Development and Preliminary Evaluation of the Bedtime Routines Questionnaire

In the past, child bedtime routines have been examined through observation or sleep diaries. These methods are often expensive and hinder study comparisons due to lack of consistent operational definitions of routines. This article describes the development and psychometric evaluation of the Bedtime Routines Questionnaire (BRQ), a 31-item paper-and-pencil, parent-report measure of children’s bedtime routines. The BRQ and related measures were completed by 226 caregivers of children ages 2 to 8. The BRQ demonstrated a solid factor structure, adequate internal consistency, and fair validity coefficients. Overall, promising results for the BRQ are reported.     

Paranormal Encounters as Eyewitness Phenomena: Psychological Determinants of Atypical Perceptual Interpretations

Many people who report paranormal sightings (e.g., Bigfoot and UFO aliens) are apparently sincere. This places many such sightings in the category of eyewitness errors, rather than of deliberate deception. Recent research has supported this idea; in an earlier paper, we demonstrated that paranormal beliefs are facilitated by tendencies toward attention deficit hyperactive disorder, dissociation, and depression. These characteristics predicted specific patterns of beliefs in several paranormal phenomena. The present research addressed the question of whether such psychological tendencies would tend to create bias in perception and interpretation as well as in belief- in whether a person’s identification of a given stimulus as paranormal in nature would be influenced by the same factors previously demonstrated to influence paranormal beliefs. This hypothesis was supported. Specifically, those with dissociative tendencies were significantly more likely to identify given stimulus items as paranormal in nature than were those with lower dissociation scores. Dissociation was further shown to be related to paranormal beliefs, consistent with earlier findings. Results are discussed in terms of the reconfigurative dynamics known to operate in areas of human cognition such as eyewitness identification, and in terms of the generality of those effects to the realm of paranormal sightings.     

Positive mood effects on delay discounting

Delay discounting is the process by which the value of an expected reward decreases as the delay to obtaining that reward increases. Individuals with higher discounting rates tend to prefer smaller immediate rewards over larger delayed rewards. Previous research has indicated that personality can influence an individual's discounting rates, with higher levels of Extraversion predicting a preference for immediate gratification. The current study examined how this relationship would be influenced by situational mood inductions. While main effects were observed for both Extraversion and cognitive ability in the prediction of discounting rates, a significant interaction was also observed between Extraversion and positive affect. Extraverted individuals were more likely to prefer an immediate reward when first put in a positive mood. Extraverts thus appear particularly sensitive to impulsive, incentive-reward-driven behavior by temperament and by situational factors heightening positive affect.     

Disgust as embodied moral judgment

How, and for whom, does disgust influence moral judgment? In four experiments participants made moral judgments while experiencing extraneous feelings of disgust. Disgust was induced in Experiment 1 by exposure to a bad smell, in Experiment 2 by working in a disgusting room, in Experiment 3 by recalling a physically disgusting experience, and in Experiment 4 through a video induction. In each case, the results showed that disgust can increase the severity of moral judgments relative to controls. Experiment 4 found that disgust had a different effect on moral judgment than did sadness. In addition, Experiments 2-4 showed that the role of disgust in severity of moral judgments depends on participants' sensitivity to their own bodily sensations. Taken together, these data indicate the importance-and specificity-of gut feelings in moral judgments.     

Top-down control of visual perception: attention in natural vision

Top-down perceptual influences can bias (or pre-empt) perception. In natural scenes, the receptive fields of neurons in the inferior temporal visual cortex (IT) shrink to become close to the size of objects. This facilitates the read-out of information from the ventral visual system, because the information is primarily about the object at the fovea. Top-down attentional influences are much less evident in natural scenes than when objects are shown against blank backgrounds, though are still present. It is suggested that the reduced receptive-field size in natural scenes, and the effects of top-down attention contribute to change blindness. The receptive fields of IT neurons in complex scenes, though including the fovea, are frequently asymmetric around the fovea, and it is proposed that this is the solution the IT uses to represent multiple objects and their relative spatial positions in a scene. Networks that implement probabilistic decision-making are described, and it is suggested that, when in perceptual systems they take decisions (or 'test hypotheses'), they influence lower-level networks to bias visual perception. Finally, it is shown that similar processes extend to systems involved in the processing of emotion-provoking sensory stimuli, in that word-level cognitive states provide top-down biasing that reaches as far down as the orbitofrontal cortex, where, at the first stage of affective representations, olfactory, taste, flavour, and touch processing is biased (or pre-empted) in humans.     

Observed Leadership Potential of Personnel in a Team Setting: Big Five traits and proximal factors as predictors

The authors explored implications of Big Five traits and proximal factors for the observed leadership potential of personnel in newly formed teams. Big Five traits were designated as distal factors having indirect links to observed leadership potential via three proximal factors: individual perception of team cohesion, team‐oriented proactivity, and teamwork knowledge. Drawing from implicit personality theory, the authors introduced a team‐leader personality profile as a higher‐order construct for explaining covariation among extraversion, conscientiousness, and emotional stability. A structural analysis of data from 472 personnel supported hypothesized relationships. Specific findings included validation of a team‐leader personality profile and preliminary support for the measure of team‐oriented proactivity that was developed for this study. Implications of the various findings are discussed.     

Brain lesion and memory functioning: Short-term memory deficit is independent of lesion location

We analyzed the effects of patterns of brain lesions from penetrating head injuries on memory performance in participants of the Vietnam Head Injury Study (Grafman et al., 1988). Classes of lesion patterns were determined by mixture modeling (L. K. Muthén & B. O. Muthén, 1998-2004). Memory performance was assessed for short-term memory (STM), semantic memory, verbal episodic memory, and visual episodic memory. The striking finding was that large STM deficits were observed in all classes of brain-injured individuals, regardless of lesion location pattern. These effects persist despite frequent concomitant effects of depressive symptomatology and substance dependence. Smaller deficits in semantic memory, verbal episodic memory, and visual episodic memory depended on lesion location, in a manner roughly consistent with the existing neuropsychological literature. The theoretical and clinical implications of the striking, seemingly permanent STM deficits in individuals with penetrating head injuries are discussed.     

Development of number combination skill in the early school years: when do fingers help?

Children's change over time in frequency of finger use on number combinations was examined in relation to their change in accuracy. Performance was tracked longitudinally over 11 time points, from the beginning of kindergarten (mean age = 5.7 years) to the end of second grade (n= 217). Accuracy in number combinations increased steadily during the time period while frequency of finger use declined. Correlations between finger use and accuracy decreased gradually, ranging from 0.60 in kindergarten to -0.15 at the end of second grade. Low-income children showed linear growth in frequency of finger use while middle-income children slowed down by second grade and even started to decline. Although girls and boys showed similar growth patterns in frequency and accuracy, boys used their fingers less often than girls and were more accurate. The findings indicate that finger use is most adaptive when children are first learning number combinations, but this benefit lessens over time.