Mental reinstatement of context and return of fear in spider-fearful participants

Extant findings in the animal and human conditioning literature demonstrate that renewal, termed return of fear in studies with humans, occurs when reexposure to a previously feared phobic stimulus occurs in a context different than the one present during extinction. The present study investigated whether mental reinstatement of the treatment context at follow-up could attenuate context-based return of fear. Forty-eight spider-fearful individuals received exposure therapy in one of two contexts, and were followed-up 1 week later in the treatment or a new context. Half of the participants received instructions to mentally reinstate the treatment context before the follow-up test. Self-report data replicated previous research on contextually driven return of fear. Furthermore, participants who mentally reinstated the treatment context, before encountering the phobic stimulus in a new context at follow-up, had less return of fear than those who did not. Limitations of the current study, as well as implications for phobia treatment, are discussed.     

Preschool children master the logic of number word meanings

Although children take over a year to learn the meanings of the first three number words, they eventually master the logic of counting and the meanings of all the words in their count list. Here, we ask whether children's knowledge applies to number words beyond those they have mastered: Does a child who can only count to 20 infer that number words above 'twenty' refer to exact cardinal values? Three experiments provide evidence for this understanding in preschool children. Before beginning formal education or gaining counting skill, children possess a productive symbolic system for representing number.     

Non-symbolic arithmetic in adults and young children

Five experiments investigated whether adults and preschool children can perform simple arithmetic calculations on non-symbolic numerosities. Previous research has demonstrated that human adults, human infants, and non-human animals can process numerical quantities through approximate representations of their magnitudes. Here we consider whether these non-symbolic numerical representations might serve as a building block of uniquely human, learned mathematics. Both adults and children with no training in arithmetic successfully performed approximate arithmetic on large sets of elements. Success at these tasks did not depend on non-numerical continuous quantities, modality-specific quantity information, the adoption of alternative non-arithmetic strategies, or learned symbolic arithmetic knowledge. Abstract numerical quantity representations therefore are computationally functional and may provide a foundation for formal mathematics.     

Is extracurricular participation associated with beneficial outcomes? Concurrent and longitudinal relations

The authors examined the relations between participation in a range of high school extracurricular contexts and developmental outcomes in adolescence and young adulthood among an economically diverse sample of African American and European American youths. In general, when some prior self-selection factors were controlled, 11th graders' participation in school clubs and organized sports was associated with concurrent indicators of academic and psychological adjustment and with drug and alcohol use. In addition, participation in 11th grade school clubs and prosocial activities was associated with educational status and civic engagement at 1 year after high school. A few of the concurrent and longitudinal relations between activity participation and development were moderated by race and gender. Finally, breadth of participation, or number of activity contexts, was associated with positive academic, psychological, and behavioral outcomes.     

The pursuit of self-esteem: contingencies of self-worth and self-regulation

Successful self-regulation is defined as the willingness to exert effort toward one's most important goals, while taking setbacks and failures as opportunities to learn, identify weaknesses and address them, and develop new strategies toward achieving those goals. Contingencies of self-worth can facilitate self-regulation because people are highly motivated to succeed and avoid failure in domains of contingency. However, because boosts in self-esteem are pleasurable and drops in self-esteem are painful, protection, maintenance, and enhancement of self-esteem can become the overriding goal. Several pitfalls for self-regulation can result, especially when tasks are difficult and failure is likely. In this article, we describe a program of research examining these self-regulation pitfalls associated with contingent self-worth and suggest that learning orientations, particularly the willingness to embrace failure for the learning it affords, foster successful self-regulation even in people with highly contingent self-esteem.     

