A Serial Reaction Time (SRT) task with symmetrical joystick responding for nonhuman primates

The serial reaction time (SRT) task is a simple procedure in which participants produce differentiated responses to each of a series of stimuli presented at varying locations. Learning about stimulus order is revealed through decreased latencies for structured versus randomized sequences. Although widely used with humans and well suited to nonhumans, this paradigm is little used in comparative research. In the present article, we describe an SRT procedure that uses colored circles as stimuli, a circular layout of locations, and symmetrical joystick deflections as responses. In two experiments, we showed that four rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta) learned to track sequences up to eight items long, with three animals showing faster responding to repeating sequences than to randomized versions. After extended training, these participants also showed evidence of faster responding at all positions within repeating sequences. This method minimizes response effort, equates effort and travel distance across stimulus locations, and is applicable to any joystick-capable species.     

Parent and Adolescent Depressive Symptoms: The Role of Parental Attributions

This study examined whether negative parental attributions for adolescent behaviour mediate the association between parental and adolescent depressive symptoms, and whether this relationship is moderated by adolescent gender. Mothers and fathers and 124 adolescents (76 girls and 48 boys; ages 14 to 18) participated. Adolescents were primarily Caucasian, and varied in the level of depressive symptoms (with 27% of the sample meeting diagnostic criteria for a current unipolar depressive disorder). Parents and adolescents completed measures of depressive symptoms, and participated in a videotaped problem-solving discussion. After the discussion, each parent watched the videotape and, at 20 s intervals, offered attributions for their adolescent’s behaviour. Adolescent gender moderated the relation between parental attributions and adolescent depressive symptoms, with stronger associations for female adolescents. For both mothers and fathers, both parental depressive symptoms and negative attributions about the adolescent’s behaviour made unique contributions to the prediction of depressive symptoms in adolescent females. There also was evidence that negative attributions partially mediated the link between depressive symptoms in mothers and adolescent daughters. The results are interpreted as consistent with parenting as a partial mediator between parental and adolescent depressive symptoms, and suggest that adolescent girls may be particularly sensitive to parents’ negative interpretations of their behaviour.     

A Latent Variable Framework for Power Estimation Within Intervention Contexts

This paper presents a latent growth SEM approach for the estimation of treatment effects, and power to detect such effects, within a true experimental design setting in which subjects are randomly assigned to treatment and control conditions. Power estimation is a critical component of intervention experiment design and the testing of their results. Although researchers have become increasingly sophisticated in applying tests for statistical significance in intervention contexts, few are aware of the power of these tests. The issues raised in this paper are not new; however, reminding researchers to consider these points is important. Exactly how the researcher handles these issues will depend on the questions asked and the resources available, as well as other considerations. Discussion underscores the relationship between the reliability of a study's measures and concomitant increases in power obtained within the SEM framework.     

The relationship between STD locus of control and STD acquisition among adolescent girls

This longitudinal study examined adolescent girls' perception of control over sexually transmitted disease (STD) acquisition. Participants were asked questions regarding their perception of their STD locus of control (internal control; control by parents, partners, peers, and health care providers; and chance) at two waves of data collection. Of the 116 participants (mean age = 17 years), 82% were African-American and 18% were Caucasian. Responses to the measure of locus of control were significantly correlated across a 6-month interval. The responses regarding internal control, control by partner, and chance were not related to the acquisition of an STD in the next 6 months. Further, they were not influenced by an STD in the preceding 6 months. These results indicate that responses to a locus of control measure were stable over a 6-month period, and internal, partner, and chance locus of control perceptions seem to be neither determined by STD experience nor directly related to future STD acquisition. However, understanding an individual's locus of control may be helpful in providing appropriate counseling. Future research could examine how adolescent girls form their perceptions of control over STD acquisition.     

Is there a natural order for expressing semantic relations?

