Doing the best for one’s child: satisficing versus optimizing parentalism

The maxim ??parents should do what is in the best interests of their child?? seems like an unassailable truth, and yet, as I argue here, there are serious problems with it when it is taken seriously. One problem concerns the sort of demands such a principle places on parents; the other concerns its larger social implications when conceived as part of a national policy for the rearing of children. The theory of parenting that creates these problems I call ??optimizing parentalism.?? To avoid them, I define and defend a new and more morally appealing theory, ??satisficing parentalism.??     

Cross-modal recognition of human individuals in domestic horses (Equus caballus)

This study has shown that domestic horses are capable of cross-modal recognition of familiar humans. It was demonstrated that horses are able to discriminate between the voices of a familiar and an unfamiliar human without seeing or smelling them at the same moment. Conversely, they were able to discriminate the same persons when only exposed to their visual and olfactory cues, without being stimulated by their voices. A cross-modal expectancy violation setup was employed; subjects were exposed both to trials with incongruent auditory and visual/olfactory identity cues and trials with congruent cues. It was found that subjects responded more quickly, longer and more often in incongruent trials, exhibiting heightened interest in unmatched cues of identity. This suggests that the equine brain is able to integrate multisensory identity cues from a familiar human into a person representation that allows the brain, when deprived of one or two senses, to maintain recognition of this person.     

Development of the coordination between posture and manual control

Studies have suggested that proper postural control is essential for the development of reaching. However, little research has examined the development of the coordination between posture and manual control throughout childhood. We investigated the coordination between posture and manual control in children (7- and 10-year-olds) and adults during a precision fitting task as task constraints became more difficult. Participants fit a block through an opening as arm kinematics, trunk kinematics, and center of pressure data were collected. During the fitting task, the precision, postural, and visual constraints of the task were manipulated. Young children adopted a strategy where they first move their trunk toward the opening and then stabilize their trunk (freeze degrees of freedom) as the precision manual task is being performed. In contrast, adults and older children make compensatory trunk movements as the task is being performed. The 10-year-olds were similar to adults under the less constrained task conditions, but they resembled the 7-year-olds under the more challenging tasks. The ability to either suppress or allow postural fluctuations based on the constraints of a suprapostural task begins to develop at around 10 years of age. This ability, once developed, allows children to learn specific segmental movements required to complete a task within an environmental context.     

Disentangling stereotype activation and stereotype application in the stereotype misperception task

When forming impressions about other people, stereotypes about the individual's social group often influence the resulting impression. At least 2 distinguishable processes underlie stereotypic impression formation: stereotype activation and stereotype application. Most previous research has used implicit measures to assess stereotype activation and explicit measures to assess stereotype application, which has several disadvantages. The authors propose a measure of stereotypic impression formation, the stereotype misperception task (SMT), together with a multinomial model that quantitatively disentangles the contributions of stereotype activation and application to responses in the SMT. The validity of the SMT and of the multinomial model was confirmed in 5 studies. The authors hope to advance research on stereotyping by providing a measurement tool that separates multiple processes underlying impression formation.     

Predicting maternal sensitivity: The roles of postnatal depressive symptoms and parasympathetic dysregulation

Previous research has established that maternal depression is a risk factor for a variety of negative developmental outcomes among infants and children. Although low levels of maternal sensitivity have been hypothesized to explain this risk, the biological mechanisms underlying the association between maternal depressive symptoms and low levels of maternal sensitivity have been largely underexplored. This study examined the roles of postnatal depressive symptoms and parasympathetic nervous system functioning as predictors of low levels of maternal sensitivity, during a stressful mother–infant interaction—the reunion phase of the Still‐Face Paradigm. Depressive symptoms and traitlike predispositions toward parasympathetic dysregulation, as indexed by low resting levels of respiratory sinus arrhythmia, were associated independently with less sensitive parenting. Discussion considers that during stressful mother–infant interactions, both mothers with depressive symptoms and mothers predisposed to parasympathetic dysregulation may have fewer emotional, physiological, and psychological resources with which to respond sensitively to their infants' cues.     

