Does the Thought Count? Gratitude Understanding in Elementary School Students

Gratitude, although studied throughout history by scholars from diverse backgrounds, has been largely understudied in psychology until recently. The psychological literature on gratitude is expanding, but it is still particularly limited with children. The authors compared younger (first- and second-grade students; n = 30) and older (fourth- and fifth-grade students; n = 27) children on gratitude-related ratings surrounding gift giving vignettes that included either a desirable (e.g., a birthday cupcake) or an undesirable (e.g., a melted ice cream cone) gift. Empathy was also measured. Hierarchical regressions revealed different patterns of predictors for desirable and undesirable gifts. For desirable gifts, liking significantly predicted gratitude and liking predicted effort. For undesirable gifts, older children and those who perceived the target as liking the gift more predicted higher gratitude ratings. Finally, higher gratitude rating predicted both higher ratings of giver effort (i.e., intention or how hard did the giver try to give a nice gift) and liking of the undesirable gifts. More research on children's understanding of gratitude is needed but these results suggest that school-aged children take into account givers’ intentions and thoughts behind gift giving in determining feelings of gratitude. Limitations and directions for future research are also discussed.     

Examining the relationship between use of sexually explicit media and sexual risk behavior in a sample of men who have sex with men in Norway

The purpose of this study was to investigate consumption patterns of gay‐oriented sexually explicit media (SEM) among men who have sex with men (MSM) in Norway, with a particular emphasis on a possible relationship between gay SEM consumption and HIV risk behavior. Participants included 529 MSM living in Norway recruited online to complete a SEM consumption and sexual risk survey. Of the 507 participants who responded to the all items measuring exposure to SEM, 19% reported unprotected anal intercourse with a casual partner (UAI) in last 90 days, and 14% reported having had sero‐discordant UAI. Among those with UAI experience, 23% reported receptive anal intercourse (R‐UAI) and 37% reported insertive anal intercourse (I‐UAI). SEM consumption was found to be significantly associated with sexual risk behaviors. Participants with increased consumption of bareback SEM reported higher odds of UAI and I‐UAI after adjusting for other factors using multivariable statistics. MSM who started using SEM at a later age reported lower odds of UAI and I‐UAI than MSM who started earlier. Future research should aim at understanding how MSM develop and maintain SEM preferences and the relationship between developmental and maintenance factors and HIV sexual risk behavior.     

The Mother Teresa Effect: Counterproductive Effects of Touching an Altruist’s Possessions on Charitable Giving

Charities that recruit famous humanitarians, or obtain celebrity endorsements, may promote products associated with these altruistic superstars in an effort to increase donations. Previous research supports that “superstar” role models can promote desirable behavior. Charitable organizations may assume if people handle a product associated with a famous humanitarian, they will be inspired and more motivated to donate as a result. An opposite possibility is that physically handling reminders of an extreme altruist may result in contrast effects. Such positive exemplars may result in more negative perceptions of one’s own charitable behavior, and decrease the perceived efficacy of one’s own contributions. In two studies, participants did or did not touch items said to have belonged to a very altruistic person (Experiment 1) or to Mother Teresa (Experiment 2). Compared to participants in non-touch and other control conditions, those who physically touched items said to belong to an altruist subsequently donated fewer raffle tickets to charity. The results are related to theories of perceived efficacy, metacognitive processes, and the counterproductive influence of extremely positive role models.     

Greater dependence on working memory and restricted familiarity in orangutans compared with rhesus monkeys

The prefrontal cortex is larger than would be predicted by body size or visual cortex volume in great apes compared with monkeys. Because prefrontal cortex is critical for working memory, we hypothesized that recognition memory tests would engage working memory in orangutans more robustly than in rhesus monkeys. In contrast to working memory, the familiarity response that results from repetition of an image is less cognitively taxing and has been associated with nonfrontal brain regions. Across three experiments, we observed a striking species difference in the control of behavior by these two types of memory. First, we found that recognition memory performance in orangutans was controlled by working memory under conditions in which this memory system plays little role in rhesus monkeys. Second, we found that unlike the case in monkeys, familiarity was not involved in recognition memory performance in orangutans, shown by differences with monkeys across three different measures. Memory in orangutans was not improved by use of novel images, was always impaired by a concurrent cognitive load, and orangutans did not accurately identify images seen minutes ago. These results are surprising and puzzling, but do support the view that prefrontal expansion in great apes favored working memory. At least in orangutans, increased dependence on working memory may come at a cost in terms of the availability of familiarity.

