Tactile memory of deaf-blind adults on four tasks

The performance of ten deaf-blind and ten sighted-hearing participants on four tactile memory tasks was investigated. Recognition and recall memory tasks and a matching pairs game were used. It was hypothesized that deaf-blind participants would be superior on each task. Performance was measured in terms of the time taken, and the number of items correctly recalled. In Experiments 1 and 2, which measured recognition memory in terms of the time taken to remember target items, the hypothesis was supported, but not by the length of time taken to recognize the target items, or for the number of target items correctly identified. The hypothesis was supported by Experiment 3, which measured recall memory, with regard to time taken to complete some of the tasks but not for the number of correctly recalled positions. Experiment 4, which used the matching pairs game, supported the hypothesis in terms of both time taken and the number of moves required. It is concluded that the deaf-blind people's tactile encoding is more efficient than that of sighted-hearing people, and that it is probable that their storage and retrieval are normal.     

Building phonotactic knowledge in bilinguals: role of early exposure

Timing and amount of exposure to a 2nd language in the acquisition of phonotactic restrictions was examined in 4 experiments. In Experiments 1 and 2, 10-month-old monolingual and bilingual Catalan-Spanish infants were presented with nonwords that were phonotactically legal or illegal in Catalan and phonotactically illegal in Spanish. Differences between the 4 groups of infants were obtained as a function of language dominance. In Experiments 3 and 4, adult Spanish-Catalan bilinguals were compared with the same materials. Catalan-dominant bilinguals were more accurate than Spanish-dominant bilinguals in their perception of legal sequences; however, they were not more accurate with illegal sequences. The findings suggest a complex correlation between the pattern of preference and the amount and timing of exposure.     

Religiosity,attributional style,and social support as psychosocial buffers for African American and white adolescents' perceived risk for suicide

Psychosocial buffers were evaluated for their relative contributions to adolescents' perceived risk for suicide. A community sample of African American and White adolescents (N = 1,098) rated the likelihood that they would die by suicide and completed standardized measures of depression, hopelessness, intrinsic and extrinsic religiosity, orthodoxy, social support, and causal attributional style. Orthodoxy-commitment to core beliefs-emerged as the single strongest correlate after controlling for the effects of other buffers. The effect of depression on perceived suicide risk was moderated by the adolescent's degree of orthodoxy. Commitment to core, life-saving beliefs may help explain the religion-suicide link for adolescents.     

Infant temperament,pleasure in parenting,and marital happiness in adoptive families

Temperamental characteristics have been related to later externalizing and internalizing behavioral outcomes. To assess the relationship between temperament and the early family environment, we measured infant temperament, pleasure in parenting, and marital happiness via parent report in 99 families with a nonrelative adoptive infant. Perceptions of child temperament were assessed using two subscales of the Infant Behavior Questionnaire (IBQ; Rothbart, 1981). Mothers and fathers who rated their adoptive child as showing more Distress to Limitations (on the IBQ) reported less pleasure in routine parenting activities; this effect was mediated by marital happiness for fathers. Mothers reported less pleasure in parenting with infants perceived to be more temperamentally fearful (on the IBQ). The bidirectional relationship between temperamental characteristics and pleasure in parenting is discussed. © 2001 Michigan Association for Infant Mental Health.     

Partisanship and the status quo

Individuals advancing the status quo in partisan conflict are more favorably evaluated compared to individuals advocating change (Keltner & Robinson, 1997 ). We explore two aspects of this intergroup bias: first, a target effect whereby groups who aim to change the status quo are judged more negatively than those favoring its preservation; and second, an observer effect whereby those favoring the status quo define the conflict in terms of the status quo versus change to a greater extent than those advancing change. We sought to extend our understanding of these partisan effects via a minimal‐group induction of partisanship in the laboratory. In our study, participants viewed a negotiation between two group representatives, where half of the groups either defended the status quo or advocated change. As predicted, partisan observers: (a) favored the negotiator advancing the status quo (consistent with the target effect), (b) were more likely to attribute actions to the negotiators as stemming from their status quo versus change preference when they themselves were aligned with the status quo rather than change (consistent with the observer effect), and (c) when aligned with the status quo, expected a more effortful conflict than those seeking change (consistent with the observer effect). It is suggested that these biased perceptions are basic to intergroup, partisan processes involving change. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Role of Network Support and Interference in Women's Perception of Romantic,Friend, and Parental Relationships

This study examined the association between support/interference from the best friend and closest parent to women's (a) satisfaction with the parent–daughter relationship, (b) satisfaction with the friendship, and (c) love for the romantic partner. The respondents (n = 162 females; 84% Caucasian, 1% Asian American, 10% Hispanic, 4% African American, and 1% Multiracial) completed a questionnaire packet to assess each of the factors. Results revealed that romantic love was unrelated to friend support, friend interference, or parental interference, but positively related to parental support. Parent support was a significant correlate of parent satisfaction, and a similar pattern emerged between friend support/friendship satisfaction. Further, best friend support moderated the relationship between friend interference and friendship satisfaction, such that interference was negatively related to satisfaction in low support conditions. Overall, the results suggested that network reactions to romance played a limited role in romantic affection, but were more strongly associated with network satisfaction.     

The role of age and prior beliefs in contingency judgment

This experiment investigated how prior beliefs affect young and older adults' ability to detect differences in objective contingency. Participants received new evidence that the objective contingency between two events was positive, negative, or zero when they believed that there was a positive or negative relationship between events, when they believed that the events were unrelated, and when they had no knowledge of the relationship between the events. They were then asked to estimate the objective contingency and recall the contingency evidence. Beliefs that events were or could be related improved young adults' contingency discrimination. Moreover, these beliefs did not produce biases in young adults' memory for the contingency evidence, but rather affected how they weighted this evidence at judgment. In contrast, these same beliefs did not improve older adults' contingency discrimination, but did produce biases in their memory for the evidence that were similar to those seen in their judgment. These findings are discussed in terms of age-related changes in working memory executive processes that impair older adults' ability to fully evaluate both belief-confirming and disconfirming contingency evidence and update their beliefs with this information.     

Effects of verbal working memory deficits on metaphor comprehension in patients with Parkinson's disease

This research studied one aspect of pragmatic language processing, the ability to understand metaphorical language, to determine whether patients with Parkinson disease (PD) are impaired for these abilities, and whether cognitive resource limitations/fronto-striatal dysfunction contributes to these deficits. Seventeen PD participants and healthy controls (HC) completed a series of neuropsychological tests and performed a metaphor comprehension task following the methods of Gernsbacher and colleagues [Gernsbacher, M. A., Keysar, B., Robertson, R. R. W., & Werner, N. K. (2001). The role of suppression and enhancement in understanding metaphors. Journal of Memory and Language, 45, 433-450.] When participants in the PD group were identified as "impaired" or "unimpaired" relative to the control group on a measure of verbal working memory span, we found that only PD participants with impaired working memory were simultaneously impaired in the processing of metaphorical language. Based on our findings we argue that certain "complex" forms of language processing such as metaphor interpretation are highly dependent on intact fronto-striatal systems for working memory which are frequently, although not always, compromised during the early course of PD.