What "mice trap" tells us about the mental lexicon

Level ordering has proven inadequate as a morphological theory, leaving unexplained the experimental results taken to support it as a component of innate grammar-young children's acceptance of irregular plurals in English compounds. The present study demonstrates that these results can be explained by slower access to the grammatically preferred singulars of irregular nouns when compounds are created on-line from plural stimuli. Experiments on English noun-noun compound production and on production of either singular or plural forms from the same or opposite form confirmed that more irregular than regular plurals were used in compounds, and showed that producing irregular singulars from plurals was slower than producing regular singulars. Plural responses were also slower when cue and required response number differed.     

How patients’ representations of cystic fibrosis-related diabetes inform their health behaviours

Background: Although diabetes is a frequent complication of cystic fibrosis (CF), patients’ behaviours tend not to comply with best practice recommendations. Using Leventhal’s Common-Sense Model, we address this issue by exploring patients’ representations of CF-related diabetes (CFRD) to better understand the discrepancy between patients’ expected and observed health behaviours.

Methods: Semi-structured individual interviews were conducted with patients (n = 39) in six CF clinics in Quebec, Canada. These interviews were part of a larger research project on screening and management practices for CFRD.

Results: Illness representations differed between two groups of interviewed patients: (1) one group had either CF without dysglycemia or CF with impaired glucose tolerance; and (2) the other group had CFRD. Both representations were internally consistent and encompassed Leventhal’s five dimensions of illness representation: illness identity, cause, timeline, consequences and control.

Conclusions: Patients require specific information on CFRD. The screening phase could be a crucial time to help patients adjust their representations to fit the reality of CFRD.     

Relationship Between Perceived Organizational Support,Proactive Personality,and Perceived Employability in Workers Over 50

This article examines the relationship between perceived organizational support, proactive personality, and perceived employability in a sample of workers over 50. An online questionnaire assessing these variables were filled by 213 employees. Results confirmed that individual dispositions have a significant impact on perceived employability but also indicated that organizational context may have a greater impact on employability. The implications of the findings are discussed, and suggestions are offered for future research on employability.     

Heart rate variability reflects self-regulatory strength, effort, and fatigue

Experimental research reliably demonstrates that self-regulatory deficits are a consequence of prior self-regulatory effort. However, in naturalistic settings, although people know that they are sometimes vulnerable to saying, eating, or doing the wrong thing, they cannot accurately gauge their capacity to self-regulate at any given time. Because self-regulation and autonomic regulation colocalize in the brain, an autonomic measure, heart rate variability (HRV), could provide an index of self-regulatory strength and activity. During an experimental manipulation of self-regulation (eating carrots or cookies), HRV was elevated during high self-regulatory effort (eat carrots, resist cookies) compared with low self-regulatory effort (eat cookies, resist carrots). The experimental manipulation and higher HRV at baseline independently predicted persistence at a subsequent anagram task. HRV appears to index self-regulatory strength and effort, making it possible to study these phenomena in the field as well as the lab.     

Optimism and College Retention: Mediation by Motivation,Performance, and Adjustment1

Although higher education has been linked to better income, longer life expectancy, and better health, about 25–45% of incoming college freshmen never graduate. The current study examined whether optimistic expectancies are associated with college retention. Participants (N = 2,189) were given surveys when entering college, and academic records were attained after freshman year completion. Dispositional and academic optimism were associated with less chance of dropping out of college, as well as better motivation and adjustment. Academic optimism was also associated with higher grade point average (GPA). Structural equation models revealed that dispositional optimism predicted retention through motivation and adjustment, which in turn predicted retention. Academic optimism, on the other hand, predicted retention through its effect on GPA, motivation, and adjustment.     

Sharing differences: The inductive route to social identity formation

A dominant assumption in social science is that shared similarities are the foundation for social categorization and identification. Accordingly, heterogeneity should hinder social identity formation. This paper argues the opposite can also be true: in heterogeneous groups, strong social identities can be built on expressions of individuality (inductive social identity formation), instead of shared similarities (deductive social identity formation). Two experiments manipulate social identity formation (deductive vs. inductive social identity formation) and support this idea. Study 1 shows that in heterogeneous groups, inductive social identity formation can result in higher identification and perceived entitativity than deductive social identity formation. Study 2 manipulates heterogeneity and confirms that while deduction of a social identity fosters a strong sense of identification in homogeneous groups, in heterogeneous groups a strong sense of identification can be brought about through induction. This pattern is also visible in real within-group cooperation.     

Colateralization of Broca's area and the visual word form area in left-handers: fMRI evidence

Language production has been found to be lateralized in the left hemisphere (LH) for 95% of right-handed people and about 75% of left-handers. The prevalence of atypical right hemispheric (RH) or bilateral lateralization for reading and colateralization of production with word reading laterality has never been tested in a large sample. In this study, we scanned 57 left-handers who had previously been identified as being clearly left (N = 30), bilateral (N = 7) or clearly right (N = 20) dominant for speech on the basis of fMRI activity in the inferior frontal gyrus (pars opercularis/pars triangularis) during a silent word generation task. They were asked to perform a lexical decision task, in which words were contrasted against checkerboards, to test the lateralization of reading in the ventral occipitotemporal region. Lateralization indices for both tasks correlated significantly (r = 0.59). The majority of subjects showed most activity during lexical decision in the hemisphere that was identified as their word production dominant hemisphere. However, more than half of the sample (N = 31) had bilateral activity for the lexical decision task without a clear dominant role for either the LH or RH, and three showed a crossed frontotemporal lateralization pattern. These findings have consequences for neurobiological models relating phonological and orthographic processes, and for lateralization measurements for clinical purposes.     

Turning back the hands of time: Autobiographical memories in dementia cued by a museum setting

The current study examined the effects of cuing autobiographical memory retrieval in 12 older participants with dementia through immersion into a historically authentic environment that recreated the material and cultural context of the participants’ youth. Participants conversed in either an everyday setting (control condition) or a museum setting furnished in early twentieth century style (experimental condition) while being presented with condition matched cues. Conversations were coded for memory content based on an adapted version of Levine, Svoboda, Hay, Winocur, and Moscovitch (2002) coding scheme. More autobiographical memories were recalled in the museum setting, and these memories were more elaborated, more spontaneous and included especially more internal (episodic) details compared to memories in the control condition. The findings have theoretical and practical implications by showing that the memories retrieved in the museum setting were both quantitatively and qualitatively different from memories retrieved during a control condition.