workers evaluate the extent to which gender‐stereotypical traits are important for becoming a successful middle manager in three conditions (female managers, male managers, and managers in general). In the second study, we explore the degree to which the behavior of real Spanish managers is gender‐typed and the existence of same‐gender bias on leadership styles – transformational, transactional and avoidant/passive – and on leadership outcomes – effectiveness, extra effort and satisfaction – from the perspective of subordinates (N = 605). Overall, the results demonstrate that masculine characteristics were rated as more important than feminine characteristics for managerial positions, and they were more often assigned to male managers than to female managers. Unexpectedly, this manager‐male association is stronger among female participants than among male participants. Our findings also demonstrate that women subordinates evaluate their same‐sex supervisors more favorably in transformational leadership, effectiveness, and extra effort. The negative consequences derived from gender‐typing managerial positions are highlighted according to the role congruity theory of prejudice toward female leaders. The positive effects of in‐group female bias on behavior ratings are also noted. The mixed implications of these results for women's advancement to leadership positions are discussed.     

Suicide attempts and stressful life events among female victims of intimate partner violence living in poverty in Nicaragua

This article describes a study of 136 female intimate partner violence victims living in poverty in Nicaragua. The paper aimed to analyze the relationship between experiencing stressful life events (SLE) and perceived social support with suicide attempts, and to evaluate the differences in the SLE experienced by female suicide attempters versus non‐attempters. The results showed the existence of a high level of SLE among the interviewees, and that women who have attempted suicide have experienced substantially more of these events. Experiences of violence and less social support were especially related to suicide attempts among the interviewees.     

Attachment style impacts behavior and early oculomotor response to positive,but not negative,pictures

The present study investigated whether oculomotor behavior is influenced by attachment styles. The Relationship Scales Questionnaire was used to assess attachment styles of forty‐eight voluntary university students and to classify them into attachment groups (secure, preoccupied, fearful, and dismissing). Eye‐tracking was recorded while participants engaged in a 3‐seconds free visual exploration of stimuli presenting either a positive or a negative picture together with a neutral picture, all depicting social interactions. The task consisted in identifying whether the two pictures depicted the same emotion. Results showed that the processing of negative pictures was impermeable to attachment style, while the processing of positive pictures was significantly influenced by individual differences in insecure attachment. The groups highly avoidant regarding to attachment (dismissing and fearful) showed reduced accuracy, suggesting a higher threshold for recognizing positive emotions compared to the secure group. The groups with higher attachment anxiety (preoccupied and fearful) showed differences in automatic capture of attention, in particular an increased delay preceding the first fixation to a picture of positive emotional valence. Despite lenient statistical thresholds induced by the limited sample size of some groups (p < 0.05 uncorrected for multiple comparisons), the current findings suggest that the processing of positive emotions is affected by attachment styles. These results are discussed within a broader evolutionary framework.     

Different Games for Different Motives: Comment on Haesevoets,Folmer, and Van Hiel (2015)

Recently, Haesevoets, Folmer, and Van Hiel (2015) strongly questioned the comparability and equivalence of different mixed‐motive situations as modelled in economic games. Particularly, the authors found that different games correlated only weakly on average and loaded on two separate factors. In turn, personality traits failed to consistently account for behavioural tendencies across games. Contrary to the conclusions of Haesevoets et al., these findings are actually perfectly in line with the game‐theoretic understanding of the different economic games. If one considers the variety of specific motives underlying decisions in different games, Haesevoets et al.'s findings actually support the validity of different games rather than questioning it. This, in turn, emphasizes the necessity for the plethora of different games that have been developed over decades in economics and psychology. Copyright © 2015 European Association of Personality Psychology     

Functional mapping of left parietal areas involved in simple addition and multiplication. A single‐case study of qualitative analysis of errors

All electrostimulation studies on arithmetic have so far solely reported general errors. Nonetheless, a classification of the errors during stimulation can inform us about underlying arithmetic processes. The present electrostimulation study was performed in a case of left parietal glioma. The patient's erroneous responses suggested that calculation was mainly applied for addition and a combination of retrieval and calculation was mainly applied for multiplication. The findings of the present single‐case study encourage follow up with further data collection with the same paradigm.     

Moderation of Stimulus Material on the Prediction of IQ with Infants' Performance in the Visual Expectation Paradigm: Do Greebles Make the Task More Challenging?

The objective of this study was to examine the role of the stimulus material for the prediction of later IQ by early learning measures in the Visual Expectation Paradigm (VExP). The VExP was assessed at 9 months using two types of stimuli, Greebles and human faces. Greebles were assumed to be associated with a higher load on working memory in comparison to human faces. IQ was assessed at 3 years and 4 months of age. Sixty‐four children participated at both assessments in this longitudinal study. The results show a moderation of the stimulus material on the prediction of IQ. With Greebles as stimulus material, a significant relationship between infants' learning and IQ was found. There was no relation when infants' learned in the VExP using human faces. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Development of Anaphora Resolution in Spanish

Journal of Psycholinguistic Research - The present study focuses on the development of Spanish pronominal processing. We investigate whether the pronoun interpretation problem (i.e., reflexive...