Sex Differences in Psychological Factors Associated with Social Discounting

The social discounting paradigm is a powerful means of quantifying altruism in humans, who are typically willing to forgo some amount of personal earnings in exchange for increased earnings for another person. The amount of money that people are willing to forgo decreases with increasing social distance. In this study, we examined variables related to sex, intolerance of uncertainty, and empathy, all of which are theorized to affect the social discounting rate. Participants (27 men and 28 women) completed measures of intolerance of uncertainty, empathy, and social discounting. We found sex differences in psychological predictors of social discounting: in women, empathy (but not intolerance of uncertainty) predicts the social discounting rate, while in men, social discounting is associated with intolerance of uncertainty (but not empathy). Possible neurobiological, social, and cognitive explanations for this sex difference are discussed. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Recognition of music in long-term memory: Are melodic and temporal patterns equal partners?

The notion that the melody (i.e., pitch structure) of familiar music is more recognizable than its accompanying rhythm (i.e., temporal structure) was examined with the same set of nameable musical excerpts in three experiments. In Experiment 1, the excerpts were modified so as to keep either their original pitch variations, whereas durations were set to isochrony (melodic condition) or their original temporal pattern while played on a single constant pitch (rhythmic condition). The subjects, who were selected without regard to musical training, were found to name more tunes and to rate their feeling of knowing the musical excerpts far higher in the melodic condition than in the rhythmic condition. These results were replicated in Experiment 2, wherein the melodic and rhythmic patterns of the musical excerpts were interchanged to create chimeric mismatched tunes. The difference in saliency of the melodic pattern and the rhythmic pattern also emerged with a music-title-verification task in Experiment 3, hence discarding response selection as the main source of the discrepancy. The lesser effectiveness of rhythmic structure appears to be related to its lesser encoding distinctiveness relative to melodic structure. In general, rhythm was found to be a poor cue for the musical representations that are stored in long-term memory. Nevertheless, in all three experiments, the most effective cue for music identification involved the proper combination of pitches and durations. Therefore, the optimal code of access to long-term memory for music resides in a combination of rhythm and melody, of which the latter would be the most informative.     

Links Between Early Personal Characteristics,Longitudinal Profiles of Peer Victimization in School and Victimization in College or at Work

Research on Child and Adolescent Psychopathology - This study used a longitudinal design from age six through age 19 (N?=?1206 (603 girls)) to examine the associations between...     

To what extent does typicality boost semantic priming effects between members of their categories?

Atypical items of their semantic category yield more generalisation than their typical members when relearning in connectionist networks (Plaut, D. C. (1996). Relearning after damage in connectionist networks: toward a theory of rehabilitation. Brain and Language, 52(1), 25–82) and in empirical studies (Kiran, S., & Thompson, C. K. (2003). The role of semantic complexity in treatment of naming deficits: Training semantic categories in fluent aphasia by controlling exemplar typicality. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 46(4), 773–787). It seems therefore that atypical words provide more information about the overall structure of the semantic category due to their specific and shared features. In this view, atypical primes could strongly facilitate the processing of targets compared to typical primes, because typical primes contain little information about the variation between members within a category. In contrast, three semantic priming experiments in visual word recognition showed an advantage with the typical context, but not with the atypical one. These findings were observed in a variety of tasks, including lexical decision, categorisation and semantic judgment. Our results do not support the findings about generalisation in relearning and suggest that typicality effects in semantic priming mostly come from the activation of representative features of categories.     

The Role of Semantic Features in Verb Processing

The present study examined the general hypothesis that, as for nouns, stable representations of semantic knowledge relative to situations expressed by verbs are available and accessible in long term memory in normal people. Regular associations between verbs and past tenses in French adults allowed to abstract two superordinate semantic features in the representation of verb meaning: durativity and resultativity. A pilot study was designed to select appropriate items according to these features: durative, non-resultative verbs and non-durative, resultative verbs. An experimental study was then conducted to assess semantic priming in French adults with two visual semantic-decision tasks at a 200- and 100-ms SOA. In the durativity decision task, participants had to decide if the target referred to a durable or non-durable situation. In the resultativity decision task, they had to decide if it referred to a situation with a directly observable outcome or without any clear external outcome. Targets were preceded by similar, opposite, and neutral primes. Results showed that semantic priming can tap verb meaning at a 200- and 100-ms SOA, with the restriction that only the positive value of each feature benefited from priming, that is the durative and resultative values. Moreover, processing of durativity and resultativity is far from comparable since facilitation was shown on the former with similar and opposite priming, whereas it was shown on the latter only with similar priming. Overall, these findings support Le Ny’s (in: Saint-Dizier, Viegas (eds) Computational lexical semantics, 1995; Cahier de Recherche Linguistique LanDisCo 12:85–100, 1998; Comment l’esprit produit du sens, 2005) general hypothesis that classificatory properties of verbs could be interpreted as semantic features and the view that semantic priming can tap verb meaning, as noun meaning.     

Sex differences in Nintendo Wii performance as expected from hunter-gatherer selection

To test the hunter-gatherer theory of cognitive sex differences, men and women each played four video games on a Wii console: two games simulating skills necessary for hunting (navigation and shooting) and two games simulating skills necessary for gathering (fine motor and visual search). Men outperformed women on the two hunting games, whereas there were no sex differences on the gathering skill games. The findings are discussed in terms of evolutionary psychology theory.     

Divided attention between lyrics and tunes of operatic songs: Evidence for independent processing

Excerpts from French operatic songs were used to evaluate the extent to which language and music compete for processing resources. Do these two dimensions conflict? Are they integrated into a single percept? Or are they independent? The final word of each excerpt was either semantically congruous or incongruous relative to the prior linguistic context and was sung either in or out of key. Participants were asked to detect either the semantic or the melodic incongruity (single task) or both (dual task). We predicted a dual-task deficit if these tasks conflicted and no deficit if they were either independent or integrated. In order to distinguish between these last two outcomes, trial-by-trial contingency analyses were also computed, predicting no correlation if the tasks were conflicting or independent, a positive correlation under the assumption of integration and a negative correlation if dividing attention is impossible. Our results show similar levels of performance in single and dual tasks and no correlation between dual-task judgments, thus suggesting that semantic and melodic aspects of language are processed by independent systems. In addition, a comparison between musicians and nonmusicians shows that these conclusions are independent of musical expertise.     

What Are the Effects of a Parent-Implemented Verbal Responsive Intervention on Preschoolers With Externalizing Behavior Problems?

This research was conducted to assess the impact of a parent-based verbal responsive intervention, aiming to enhance parents’ responsiveness and communication strategies, by way of a sample of parents and their preschool-aged children with a clinical level of externalizing behavior problems. Twenty-one parents received the intervention, consisting of eight 1.5-hour sessions. The study tested the hypothesis that the intervention led to an improvement in parenting variables and a decrease in children’s behavior problems, assessed by a multimethod procedure. The results partially confirmed the prediction, as they showed an enhancement of parents’ responsiveness and parent self-efficacy belief, which are promising findings, but no modifications of negative practices. These effects persisted for 4 months after the intervention. Moreover, a decrease in children’s externalizing behavior problems was reported by parents in a questionnaire, but this was not confirmed by an observational paradigm. This last result seems to show that a parent-implemented verbal responsive intervention is necessary for some children with externalizing behavior difficulties but often insufficient, and has to be part of a multidisciplinary treatment approach.