Neural Recruitment and CognitiveAging: Two Hemispheres Are Better Than One, Especially as You Age

Several neuroimaging studies have reported that older adults show weaker activations in some brain areas together with stronger activations in other areas, compared with younger adults performing the same task. This pattern may reflect neural recruitment that compensates for age-related neural declines. The recruitment hypothesis was tested in a visual laterality study that investigated age differences in the efficiency of bihemispheric processing. Letter-matching tasks of varying complexity were performed under two conditions: (a) matching letters projected to the same visual field (hemisphere) and (b) matching letters projected to opposite visual fields (hemispheres). As predicted by the recruitment hypothesis, older adults generally performed better in the bilateral than unilateral condition, whereas younger adults showed this pattern onlyfor the most complex task. We discuss the relation between these results and neuroimaging evidence for recruitment, and the relevance of the present bihemispheric advantage to other evidence for age-related changes in interhemispheric transfer.     

Individualism-collectivism and self-concept: Social or contextual?

The cultural constructs of individualism and collectivism (I-C) have been closely identified with different conceptions of the self. In contrast to autonomous, abstract self-concepts, it has been argued that collectivists have concepts of self which are interdependent with others and connected with particular contexts. This study investigated the extent to which spontaneous social and contextual self-concepts were connected to each other and to individual-level I-C measures. Questionnaires were administered to adult employee samples in Australia and South-East Asia (N = 581). Although closely intertwined, social and contextual statements were able to be independently tested in relation to I-C. I-C was primarily related to the social-autonomous dimension of self. Controlling for social self-responses, contextual self-concepts were not independently related to any of the measures of I-C.     

Counseling in the Philippines: Past,Present, and Future

The history of colonization and persistent attempts at self‐governance in the Philippines parallel the beginnings of counseling in the country, which were largely influenced by the United States. Because of the Guidance and Counseling Act of 2004 and the Psychology Act of 2009, counseling is on its way to professionalization and regulation. Counseling is growing in depth and credibility, as evidenced by applications in practice that are not only indigenous but powerfully relevant.     

CHARACTER,PSYCHOANALYTIC IDENTIFICATION,AND NUMERICAL IDENTITY

Identification figures prominently in moral psychological explanations. I argue that in identification the subject has an ‘identity‐thought’, which is a thought about her numerical identity with the figure she identifies with. In Freud's psychoanalytic psychology character is founded on unconscious identification with parental figures. Moral philosophers have drawn on psychoanalysis to explain how undesirable or disadvantageous character dispositions are resistant to insight through being unconscious. According to Richard Wollheim's analysis of Freud's theory, identification is the subject's disposition to imagine, unconsciously, her bodily merging with the figure she identifies with. I argue that this explanation of identification is not adequate. Human character is held to be capable of change when self‐reflection brings unconscious identifications to conscious self‐knowledge. I argue that for self‐knowledge these identifications must be an intelligible part of the subject's self‐conception, and that Wollheim's ‘merging phantasy’ is not intelligible to the subject in this way. By contrast, the subject's thought that she is numerically identical to the figure she identifies with does provide an intelligible starting‐point for reflecting on this identification. This psychoanalytic account provides a clear conception of identification with which to investigate puzzle cases in the moral psychology of character.     

Predictors of Boys’ ADHD Symptoms from Early to Middle Childhood: The Role of Father–Child and Mother–Child Interactions

This prospective 3 year longitudinal study investigated preschool paternal and maternal parenting predictors of Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder(ADHD) in a community sample of 93 school-age boys. Participants were recruited on the basis of inattention-hyperactivity at age 4 and fathers and mothers were observed interacting with their sons. Teachers, fathers, and mothers reported children's ADHD symptoms and impairment. Results from dimensional analysis showed that less observed paternal sensitivity and maternal positive regard predicted higher levels of inattentiveness in middle childhood, and that intrusive paternal behavior was predictive of hyperactive-impulsive behavior at school. In categorical analysis, less maternal warmth and sensitivity were predictive of later ADHD. These predictions held after statistical adjustment for the effects of preschool ADHD behaviors and conduct problems. At follow-up, parents of boys with ADHD reported more negative child-parent relationship perceptions than comparison parents. Findings highlight the importance of examining responsive parenting behaviors of both fathers and mothers in relation to multi-informant ratings of ADHD symptoms.     

Refining the measurement of distress intolerance

Distress intolerance is an important transdiagnostic variable that has long been implicated in the development and maintenance of psychological disorders. Self-report measurement strategies for distress intolerance (DI) have emerged from several different models of psychopathology and these measures have been applied inconsistently in the literature in the absence of a clear gold standard. The absence of a consistent assessment strategy has limited the ability to compare across studies and samples, thus hampering the advancement of this research agenda. This study evaluated the latent factor structure of existing measures of DI to examine the degree to which they are capturing the same construct. Results of confirmatory factor analysis in three samples totaling 400 participants provided support for a single-factor latent structure. Individual items of these four scales were then correlated with this factor to identify those that best capture the core construct. Results provided consistent support for 10 items that demonstrated the strongest concordance with this factor. The use of these 10 items as a unifying measure in the study of DI and future directions for the evaluation of its utility are discussed.     

Cross cultural differences in unconscious knowledge

Previous studies have indicated cross cultural differences in conscious processes, such that Asians have a global preference and Westerners a more analytical one. We investigated whether these biases also apply to unconscious knowledge. In Experiment 1, Japanese and UK participants memorized strings of large (global) letters made out of small (local) letters. The strings constituted one sequence of letters at a global level and a different sequence at a local level. Implicit learning occurred at the global and not the local level for the Japanese but equally at both levels for the English. In Experiment 2, the Japanese preference for global over local processing persisted even when structure existed only at the local but not global level. In Experiment 3, Japanese and UK participants were asked to attend to just one of the levels, global or local. Now the cultural groups performed similarly, indicating that the bias largely reflects preference rather than ability (although the data left room for residual ability differences). In Experiment 4, the greater global advantage of Japanese rather English was confirmed for strings made of Japanese kana rather than Roman letters. That is, the cultural difference is not due to familiarity of the sequence elements. In sum, we show for the first time that cultural biases strongly affect the type of unconscious knowledge people acquire.