Maternal Prenatal Stress and Other Developmental Risk Factors for Adolescent Depression: Spotlight on Sex Differences

Maternal stress during pregnancy has been linked to premorbid abnormalities associated with depression (e.g., difficult temperament, cognitive deficits) in offspring. However, few studies have looked across developmental periods to examine maternal stress during pregnancy and offspring depression during adolescence and whether these associations differ by sex. The current study used data from 1711 mother-offspring dyads (offspring sex: 49.8% male) in a longitudinal birth cohort study. Maternal narratives collected during pregnancy were qualitatively coded for stress-related themes by independent raters. Latent class analysis (LCA) identified distinct subgroups of offspring based on exposure to maternal prenatal stress and other developmental factors from the prenatal, childhood, and adolescent periods that have been associated with depression and/or maternal prenatal stress. LCA identified subgroups that were compared to determine whether and to what extent they differed on adolescent depressive symptoms. LCA revealed a subgroup of “high-risk” individuals, characterized by maternal factors during pregnancy (higher ambivalence/negativity and lower positivity towards the pregnancy, higher levels of hassles, lower maternal education and higher maternal age at birth, higher pre-pregnancy BMI) and offspring developmental factors (decreased cognitive functioning during childhood and adolescence, lower perceived parental support during adolescence, and higher levels of maternal depression during adolescence). High-risk females exhibited elevated conduct symptoms and higher birth order, while high-risk males exhibited decreased internalizing symptoms and lower birth order. Both high-risk males and females reported elevated depressive symptoms during adolescence relative to their “low-risk” counterparts.     

Comparison of Methods for Collecting and Modeling Dissimilarity Data: Applications to Complex Sound Stimuli

Sorting procedures are frequently adopted as an alternative to dissimilarity ratings to measure the dissimilarity of large sets of stimuli in a comparatively short time. However, systematic empirical research on the consequences of this experiment-design choice is lacking. We carried out a behavioral experiment to assess the extent to which sorting procedures compare to dissimilarity ratings in terms of efficiency, reliability, and accuracy, and the extent to which data from different data-collection methods are redundant and are better fit by different distance models. Participants estimated the dissimilarity of either semantically charged environmental sounds or semantically neutral synthetic sounds. We considered free and hierarchical sorting and derived indications concerning the properties of constrained and truncated hierarchical sorting methods from hierarchical sorting data. Results show that the higher efficiency of sorting methods comes at a considerable cost in terms of data reliability and accuracy. This loss appears to be minimized with truncated hierarchical sorting methods that start from a relatively low number of groups of stimuli. Finally, variations in data-collection method differentially affect the fit of various distance models at the group-average and individual levels. On the basis of these results, we suggest adopting sorting as an alternative to dissimilarity-rating methods only when strictly necessary. We also suggest analyzing the raw behavioral dissimilarities, and avoiding modeling them with one single distance model.     

Neosentimentalism and the valence of attitudes

Neosentimentalist accounts of value need an explanation of which of the sentiments they discuss are pro-attitudes, which attitudes are con-attitudes, and why. I argue that this project has long been neglected in the philosophical literature, even by those who make extensive use of the distinction between pro- and con-attitudes. Using the attitudes of awe and respect as exemplars, I argue that it is not at all clear what if anything makes these attitudes pro-attitudes. I conclude that neither our intuitive sense of the distinction nor the vague accounts of it that exist in the philosophical literature are especially helpful in sorting out the hard cases. What is needed is a more explicit and thorough account of what the valence of our attitudes consists in.     

Competition in stereotyped domains: Competition,social comparison,and stereotype threat

The current work examines a novel and specific way in which competition can hurt the performance of negatively stereotyped individuals: by evoking stereotype threat. In four experiments, we demonstrate that women's underperformance in math when primed with competition was due to feeling worried about confirming negative stereotypes about women's math ability (i.e., stereotype threat), that the activation of negative performance stereotypes for women primed with competition was due to increased group‐level social comparisons (i.e., comparing the self with men and women), and that priming competition led men to perform more poorly than women in a domain where they are negatively stereotyped (i.e., verbal ability). This research suggests that priming people with competition in contexts where they are negatively stereotyped leads to greater social comparison, activation of negative stereotypes, and concern about confirming these stereotypes, thereby decreasing stereotyped individuals' performance in the stereotyped domain. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Unintended Consequences of EEO Enforcement Policies: Being Big is Worse than Being Bad

In enforcing the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1991, it is often critical to determine whether a challenged procedure has systematic adverse impact. The use of statistical significance tests to make this determination has the perverse consequence that the size of an organization or an applicant pool has more impact on determining adverse impact than the extent to which procedures actually discriminate. That is, it is worse to be big than to be bad. We use Monte Carlo studies to illustrate this unforeseen consequence of current enforcement policies and note that a broader definition of adverse impact is clearly warranted.     

