How Viewers Process Live,Breaking, and Emotional Television News

This study experimentally tested the effects of negative emotional video and presentation style of television news stories on viewers' attention to, and memory for, the stories. News stories were selected that elicited either fear or disgust. Also, stories were presented either as “breaking” news, “live” news, or traditional news. Findings suggest that stories that elicited disgust reduced processing resources available at encoding more than stories that elicited fear, and were recognized less. A signal detection analysis was conducted that indicated higher sensitivity for fear stories than for disgust, but there was a conservative criterion bias shift for disgust stories. Presentation style had little impact on resources available at encoding and recognition memory, except that fewer resources were available at encoding shortly after the story was verbally labeled “live” or “breaking,” but that did not translate into differences in recognition memory. These results suggest that including disgust-eliciting images in television news stories hinders processing. These results also suggest that discrete emotional theory is applicable to the limited capacity model of mediated message processing.     

Effects of Deception on Children's Understanding of Second‐order False Belief

This research examined two questions: effects of deception on children's understanding of second‐order false belief, and possible effects of number of siblings on second‐order performance. Kindergarten children responded to 3 second‐order problems that varied in the presence and the nature of deception. Performance was better on the problems with deception, but significantly so only when the target for the belief attribution produced the deception. This finding helps to clarify differences between the two main paradigms for assessing second‐order false belief. There was no relation between number of siblings and performance. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

fMRI reliability: Influences of task and experimental design

As scientists, it is imperative that we understand not only the power of our research tools to yield results, but also their ability to obtain similar results over time. This study is an investigation into how common decisions made during the design and analysis of a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study can influence the reliability of the statistical results. To that end, we gathered back-to-back test–retest fMRI data during an experiment involving multiple cognitive tasks (episodic recognition and two-back working memory) and multiple fMRI experimental designs (block, event-related genetic sequence, and event-related m-sequence). Using these data, we were able to investigate the relative influences of task, design, statistical contrast (task vs. rest, target vs. nontarget), and statistical thresholding (unthresholded, thresholded) on fMRI reliability, as measured by the intraclass correlation (ICC) coefficient. We also utilized data from a second study to investigate test–retest reliability after an extended, six-month interval. We found that all of the factors above were statistically significant, but that they had varying levels of influence on the observed ICC values. We also found that these factors could interact, increasing or decreasing the relative reliability of certain Task × Design combinations. The results suggest that fMRI reliability is a complex construct whose value may be increased or decreased by specific combinations of factors.     

A systematic review of studies comparing body image concerns among female college athletes and non-athletes, 1997–2012

Research prior to 2001 indicated that athletes experienced better body image than non-athletes, with no differences among sport types. Since then, female athletes have become increasingly sexually objectified in the media, and the sociocultural beauty ideal has shifted to emphasize appearing both athletic and thin. Part I of this paper explores the literature describing these changes. Part II presents a systematic and comprehensive literature review of 10 recent studies comparing body image concerns (BIC) among collegiate female athletes and non-athletes to identify the current status of BIC in female athletes. Findings indicate that involvement in collegiate athletics provides some protection from BIC; however, this protection appears attenuated for athletes in more feminine sports (e.g., gymnastics), and higher level athletes (Division I). Researchers should examine how sociocultural pressures unrelated to competition predict female athletes’ BIC using measures that focus on objectification, positive body image, body functionality, and thin- and athletic-ideal internalization.     

Listeners learn phonotactic patterns conditioned on suprasegmental cues

Language learners are sensitive to phonotactic patterns from an early age, and can acquire both simple and 2nd-order positional restrictions contingent on segment identity (e.g., /f/ is an onset with /æ/but a coda with /?/). The present study explored the learning of phonototactic patterns conditioned on a suprasegmental cue: lexical stress. Adults first heard non-words in which trochaic and iambic items had different consonant restrictions. In Experiment 1, participants trained with phonotactic patterns involving natural classes of consonants later falsely recognized novel items that were consistent with the training patterns (legal items), demonstrating that they had learned the stress-conditioned phonotactic patterns. However, this was only true for iambic items. In Experiment 2, participants completed a forced-choice test between novel legal and novel illegal items and were again successful only for the iambic items. Experiment 3 demonstrated learning for trochaic items when they were presented alone. Finally, in Experiment 4, in which the training phase was lengthened, participants successfully learned both sets of phonotactic patterns. These experiments provide evidence that learners consider more global phonological properties in the computation of phonotactic patterns, and that learners can acquire multiple sets of patterns simultaneously, even contradictory ones.     

Developing Depressive Symptoms over the Adolescent Years: The Influence of Affiliated Cultural Values among Taiwanese Youth

The purpose of this study was (a) to identify latent subgroups of Taiwanese adolescents who vary in their cultural value affiliations and (b) to examine how latent-subgroup membership in early adolescence predicted depressive symptoms for 6 years throughout adolescence into young adulthood. Participants consisted of 2458 youth from the longitudinal Taiwan Youth Project (TYP). Latent profile analysis indicated five classes (patterns) of cultural value affiliation. A zero-inflated Poisson (ZIP) analysis followed, which identified the estimated (a) probability of experiencing depressive symptoms and (b) number of depressive symptoms experienced by individuals who reported depressive symptoms across the five observational time points. Results showed that among the five classes of value affiliation, two classes had a greater likelihood of experiencing depressive symptoms at the beginning of the assessment (age 15). Youth who were least likely to embrace societally prescribed culture values were at the greatest risk for manifesting subsequent depressive symptoms. These findings support the idea that the way adolescents identify with their cultural values predicts subsequent depressive symptoms.     

More than meets the eye: Morandi's art and analytic listening

This study of Giorgio Morandi, the great twentieth-century Italian painter, departs from the model of Freud's essay on Leonardo, in which he creates a psychodynamic hypothesis by linking the art with facts and conjecture about the artist's life. Because personal information about Morandi is remarkably scarce, we can make few connections between his art and his individual psychology. But Morandi's works can inform psychoanalysis and enhance analytic listening when we reflect on the paintings themselves, our responses to them, and the responses of art critics. This approach to his art evokes core principles of clinical theory, demonstrates the overlap between the creative process in art and analysis, and exemplifies the value of interdisciplinary study for analytic education.     

Evaluation of a preventive intervention for child anxiety in two randomized attention-control school trials

The present research examined the effectiveness of a cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) based intervention program, FRIENDS, for children from grades 4 to 6, using random assignment at the school-level and an attention-control design in two longitudinal studies. The first study targeted children with anxiety symptoms (N = 191, mean age = 10.1) as screened with self, parent, and teacher-reports; the second study took a universal approach with full classrooms of children participating (N = 253, mean age = 9.8). The results showed no intervention effect in both studies, with children’s anxiety symptoms decreasing over time regardless of whether they were in the story-reading (attention control) or FRIENDS condition. The findings also indicated that girls reported a higher level of anxiety than boys and children in higher grades reported lower anxiety relative to younger children in both studies. In addition, similar patterns were found using a subgroup of children with high-anxiety symptoms from both studies.