Effects of writing about emotions versus goals on psychological and physical health among third-year medical students

A randomized, controlled trial compared writing about emotional topics (EMO) to writing about goals as the "best possible self" (BPS; after King, 2001) and evaluated emotional approach coping, i.e., efforts to cope through processing and expressing emotion, as a moderator of writing effects on psychological and physical health in 64 third-year medical students. In participants with higher baseline hostility, the EMO condition was associated with less hostility at 3 months compared to the BPS and control conditions. Emotional processing (EP) and emotional expression (EE) moderated the effect of experimental condition on depressive symptoms at 3 months; high EP/EE participants reported fewer depressive symptoms in the EMO condition, whereas low EP/EE individuals reported fewer depressive symptoms in the BPS condition compared to the EMO and control conditions. A moderating effect of EP on physical health was also identified, such that low EP individuals who wrote about goals (BPS) had fewer health care visits at 3 months compared to low EP participants in the EMO and control conditions.     

Positive affect and the experience of meaning in life

Six studies examined the role of positive affect (PA) in the experience of meaning in life (MIL). Study 1 showed strong relations between measures of mood, goal appraisals, and MIL. In multivariate analyses, PA was a stronger predictor of MIL than goal appraisals. In Study 2, the most consistent predictor of the experience of meaning in a day was the PA experienced that day. Later, global MIL was predicted by average daily PA, rather than average daily MIL. Study 3 demonstrated no prospective relations between measures of MIL and PA over 2 years. In Study 4, priming positive mood concepts enhanced MIL. In Study 5, manipulated positive mood enhanced ratings of MIL for those who were not given an attributional cue for their moods. In Study 6, PA was associated with a high level of distinction between meaningful and meaningless activities. Results indicate that positive moods may predispose individuals to feel that life is meaningful. In addition, positive moods may increase sensitivity to the meaning-relevance of a situation.     

The role of test structure in creating false memories

In the Deese/Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm, studying lists of semantic associates results in high rates of false recognition of a nonpresented critical word. The present set of experiments was designed to measure the contribution of additional processing of list items at test to this false memory effect. The participants studied sets of lists and then performed a recognition task for each set. In three experiments, using this paradigm, we investigated false recognition when the number of studied list items presented at test (0, 6, or 12) was manipulated. In Experiments 2 and 3, false recognition of critical lures associated to both studied and nonstudied lists increased significantly as the number of list items included in the test increased. These results indicate that processes occurring at retrieval contribute to false memory effects found with the DRM paradigm.     

Early Childhood Externalising Behaviour Problems: Child, Parenting, and Family-related Predictors Over Time

This study examined the dynamic relationships between child, parenting, and family-related predictor variables and early childhood externalising behaviour problems. A community sample of 395 Australian children was followed longitudinally, and assessed at 4 and 6 years with the Child Behavior Checklist, Teacher Report Form, and standard measures of parenting, temperament, and familial adversity. Variables based on the average scores across the two assessments and the change in scores between assessments were utilised as predictors of parent-reported and teacher-reported externalising behaviour problems at age 6. It was hypothesised that both higher average scores and more detrimental changes in scores, would independently predict externalising problems at age 6. Multivariable analyses found that the presence of parent-reported child externalising problems in six-year-olds were predicted by: (i) the presence of parent-reported child externalising problems at age 4, (ii) higher average “teacher-reported child externalising behaviour,” “inflexible temperament,” “non-persistent temperament,” and “over-reactive parenting,” and (iii) an increased “inflexible temperament” score between age 4 and age 6. The presence of teacher-reported child externalising problems at age 6 was predicted by higher average “parent-reported child externalising behaviour,” and “over-reactive parenting.” The results provide further evidence of the adverse impact of continuing high levels of temperament difficulties and over-reactive parenting on externalising behaviour in early childhood. However, contrary to expectations, the contribution of including the dynamic change scores was limited.     

Moving up from the segment: a comment on Aichert and Ziegler's syllable frequency and syllable structure in apraxia of speech, Brain and Language, 88, 148-159, 2004

In a recent article, explore whether apraxia of speech (AOS) can be explained by disruption of the phonetic plans for high frequency syllables. This approach is a hybrid one, combining the notion of a mental syllabary with an explanation that the impairment in AOS results from reduced access to supra-segmental phonetic plans. In this commentary, we explore Aichert and Ziegler's approach and suggest that in testing a hybrid model it is important to be cautious in identifying implications for the two source models.