The prefrontal cortex is critical for a suite of cognitive control processes that are conspicuous in human cognition (Miller 2000; Rougier et al. 2005; Braver et al. 2009). One such process is working memory, which actively maintains representations in a state of heightened access for further processing (Baddeley and Hitch 1974; Engle 2010). Working memory and cognitive control are positively correlated with measures of general intelligence in humans, implicating the prefrontal cortex as a key neural structure in the evolution of human cognition (Gray et al. 2003; Unsworth and Engle 2007; Cole et al. 2012). Some neuroanatomical studies have found that the prefrontal cortex is larger than would be predicted based on body size and visual cortex volume in apes compared with monkeys (Rilling 2006; Passingham and Smaers 2014). These findings suggest that the prefrontal cortex expanded disproportionately in great apes during primate evolution. Disproportionate expansion of the prefrontal cortex in great apes may have resulted in greater capacity for cognitive control functions, such as working memory, compared with monkeys. Thus, studies directly comparing working memory in monkeys and apes are critical to understanding the evolution of intelligence in primates.The role of cognitive control, and thus the prefrontal cortex, varies among memory systems. For instance, working memory relies heavily on cognitive control, consuming substantial cognitive resources, and is known to depend on frontal brain areas (Goldman-Rakic 1995; Fuster 1997). In contrast, familiarity, which is a strength-based memory signal that codes for whether or not a percept has previously been experienced (Kelley and Jacoby 1998; Yonelinas 2002), relies substantially less on cognitive control, consumes fewer cognitive resources, and has been mostly associated with nonfrontal areas of the brain such as the perirhinal cortex (Bachevalier and Mishkin 1986; Brown and Aggleton 2001; Haskins et al. 2008; Tu et al. 2011; O''Neil et al. 2012). Thus, working memory and familiarity vary in the degree to which they rely on cognitive control, and the degree to which they rely on prefrontal areas of the brain.If a relatively large prefrontal cortex enhances cognitive control and working memory, then we should expect recognition memory tests to engage working memory relatively more in apes than in monkeys. We evaluated this hypothesis by comparing the contributions of working memory and familiarity with recognition memory performance in orangutans and rhesus monkeys. Because the orangutans and monkeys here compared have different experience with cognitive testing, we aimed to compare the relative contributions of working memory and familiarity in each species, rather than the absolute accuracy of the two species in a particular memory test. This follows a logic similar to that used in many comparative anatomical studies; for example, those cited here that found the prefrontal cortex is larger in apes relative to body weight or visual cortex volume, rather than simply absolute volume.The relative contributions of working memory and familiarity to behavior can be measured in visual recognition memory tests. In these tests subjects study a sample image at the beginning of each trial and after a delay they are presented with a test consisting of the recently seen sample image among distractors (Fig. 1). The images used in these tests can either be repeated, such that the subject''s job is to determine which image in a set of familiar images was seen most recently, or the images can be trial unique, such that at test subjects need to discriminate a previously seen image from novel distractors. Working memory is critical for solving tests with repeating images, but much less so for tests using trial unique images, where familiarity plays a much greater role (Brady and Hampton 2018a). Monkeys (Jitsumori et al. 1988; Basile and Hampton 2013a) and apes (Harlow 1944; Hayes and Thompson 1953) are more accurate and better tolerate long delay intervals in tests with trial-unique stimuli, when familiarity can support performance. Experimentally naïve monkeys require comparatively little training to demonstrate proficient use of familiarity as a mnemonic cue, compared with the training required to become proficient in using working memory (Mishkin and Delacour 1975). Active working memory and passive familiarity are independent mnemonic processes that can be doubly dissociated. Working memory is impaired by a concurrent cognitive load imposed during the memory interval, while familiarity is not affected (Logie 1986; Jacoby et al. 1989; Basile and Hampton 2013a; Brady and Hampton 2018a). Completing the double dissociation, equating the familiarity of the sample and distractor images during study impairs choice based on familiarity, but not working memory (Brady and Hampton 2018a). Thus, recognition memory tests may allow us to compare the relative contributions of these two memory processes with recognition performance across species.Open in a separate windowFigure 1.Recognition memory tests with repeating and trial-unique images. (A) In tests with trial-unique images, each image was only used once as a sample or a distractor within a session. (B) When tested with repeating images, the images were the same on each trial. The sample image was pseudorandomly selected each trial such that each image appeared equally often as the sample or as a distractor.One might expect orangutans to show greater dependence on working memory compared with rhesus monkeys for at least two reasons. First, working memory is highly refined in humans and orangutans are more closely related to humans phylogenetically, sharing a common ancestor 13 million to 14 million years ago (Stewart and Disotell 1998), whereas rhesus monkeys and humans shared a common ancestor ∼32 million years ago (Roos and Zinner 2015). Second, orangutans have a relatively larger prefrontal cortex compared with monkeys (Rilling 2006; Passingham and Smaers 2014). We compared the ability of rhesus monkeys and orangutans to maintain images from different sets in working memory. We also determined the extent to which familiarity contributed to recognition memory performance. Across three experiments, we observed striking species differences. We found that in orangutans, recognition memory performance for both repeating and trial-unique images was controlled by working memory. In contrast, monkeys relied on working memory for repeating images, and on familiarity for trial-unique images. Furthermore, monkeys dramatically outperformed orangutans in tests that exceeded the capacity and duration of working memory, and thus depended on familiarity.     