The brain's hemispheres and controlled search of the lexicon: evidence from fixated words and pseudowords

Difference between the brain's hemispheres in efficiency of intentional search of the mental lexicon with phonological, orthographic, and semantic strategies was investigated. Letter strings for lexical decision were presented at fixation, with a lateralized distractor to the LVF or RVF. Word results revealed that both hemispheres were capable of using each of the three strategies, but the right hemisphere had better baseline processing of orthography and was better at processing semantics. Pseudoword results supported the right hemisphere advantage for orthography and showed a left hemisphere advantage for phonology and assessment of possible semantic relationships. Taken together, the data support the idea that the right hemisphere uses orthography to make efficient decisions about novelty of an item, while the left engages in grapheme-to-phoneme conversion to test hypotheses about unfamiliar items. The convergence of data with previous research reveals that the procedure, as well as analyses of pseudowords, inform laterality research.     

Taking stress response out of the box: stability, discontinuity, and temperament effects on HPA and SNS across social stressors in mother-infant dyads

This study investigated continuity and stability of hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) and sympathetic nervous system (SNS) response measures in mother-infant dyads across 2 different types of social stress sessions. Synchrony of response trajectories across systems (SNS-HPA coordination) and partners (mother-infant attunement) was addressed, as were associations with infant temperament. Primiparous mothers and their 18-month-old infants (n = 86 dyads) completed an attachment stressor--Strange Situation (Ainsworth, Blehar, Waters, & Wall, 1978)--at Session 1 and challenge stressors--cleanup task and emotion task battery--at Session 2. Mother and infant saliva samples collected to index pre-stress, stress, and post-stress response during each session were assayed for cortisol (HPA marker) and salivary alpha-amylase (sAA; SNS marker). Multilevel modeling of cortisol/sAA trajectories across sessions revealed rank-order stability in mother/infant stress measures but discontinuity in absolute levels; cortisol trajectories were higher during attachment stress, and sAA trajectories were higher during challenge stress. Varying degrees of mother-infant attunement were found across sessions/systems. Infant surgency predicted higher stress measures, and negative affect and effortful control predicted lower stress measures, though associations depended on session/system. Findings are discussed in terms of advancing a multisystemic, contextual definition of developing stress responsiveness.     

Errors in identifying and expressing emotion in facial expressions, voices, and postures unique to social anxiety

The purpose of the present study was to see if 7-10-year-old socially anxious children (n = 26) made systematic errors in identifying and sending emotions in facial expressions, paralanguage, and postures as compared with the more random errors of children who were inattentive-hyperactive (n = 21). It was found that socially anxious children made more errors in identifying anger and fear in children's facial expressions and anger in adults' postures and in expressing anger in their own facial expressions than did their inattentive-hyperactive peers. Results suggest that there may be systematic difficulties specifically in visual nonverbal emotion communication that contribute to the personal and social difficulties socially anxious children experience.     

A note on the relationship between graphs and information protocols

Information protocols (IP’s) were developed to describe players who learn their social situation by their experiences. Although IP’s look similar to colored multi-graphs (MG’s), the two objects are constructed in fundamentally different ways. IP’s are constructed using the global concept of history, whereas graphs are constructed using the local concept of edges. We give necessary and sufficient conditions for each theory to be captured by the other. We find that the necessary and sufficient condition for IP theory to be captured by MG theory, which we call SE, excludes relevant game situations. Hence, we conclude that IP theory remains a vital tool and cannot be replaced by MG theory.     

Executive Functioning and Delay Discounting of Four Different Outcomes in University Students

The study investigated a potential relationship between level of executive functioning and rates of delay discounting (i.e., the subjective decrease in the value of an outcome if its delivery is delayed). University students completed an executive-functioning questionnaire and then a delay-discounting task involving four different outcomes (money, cigarettes, dating partner, body image). Results showed that the overall measure of executive functioning was a significant predictor of rates of discounting of three of the four outcomes, and approached significance for the fourth outcome. Further, different subscales of executive functioning were significantly correlated with discounting of different outcomes. These results suggest that executive functioning plays a role in discounting of delayed outcomes and that procedures designed to affect either executive function or delay discounting might result in concomitant changes in the other measure.