Domestic dogs (Canis familiaris) are sensitive to the attentional state of humans

Twelve domestic dogs (Canis familiaris) were given a series of trials in which they were forbidden to take a piece of visible food. In some trials, the human continued to look at the dog throughout the trial (control condition), whereas in others, the human (a) left the room, (b) turned her back, (c) engaged in a distracting activity, or (d) closed her eyes. Dogs behaved in clearly different ways in most of the conditions in which the human did not watch them compared with the control condition, in which she did. In particular, when the human looked at them, dogs retrieved less food, approached it in a more indirect way, and sat (as opposed to laid down) more often than in the other conditions. Results are discussed in terms of domestic dogs' social-cognitive skills and their unique evolutionary and ontogenetic histories.     

Mastery matters most: How mastery and positive relations link attachment avoidance and anxiety to negative emotions

Attachment avoidance and anxiety are associated with negative emotions. However, the mechanisms underlying these associations are not fully understood. We investigated environmental mastery and positive relations with others as two mechanisms behind the attachment–emotion link in a sample of 343 adults. As predicted, attachment avoidance and anxiety were related to greater fear, hostility, envy and depression through lower mastery. Contrary to our hypothesis, positive relations mediated only the attachment–depression link. In addition, by adopting a moderated mediation approach, we were able to show that mastery mattered most for individuals high on avoidance: The indirect effect of avoidance through lack of mastery on fear, hostility and depression (but not on envy) increased with higher avoidance scores. Contrary to our predictions, poor relationships did not matter more as sources of negative emotions as anxiety increased. These findings underscore that the emotional life of avoidantly attached individuals is especially jeopardised by poor mastery.     

Commutation-Augmented Pregroup Grammars and Mildly Context-Sensitive Languages

The paper presents a generalization of pregroup, by which a freely-generated pregroup is augmented with a finite set of commuting inequations, allowing limited commutativity and cancelability. It is shown that grammars based on the commutation-augmented pregroups generate mildly context-sensitive languages. A version of Lambek’s switching lemma is established for these pregroups. Polynomial parsability and semilinearity are shown for languages generated by these grammars. Special Issue Categorial Grammars and Pregroups Edited by Wojciech Buszkowski and Anne Preller     

How dogs know when communication is intended for them

Domestic dogs comprehend human gestural communication in a way that other animal species do not. But little is known about the specific cues they use to determine when human communication is intended for them. In a series of four studies, we confronted both adult dogs and young dog puppies with object choice tasks in which a human indicated one of two opaque cups by either pointing to it or gazing at it. We varied whether the communicator made eye contact with the dog in association with the gesture (or whether her back was turned or her eyes were directed at another recipient) and whether the communicator called the dog's name (or the name of another recipient). Results demonstrated the importance of eye contact in human-dog communication, and, to a lesser extent, the calling of the dog's name--with no difference between adult dogs and young puppies--which are precisely the communicative cues used by human infants for identifying communicative intent. Unlike human children, however, dogs did not seem to comprehend the human's communicative gesture when it was directed to another human, perhaps because dogs view all human communicative acts as directives for the recipient.     

Development of children’s ability to detect kinship through facial resemblance

Facial features appear to be a prominent kinship cue for ascribing relatedness among human individuals. Although there is evidence that adults can detect kinship in unrelated and unfamiliar individual’s faces, it remains to be seen whether people already possess the ability when they are young. To further understand the development of this skill, we explored children’s ability to detect parent-offspring resemblance in unrelated and unfamiliar faces. To this end, we tested approximately 140 children, aged 5–11, in two photo-matching tasks. We used a procedure that asked them to match one neonate’s face to one of three adults’ faces (Task 1), or to match one adult’s face to one of three neonate’s faces (Task 2). Our findings reveal asymmetrical performance, depending on the tasks assigned (performance of Task 2 is stronger than for Task 1), and on the sex of individuals who made up the parent-offspring pair (male parents are better matched with neonates than female parents, and boys are better matched than girls). The picture that emerges from our study is, on one hand, that the ability to detect kinship is already present at the age of five but continues to improve as one gets older, and on the other, that perception of parent-offspring facial resemblance varies according to the appraisers’ characteristics.     

Masked emotional priming beyond global valence activations

An immense body of research demonstrates that emotional facial expressions can be processed unconsciously. However, it has been assumed that such processing takes place solely on a global valence-based level, allowing individuals to disentangle positive from negative emotions but not the specific emotion. In three studies, we investigated the specificity of emotion processing under conditions of limited awareness using a modified variant of an affective priming task. Faces with happy, angry, sad, fearful, and neutral expressions were presented as masked primes for 33 ms (Study 1) or 14 ms (Studies 2 and 3) followed by emotional target faces (Studies 1 and 2) or emotional adjectives (Study 3). Participants' task was to categorise the target emotion. In all three studies, discrimination of targets was significantly affected by the emotional primes beyond a simple positive versus negative distinction. Results indicate that specific aspects of emotions might be automatically disentangled in addition to valence, even under conditions of subjective unawareness.     

Exams? Why worry? Interpreting anxiety as facilitative and stress appraisals

Background and Objectives: The present study examined why people differ in how they appraise the same stressful situation (an approaching exam). Design: We explored whether interpreting anxiety as a facilitative emotion can affect the type of stress appraisal people make. Method: One hundred and three undergraduate students took part in this study, which lasted for 10 days (leading up to an exam). The students completed a daily self-reported evaluation of anxiety, emotional exhaustion, and stress experienced. Results: The findings suggest a process by which a stressful time can be experienced as motivating rather than threatening or emotionally exhausting. For example, interpreting anxiety as facilitative moderated the relationship between anxiety and stress appraisals. When interpreting their anxiety as facilitative, individuals showed a higher tendency to make challenge stress appraisals and a lower tendency to appraising the stressor as a threat. These differences were especially visible with high levels of anxiety. Furthermore, interpreting anxiety as facilitative was negatively associated with emotional exhaustion, but positively associated with the academic performance. Conclusions: These findings suggest an explanation why people differ in how they appraise the same stressor: how people interpret their anxiety may to a large part affect how they appraise difficult events and situations.     

Developmental changes in coping: Situational and methodological influences

Abstract

Previous studies on the development of coping have shown rather inconsistent findings regarding the developmental trajectories for different coping dimensions. The aim of this study is to search for possible influences that might explain these inconsistencies. The analysis focuses on methodological influences (longitudinal vs. cross-sectional assessments) and situational influences. Two samples of children were traced longitudinally with yearly assessments from grade 2 to 5 (sample 1, N =432) and from grade 4 to 7 (sample 2, N =366). A third sample (N =849) was added with cross-sectional assessments from grade 2 to 7. The assessed coping dimensions were related to (a) problem solving, (b) seeking social support, (c) palliative coping, (d) externalizing emotional coping, and (e) avoidant coping. The use of the coping strategies had to be assessed for six stress-evoking situations. The results show only small differences between the longitudinal and the cross-sectional coping assessments. There are, however, clear situational influences on the choice of the coping strategies and also on the resulting developmental trajectories.