“Troubles Talk”: Effects of Gender and Gender-Typing

Effects of gender and gender-typing on communication styles were examined in 62 male and 110 female college students. Participants were asked to rate the likelihood of giving certain responses to a friend's problems as well as the likelihood of feeling certain emotions when a friend gives them advice or sympathy for their own problems. Men and masculine people were expected to be more likely to respond to a friend in a way that reduces interpersonal intimacy; women and feminine people were expected to respond in a way that enhances interpersonal intimacy. Although a few gender differences were found, participants' level of expressive/nurturing traits (femininity) was related to more responses than was gender. The importance of examining gender-linked traits and not just gender when studying communication patterns is emphasized.     

Three-month-old infants' object recognition across changes in viewpoint using an operant learning procedure

Object knowledge refers to the understanding that all objects share certain properties. Various components of object knowledge (e.g., object occlusion, object causality) have been examined in human infants to determine its developmental origins. Viewpoint invariance--the understanding that an object viewed from different viewpoints is still the same object--is one area of object knowledge, however, that has received less attention. To this end, infants' capacity for viewpoint-invariant perception of multi-part objects was investigated. Three-month-old infants were tested for generalization to an object displayed on a mobile that differed only in orientation (i.e., viewpoint) from a training object. Infants were given experience with a wide range of object views (Experiment 1) or a more restricted range during training (Experiment 2). The results showed that infants generalized between a horizontal and vertical viewpoint (Experiment 1) that they could clearly discriminate between in other contexts (i.e., with restricted view experience, Experiment 2). Overall, the outcome shows that training experience with multiple viewpoints plays an important role in infants' ability to develop a general percept of an object's 3D structure and promotes viewpoint-invariant perception of multi-part objects; in contrast, restricting training experience impedes viewpoint-invariant recognition of multi-part objects.     

The emotional impact and ease of recall of warning signs for suicide: a controlled study

In light of concerns about potential iatrogenic effects of information about suicide, in the current study we examined the emotional impact of reading a list of warning signs for suicide in comparison to comparable lists for heart attacks and diabetes. All participants read two sets of warning signs, with the experimental group reading the suicide warning signs. Results confirm no difference in emotional impact across groups, along with providing evidence that warning signs for suicide are as easy to recall after exposure as warning signs for heart attack. Implications for pubic health campaigns are discussed.     

Warning signs for suicide on the Internet: a descriptive study

The issue of suicide warning signs on the Internet is considered. In addition to reviewing some of the relevant conceptual issues about warning signs, a random sample of Internet sites was selected and reviewed. Warning signs were grouped and agreement across sites was examined, with results confirming broad disparity in what is presented to the public. The implications of a lack of consensus on warning signs for suicide are discussed.     

Brain-behavior relationships in reading acquisition are modulated by socioeconomic factors

Functional neuroimaging may provide insights into the achievement gap in reading skill commonly observed across socioeconomic status (SES). Brain activation during reading tasks is known to be associated with individual differences in children's phonological language skills. By selecting children of equivalent phonological skill, yet diverse socioeconomic backgrounds, we use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to demonstrate that a child's experience, as operationalized by SES, can systematically modulate the relationship between phonological language skills and reading-related brain activity in left fusiform and perisylvian regions. Specifically, at lower socioeconomic levels, individual differences in skill result in large differences in brain activation. In contrast, as SES increases, this relationship between phonological language skill and activation is attenuated. Socioeconomic background factors are thus found to modulate brain-behavior relationships in reading, indicating that cognitive, social, and neurobiological influences on reading development are fundamentally intertwined.     

A cross-cultural analysis of the Brief Symptom Inventory-18

The Brief Symptom Inventory-18 (BSI-18: Derogatis, 2000) is an abbreviated version of the nine dimension, 53-item BSI (Derogatis, 1993) which is a shortened form of the 90-item Symptom Checklist-90-Revised (SCL-90-R: Derogatis, 1994). Criticism focused on factor structure (cf. Boulet & Boss, 1991; Ruipérez, Ibá?ez, Lorente, Moro, & Ortet, 2001) and the two older versions' poor discriminant validity suggest the scales' usefulness is limited to global scores only. Using principal component analysis, the authors explore the three-dimension factor structure of the BSI - 18 with the understudied population of Central American immigrants to the U.S. (N = 100). Results suggest one underlying factor best used in aggregate as a general screening for overall levels of psychological distress. Cultural differences are discussed.     

Lexical characteristics of words used in emotional Stroop experiments

Validity of the emotional Stroop task hinges on equivalence between the emotion and the control words in terms of lexical features related to word recognition. The authors evaluated the lexical features of 1,033 words used in 32 published emotional Stroop studies. Emotion words were significantly lower in frequency of use, longer in length, and had smaller orthographic neighborhoods than words used as controls. These lexical features contribute to slower word recognition and hence are likely to contribute to delayed latencies in color naming. The often-replicated slowdown in color naming of emotion words may be due, in part, to lexical differences between the emotion and control words used in the majority of such studies to date.     

Longitudinal Intellectual Assessment of Children With HIV Infection

The objective of this paper was to describe the intellectual development of 39 children with HIV infection. The children received serial evaluations over a 10-year period. Thirty-nine children were assessed with age-appropriate intellectual measures at regular intervals as part of their treatment in the HIV Program of a children's hospital. Children showed an 24-point drop in mean Bayley Mental scores over the first 2 years of life. McCarthy scores remained in the low average range from ages 3–5 years. IQ scores were stable by age 6 in the low average range, and unchanged through age 12. Significant changes in memory, vocabulary, and performance subtests were noted. Children with HIV infection demonstrated a significant decline in mental functioning over the first 2 years of life, fell into the low average range by age 3, and remained in the low average range, with subtle changes in some areas.     

Neurocognitive correlates of socioeconomic status in kindergarten children

Socioeconomic status (SES) is strongly associated with cognitive ability and achievement during childhood and beyond. Little is known about the developmental relationships between SES and specific brain systems or their associated cognitive functions. In this study we assessed neurocognitive functioning of kindergarteners from different socioeconomic backgrounds, using tasks drawn from the cognitive neuroscience literature in order to determine how childhood SES predicts the normal variance in performance across different neurocognitive systems. Five neurocognitive systems were examined: the occipitotemporal/visual cognition system, the parietal/spatial cognition system, the medial temporal/memory system, the left perisylvian/language system, and the prefrontal/executive system. SES was disproportionately associated with the last two, with low SES children performing worse than middle SES children on most measures of these systems. Relations among language, executive function, SES and specific aspects of early childhood experience were explored, revealing intercorrelations and a seemingly predominant role of individual differences in language ability involved in SES associations with executive function.