All languages rely to some extent on word order to signal relational information. Why? We address this question by exploring communicative and cognitive factors that could lead to a reliance on word order. In Study 1, adults were asked to describe scenes to another using their hands and not their mouths. The question was whether this home-made "language" would contain gesture sentences with consistent order. In addition, we asked whether reliance on order would be influenced by three communicative factors (whether the communication partner is permitted to give feedback; whether the information to be communicated is present in the context that recipient and gesturer share; whether the gesturer assumes the role of gesture receiver as well as gesture producer). We found that, not only was consistent ordering of semantic elements robust across the range of communication situations, but the same non-English order appeared in all contexts. Study 2 explored whether this non-English order is found only when a person attempts to share information with another. Adults were asked to reconstruct scenes in a non-communicative context using pictures drawn on transparencies. The adults picked up the pictures for their reconstructions in a consistent order, and that order was the same non-English order found in Study 1. Finding consistent ordering patterns in a non-communicative context suggests that word order is not driven solely by the demands of communicating information to another, but may reflect a more general property of human thought.     

Word naming times and psycholinguistic norms for Italian nouns

The present study describes normative measures for 626 Italian simple nouns. The database (LEXVAR. XLS) is freely available for down-loading on the Web site http://wwwistc.ip.rm.cnr.it/material/ database/. For each of the 626 nouns, values for the following variables are reported: age of acquisition, familiarity, imageability, concreteness, adult written frequency, child written frequency, adult spoken frequency, number of orthographic neighbors, mean bigram frequency, length in syllables, and length in letters. A classification of lexical stress and of the type of word-initial phoneme is also provided. The intercorrelations among the variables, a factor analysis, and the effects of variables and of the extracted factors on word naming are reported. Naming latencies were affected primarily by a factor including word length and neighborhood size and by a word frequency factor. Neither a semantic factor including imageability, concreteness, and age of acquisition nor a factor defined by mean bigram frequency had significant effects on pronunciation times. These results hold for a language with shallow orthography, like Italian, for which lexical nonsemantic properties have been shown to affect reading aloud. These norms are useful in a variety of research areas involving the manipulation and control of stimulus attributes.     

Validation of a Buddhist Coping Measure Among Primarily Non‐Asian Buddhists in the United States

Researchers have developed scales to measure religious coping among Christians, Jews, Muslims, and Hindus. However, there is no quantitative measure of religious coping for Buddhists. The present study describes the development and initial validation of a scale of Buddhist coping (BCOPE). Eight hundred sixty participants in the United States completed the BCOPE along with demographic information and scales of adjustment to stress. Construct validity of the BCOPE is demonstrated through exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses, which reveals 14 types of Buddhist coping. BCOPE subscales exhibited criterion validity through significant correlations with outcome measures. The BCOPE has incremental validity, predicting adjustment over and above demographic and global religious measures. The research and practical implications of the BCOPE are discussed.     

Mimicry reduces racial prejudice

Humans are empathic animals. We automatically match other people's motor responses, allowing us to get “under the skin” of other people. Although this perception–action-coupling—a form of motor resonance—occurs spontaneously, this happens less readily with the outgroup (vs. the ingroup) and for those high (vs. low) in prejudice. Thus, prejudice diminishes our tendency to resonate with the outgroup. Here we suggest that the reverse is also possible—that resonating with the actions of an outgroup member can reduce prejudice. We predict, in other words, that explicitly mimicking the outgroup can reduce prejudice. Participants watched a 140-second video depicting actors repeatedly reaching for and drinking from a glass of water. They passively watched a video with Black actors; watched the video and mimicked the Black actors; or watched and mimicked a video with actors from their ingroup. Participants then completed the Affect Misattribution Procedure (Payne, Cheng, Govorun, & Stewart, 2005), a measure of implicit anti-Black prejudice, and an explicit symbolic racism measure. Results indicate that the outgroup-mimicry group had similar implicit preference for Blacks and Whites, unlike the other two groups, which preferred Whites over Blacks. The outgroup-mimicry group also reported less explicit racism towards Blacks than the ingroup-mimicry group, but no less than the ingroup-observation group. Mimicking specific outgroup members, therefore, reduces implicit, and possibly explicit, bias against the outgroup more generally.