Grammatical gender processing in bilinguals: An analytic review

Psychonomic Bulletin & Review - In this review article, we analyze how grammatical gender is represented and processed in the bilingual mind. To that end, we review the data from 13 existing...     

Traumatic stress symptoms following a lower limb amputation in diabetic patients: a longitudinal study

Objective: Limited research has focussed on the development of traumatic stress symptoms following an amputation due to a chronic disease such as Diabetes. This study analysed whether coping strategies, anxiety and depression symptoms, sociodemographic and clinical variables were related to traumatic stress symptoms in a sample of patients who had undergone a lower limb amputation.

Design: A longitudinal design with three assessments, one month (T1), six (T2) and ten months after an amputation surgery (T3), included 144 patients.

Main outcome measures: IES-R, WOC and HADS.

Results: Traumatic stress symptoms were prevalent at T1 (M?=?15.65, SD?=?15.40) and probable PTSD was observed in 13.9% patients. Presence of pain, high level of anxiety symptoms and emotion-focused strategies contributed to traumatic stress symptoms, and the period between T1 and T2, was critical. Six to ten months (Λ?=?0.871, F (2,84) =6.245, p=. 003), after surgery, symptoms tended to decrease 0.122 units (SE?=?0.032, p?=?0.002) per assessment.

Conclusions: Findings raise awareness to the need of urgent identification of traumatic stress symptoms in medically ill patients who underwent a lower limb amputation, given the prevalence of traumatic stress symptoms right after surgery and in the following six months.     

Holistic face processing is penetrable … depending on the composite design

Holistic processing (HP) of faces is usually measured by the composite effect. While Weston and Perfect [2005. Effects of processing bias on the recognition of composite face halves. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 12, 1038–1042. doi:10.3758/BF03206440] found that priming at the local level speeded recognition of components of faces, Gao et al. [2011. Priming global and local processing of composite faces: Revisiting the processing-bias effect on face perception. Attention Perception & Psychophysics, 73, 1477–1486. doi:10.3758/s13414-011-0109-7] found that only global priming had an effect on HP of faces. The two studies used different versions of the composite task (the partial design, which is considered to be prone on bias, and the complete design). However, the two studies also differed in other respects and it is difficult to know to what extent issues with the partial design contributed to the differing conclusions. In the present study, the HP indexed by the complete design measure was augmented by global priming. In contrast, no effect was observed in the partial design index. We claim that the partial design index reflects other factors besides HP, including response bias, and conclude that HP can be understood within the context of domain-general attentional processes.     

Tests for inhibition after extinction of a conditioned stimulus in the flavour aversion procedure

In four experiments, rats received flavour aversion conditioning followed by extinction. The flavour was then subjected to retardation and summation tests. Experiment 1 showed that reacquisition of an extinguished flavour aversion was retarded with respect to the performance shown by rats for whom the flavour was novel. No retardation was found, however, with respect to a control group that had been given non-reinforced pre-exposure to the flavour. Experiment 2 demonstrated that extinction showed the same sensitivity to the effects of a retention interval as did latent inhibition, consistent with the view that the retardation effect was a consequence of the occurrence of latent inhibition during extinction. An extinguished stimulus was also found to alleviate the response governed by aseparately trained excitor in a summation test (Experiments 3 and 4), but the size of this effect did not exceed that produced by a control stimulus when the procedure used ensured an equivalent aversion to the test excitor in the two cases. These results challenge the proposal that extinction can turn a stimulus into a net inhibitor.