The Relationship of Temperament Scores to the Way Young Adults Adapt to Change

Temperament has been suggested as affecting the way individuals adapt to changes. This study examined the relationship of temperament, as measured by the Dimensions of Temperament Scale (Lerner, Palermo, Spiro, & Nesselroade, 1982), to three aspects of adaptation for 167 students starting post-secondary education. Loneliness was measured using Schmidt and Sermat's (1983) Differential Loneliness Scale, involvement was measured using Scales of Satisfaction and Activity (Vinsel, Brown, Altman, & Foss, 1980), and affect was measured using the Multiple Affect Adjective Checklist (Zuckerman & Lubin, 1965a). In the sample, feelings of loneliness were related to temperament differentially with regard to friends, romantic-sexual relationships, groups, and family. Involvement was best predicted by the approach/withdrawal dimension, whereas affect was best predicted by the dimensions of mood. The results are consistent with earlier work with children and lend support to the view of temperament as an active mechanism by which the individual adapts to life changes.     

Can skilled readers perform a second task in parallel? A functional connectivity MRI study

When asked to search for a target letter while reading, the patterns with which people miss the target letter reveal information about the process of reading itself. Questions remain as to whether this paradigm reflects normal reading processes however. We used a novel continuous-performance neuroimaging paradigm to address this question. In separate scanning runs, subjects either read alone, read while searching for a target letter, or searched non-words continuously. Functional connectivity analysis recovered the full extent of brain areas identified for reading in a localizer scan, with no differences between reading alone and the dual task condition. Differences were found, however, between both reading conditions and the nonword search condition. These results demonstrate that in skilled readers brain activation associated with reading is unaffected by a concurrent letter-search task. They further demonstrate the utility of a naturalistic, continuous-performance paradigm for studying the neural basis of language processing.     

The effect of scene removal on inhibition of return in a cue-target task

Inhibition of return (IOR) is thought to be a phenomenon that biases orienting toward novel stimuli and/or facilitates foraging search. Although IOR has been explored using both the spatial cueing paradigm and the search paradigm, there is significant disagreement among scholars over whether these paradigms are reflecting the same underlying mechanism. We sought to address this disagreement by exploring whether a manipulation known to impact IOR in search - maintenance versus removal of the scene - might have a similar impact in the spatial cuing paradigm. As has been observed in both the cuing and search paradigms, we obtained a robust gradient of IOR around the cued location. Importantly, as in search tasks, scene removal resulted in the abolishment of IOR. This similarity lends support to the view that the spatial cuing and search paradigms are exploring the same IOR phenomenon.     

The components of visual attention and the ubiquitous Simon effect

Spatial responding is influenced by the degree of correspondence between the stimulus–response (S–R) code activated by the target's task-irrelevant location and the S–R code activated by the target's non-spatial, task-relevant feature. A generally accepted explanation of this “Simon effect,” named after its discoverer, is that there is a natural tendency to respond towards the source of stimulation. First we will review the ubiquity of the Simon effect. Then we will review the literature, including our own studies when appropriate, that has explored the relationship between the Simon effect and the components of attention: alertness, orienting and executive control, with an emphasis on visual orienting. The Simon effect is reduced when participants are not alert and when executive control is effective in filtering out the irrelevant location information. When attention is oriented endogenously, or is captured exogenously by uninformative peripheral stimulation, the Simon effect is additive with attentional facilitation (i.e., the Simon effect is the same magnitude for targets presented at attended and unattended locations). Yet, some forms of orienting, such as orienting directed by gaze and biased by inhibition of return, modulate the Simon effect. We will explore the implications of these patterns of additivity and interaction for our understanding of both the Simon effect and spatial attention.     

