Effects of a Parenting Intervention on Features of Psychopathy in Children

This study examined whether Project Support, a parenting intervention shown to reduce child conduct problems, also exerts positive effects on features of psychopathy in children. Participants were 66 families (mothers and children) recruited from domestic violence shelters who participated in a randomized controlled trial evaluating Project Support. Each family included at least one child between the ages of 4 and 9 who was exhibiting clinical levels of conduct problems. Families were randomly assigned to the Project Support intervention condition or to an existing services comparison condition, and they were assessed on 6 occasions over 20 months, following their departure from the shelter. Children in families in the Project Support condition, compared with those in the comparison condition, exhibited greater reductions in features of psychopathy. Moreover, the changes in features of psychopathy remained after accounting for changes in conduct problems. Project Support’s effects on features of psychopathy were mediated by improvements in mothers’ harsh and inconsistent parenting. These findings on the effects of an intervention on features of psychopathy are the first from a randomized controlled trial. They inform the debate about whether features of psychopathy in children are responsive to intervention, and hold important implications for clinical practice.     

Relative and Absolute Judgments of Speech Rate from Masked and Content-Standard Stimuli The Influence of Vocal Frequency and Intensity

In two previous studies, the perception of speech rate was found to be positively related to the vocal frequency and intensity of speech. In those studies, a single sample of spontaneous, content-masked speech was used to produce nine stimuli by factorially varying three levels of each vocal frequency and intensity, while controlling the actual speech rate of the stimuli. Participants were asked to judge each stimulus, preceded by a standard, “anchoring,” stimulus as to its speech rate, pitch, loudness, and duration. The purpose of the three studies reported here was to examine the generalizability of the previous findings by using stimuli that were nonmasked and/or were not preceded by an anchoring stimulus. In each study, nine speech stimuli were prepared, as described above, and participants were asked to make judgments about the rate, pitch, loudness, and duration of each stimulus. In the first study, the stimuli were masked but were not preceded by an anchoring stimulus. In the second study, participants listened to content-standard speech stimuli preceded by an anchoring stimulus. Finally, in the third study, content-standard stimuli without an anchoring stimulus were used. In addition, studies two and three used speech segments of a male and a female speaker. The findings from the three studies replicated the central findings of the previous studies. They suggest, in other words, that rate perception of speech is indeed influenced by vocal frequency and, to some extent, by intensity, and that these relationships are not materially altered by the speakers'gender.     

Reducing prejudice via direct and extended cross-group friendship

One of the most exciting developments in intergroup contact theory is the idea that a certain type of contact, cross-group friendship, might be particularly effective at reducing prejudice. In this chapter we review research on two types of cross-group friendship. Direct cross-group friendship refers to friendships that develop between members of different groups. Extended cross-group friendship, on the other hand, refers to vicarious experience of cross-group friendship, the mere knowledge that other ingroup members have cross-group friends. We consider the relationship between both types of cross-group friendship and prejudice and the processes that mediate and moderate these relationships. The research highlights the respective strengths and weaknesses of direct and extended cross-group friendship and illustrates how they might be practically combined in efforts to improve intergroup relations.     

Salience network response to changes in emotional expressions of others is heightened during early adolescence: relevance for social functioning

Adolescence is a unique developmental period when the salience of social and emotional information becomes particularly pronounced. Although this increased sensitivity to social and emotional information has frequently been considered with respect to risk behaviors and psychopathology, evidence suggests that increased adolescent sensitivity to social and emotional cues may confer advantages. For example, greater sensitivity to shifts in the emotions of others is likely to promote flexible and adaptive social behavior. In this study, a sample of 54 children and adolescents (age 8–19 years) performed a delayed match‐to‐sample task for emotional faces while undergoing fMRI scanning. Recruitment of the anterior cingulate and anterior insula when the emotion of the probe face did not match the emotion held in memory followed a quadratic developmental pattern that peaked during early adolescence. These findings indicate meaningful developmental variation in the neural mechanisms underlying sensitivity to changes in the emotional expressions. Across all participants, greater activation of this network for changes in emotional expression was associated with less social anxiety and fewer social problems. These results suggest that the heightened salience of social and emotional information during adolescence may confer important advantages for social behavior, providing sensitivity to others’ emotions that facilitates flexible social responding.