Are individual differences in appetitive and defensive motivation related? A psychophysiological examination in two samples

Appetitive and defensive motivation account for a good deal of variance in personality and mental health, but whether individual differences in these systems are correlated or orthogonal has not been conclusively established. Previous investigations have generally relied on self-report and have yielded conflicting results. We therefore assessed the relation between psychophysiological indices of appetitive and defensive motivation during elicitation of these motivational states: specifically, frontal electroencephalogram asymmetry during reward anticipation and startle response during anticipation of predictable or unpredictable threat of shock. Results in a sample of psychopathology-free community members (n=63), an independent sample of undergraduates with a range of internalising symptoms (n=64), and the combination of these samples (n=127) revealed that differences in responding to the two tasks were not significantly correlated. Average coefficients approached zero in all three samples (community: .04, undergraduate: ?.01, combined: .06). Implications of these findings for research on normal and abnormal personality are discussed.     

J. M. Keynes's position on the general applicability of mathematical,logical and statistical methods in economics and social science

The author finds no support for the claim that J. M. Keynes had severe reservations, in general, as opposed to particular, concerning the application of mathematical, logical and statistical methods in economics. These misinterpretations rest on the omission of important source material as well as a severe misconstrual ofThe Treatise on Probability (1921).The author acknowledges substantial help from Jaakko Hintikka, but is necessarily responsible for any shortcomings.     

What teacher factors influence their attributions for children's difficulties in learning?

Background Identifying the factors that influence teacher beliefs about teaching children with learning difficulties is important for the success of inclusive education. This study explores the relationship between teachers' role, self‐efficacy, attitudes towards disabled people, teaching experience and training, on teachers' attributions for children's difficulties in learning. Method One hundred and eighteen primary school teachers (44 general mainstream, 33 mainstream learning support, and 41 special education teachers) completed the short form of the Teachers' Sense of Efficacy Scale, the Interaction with Disabled Persons Scale (IDP), and a revised version of the Teacher Attribution Scale. Results Regression analysis found that teachers' role influenced stability and controllability attributions. However, for stability attributions the effect was not sustained when examined in the context of the other factors of teaching efficacy, experience, training, and attitudes towards disability. What emerged as important instead was strong feelings of sympathy towards disabled people which predicted stable attributions about learning difficulties. Experience of teaching children with additional support needs and teaching efficacy positively predicted external locus of causality attributions. Surprisingly, training was not found to have an impact on attributions. A mixed MANOVA found that mainstream teachers' controllability attributions were influenced by whether or not the child had identified learning support needs. Conclusions Teacher efficacy, experience of teaching students with support needs, attitudes towards disabled people, and teachers' role all impact on teacher attributions, but no relationship with training was found. Implications for teacher training and development, and for student achievement and student self‐perception are discussed.     

A Web-Based Contingency Management Program With Adolescent Smokers

The present study evaluated a new 30-day Web-based contingency management program for smoking abstinence with 4 daily-smoking adolescents. Participants made 3 daily video recordings of themselves giving breath carbon monoxide (CO) samples at home that were sent electronically to study personnel. Using a reversal design, participants could earn money for continued abstinence during the treatment phases (CO ≤ 5 ppm). All participants were compliant with the treatment (submitting 97.2% of samples), and all achieved prolonged abstinence from smoking.