Psychometric properties of the Behavioral Inhibition Questionnaire in preschool children

We examined the psychometric properties of the Behavioral Inhibition Questionnaire (BIQ; Bishop, Spence, & McDonald, 2003), a rating scale for children's behavioral inhibition. Parent and teacher ratings, parent interviews, and laboratory observations were obtained for 495 preschoolers. Confirmatory factor analysis yielded 6 factors, each reflecting the BIQ's subscales, and all loading onto a second-order general dimension. Model fit was acceptable for parent ratings, but only marginal for teacher ratings. The convergent and discriminant validity of the BIQ was examined by using a multitrait-multimethod approach. Results indicate that the BIQ displays evidence of reliability and validity that can complement observational paradigms.     

Attentional Biases for Emotional Faces in Young Children of Mothers with Chronic or Recurrent Depression

Attentional biases for negative stimuli have been observed in school-age and adolescent children of depressed mothers and may reflect a vulnerability to depression. The direction of these biases and whether they can be identified in early childhood remains unclear. The current study examined attentional biases in 5–7-year-old children of depressed and non-depressed mothers. Following a mood induction, children participated in a dot-probe task assessing biases for sad and happy faces. There was a significant interaction of group and sex: daughters of depressed mothers attended selectively to sad faces, while children of controls and sons of depressed mothers did not exhibit biases. No effects were found for happy stimuli. These findings suggest that attentional biases are discernible in early childhood and may be vulnerability markers for depression. The results also raise the possibility that sex differences in cognitive biases are evident before the emergence of sex differences in the prevalence of depression.     

The future-orientation of memory: planning as a key component mediating the high levels of recall found with survival processing

In a series of papers, Nairne and colleagues have demonstrated that tasks encouraging participants to judge words for relevance to survival led to better recall than did tasks lacking survival relevance. Klein, Robertson, and Delton (2010) presented data suggesting that the future-directed temporal orientation of the survival task (e.g., planning), rather than survival per se, accounts for the good recall found with the task. In the present studies we manipulated the amount of survival and planning processing encouraged by a set of encoding tasks. Participants performed tasks that encouraged processing stimuli for their relevance to (a) both survival and planning, (b) planning, but not survival, or (c) survival but not planning. We predicted, and found, that recall performance associated with tasks encouraging planning (i.e., survival with planning and planning without survival) should exceed tasks that encouraged survival but not planning (i.e., survival without planning). We draw several conclusions. First, planning is a necessary component of the superior recall found in the survival paradigm. Second, memory, from an evolutionary perspective, is inherently prospective--tailored by natural selection to support future decisions and judgements that cannot be known in advance with certainty.     

Using MMPI–2–RF Correlates to Elucidate the PCL–R and Its Four Facets in a Sample of Male Forensic Psychiatric Patients

This study documents the associations between the MMPI–2–RF (Ben-Porath &; Tellegen, 2008 Ben-Porath, Y. S., &; Tellegen, A. (2008). MMPI–2–RF (Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory–2–Restructured Form): Manual for administration and scoring. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. [Google Scholar]) scale scores and the Psychopathy Checklist Revised (PCL–R; Hare, 2003 Hare, R. D. (2003). The Hare Psychopathy Checklist–Revised (2nd ed.). Toronto, ON, Canada: Multi-Health Systems. [Google Scholar]) facet scores in a forensic psychiatric sample. Objectives were to determine how the MMPI–2–RF scales might enhance substantive understanding of the nature of the 4 PCL–R facets and to discern possible implications for the treatment of psychopathic patients. A sample of 127 male forensic psychiatric offenders admitted to a Dutch forensic psychiatric hospital completed the PCL–R and the MMPI–2. Exploratory stepwise regression analyses assessed the prediction of the PCL–R total and its facet scores from MMPI–2–RF scales at its 3 hierarchical levels. Conceptually meaningful results emerged at each level of the MMPI–2–RF hierarchy, including several consistent differences between predictor sets across the facets. Interestingly, ideas of persecution (RC6) was a specific predictor of PCL–R Facet 2, a facet noted for its association with treatment failure. Results are compared and contrasted to the extant body of empirical work to date, and some tentative clinical implications are offered.