The impact of presentation format on causal inferences

The impact of the presentation format of covariation information on causal judgements was examined in a fictitious virus-disease causal induction task. Six different judgement conditions were created by crossing two levels of virus-disease covariation (0, .5) with three levels of disease base rate (.25, .5, .75). The covariation information was presented differently to three groups of participants. In a first group, it was presented in propositional format summarising the frequencies of the four patient types, namely patients with or without the virus who either did have or did not have the disease. In a second group the same information was presented in a 2×2 table with the cell frequencies represented in terms of countable objects (the presence/absence of virus/disease was shown as schematic faces that varied in expression and colour). In a third group the covariation information was presented in terms of a cumulative frequency tree with the two main branches representing the frequencies of patients with and without the disease which further decomposed into subgroups of those with and without the virus. The ability to discriminate between the levels of covariation was poorest in Group 1; it was significantly improved in Group 2, and was best in Group 3. These results suggest that the format with which covariation information is presented to reasoners exerts a significant influence on causal judgements.     

Randomized,placebo-controlled trial of cognitive-behavioral therapy alone or combined with sertraline in the treatment of pediatric obsessive–compulsive disorder

Background

To examine the efficacy of sequential sertraline and cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) treatment relative to CBT with pill placebo over 18 weeks in children and adolescents with obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD).

Methods

Forty-seven children and adolescents with OCD (Range = 7–17 years) were randomized to 18-weeks of treatment in one of three arms: 1) sertraline at standard dosing + CBT (RegSert + CBT); 2) sertraline titrated slowly but achieving at least 8 weeks on the maximally tolerated daily dose + CBT (SloSert + CBT); or 3) pill placebo + CBT (PBO + CBT). Assessments were conducted at screening, baseline, weeks 1–9, 13, and 17, and post-treatment. Raters and clinicians were blinded to sertraline (but not CBT) randomization status. Primary outcomes included the Children's Yale-Brown Obsessive–Compulsive Scale, and response and remission status. Secondary outcomes included the Child Obsessive Compulsive Impact Scale–Parent/Child, Children's Depression Rating Scale-Revised, Multidimensional Anxiety Scale for Children, and Clinical-Global Impressions-Severity.

Results

All groups exhibited large within-group effects across outcomes. There was no group by time interaction across all outcomes suggesting that group changes over time were comparable.

Conclusions

Among youth with OCD, there was no evidence that sequentially provided sertraline with CBT differed from those receiving placebo with CBT.

ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier

NCT00382291.     

Perceptual load does not modulate auditory distractor processing

In vision, it is well established that the perceptual load of a relevant task determines the extent to which irrelevant distractors are processed. Much less research has addressed the effects of perceptual load within hearing. Here, we provide an extensive test using two different perceptual load manipulations, measuring distractor processing through response competition and awareness report. Across four experiments, we consistently failed to find support for the role of perceptual load in auditory selective attention. We therefore propose that the auditory system – although able to selectively focus processing on a relevant stream of sounds – is likely to have surplus capacity to process auditory information from other streams, regardless of the perceptual load in the attended stream. This accords well with the notion of the auditory modality acting as an ‘early-warning’ system as detection of changes in the auditory scene is crucial even when the perceptual demands of the relevant task are high.     

Were the Victorians cleverer than us? The decline in general intelligence estimated from a meta-analysis of the slowing of simple reaction time

The Victorian era was marked by an explosion of innovation and genius, per capita rates of which appear to have declined subsequently. The presence of dysgenic fertility for IQ amongst Western nations, starting in the 19th century, suggests that these trends might be related to declining IQ. This is because high-IQ people are more productive and more creative. We tested the hypothesis that the Victorians were cleverer than modern populations, using high-quality instruments, namely measures of simple visual reaction time in a meta-analytic study. Simple reaction time measures correlate substantially with measures of general intelligence (g) and are considered elementary measures of cognition. In this study we used the data on the secular slowing of simple reaction time described in a meta-analysis of 14 age-matched studies from Western countries conducted between 1889 and 2004 to estimate the decline in g that may have resulted from the presence of dysgenic fertility. Using psychometric meta-analysis we computed the true correlation between simple reaction time and g, yielding a decline of − 1.16 IQ points per decade or − 13.35 IQ points since Victorian times. These findings strongly indicate that with respect to g the Victorians were substantially cleverer than modern Western populations.