The developmental origins of cognitive vulnerability to depression: temperament, parenting, and negative life events in childhood as contributors to negative cognitive style

Cognitive models of depression have been well supported with adults, but the developmental origins of cognitive vulnerability are not well understood. The authors hypothesized that temperament, parenting, and negative life events in childhood would contribute to the development of cognitive style, with withdrawal negativity and negative parental feedback moderating the effects of negative life events to predict more depressogenic cognitive styles. These constructs were assessed in 289 children and their parents followed longitudinally from infancy to 5th grade; a subsample (n = 120) also participated in a behavioral task in which maternal feedback to child failure was observed. Results indicated that greater withdrawal negativity in interaction with negative life events was associated with more negative cognitive styles. Self-reported maternal anger expression and observed negative maternal feedback to child's failure significantly interacted with child's negative events to predict greater cognitive vulnerability. There was little evidence of paternal parenting predicting child negative cognitive style.     

Line bisection by left-handed preschoolers: A phenomenon of symmetrical neglect

When a normal dextral attempts to bisect a horizontal line placed across his/her midline, there is a tendency for the transection to be placed slightly to the left of true center, a tendency which may be a little more pronounced when the left hand is used. However, left-handed children at or younger than 5 years of age err substantially to the left with the left hand and to the right with the right hand. This symmetrical neglect of extents contralateral to the hand currently in use, which may possibly reflect relatively greater commissural immaturity in left-handers, was not seen in dextral children of comparable ages, whose performance closely followed adult patterns.     

Construal: Overview, Motivation, and Some New Evidence

Is there underspecification in the syntactic phrase marker constructed during on-line sentence analysis? According to the construal hypothesis (Frazier &; Clifton, 1996), a very limited amount and type of structural underspecification is available to the human sentence parsing mechanism. Here we present the basic definitions of construal, illustrating the theory with some already published evidence. We also discuss several new pieces of evidence, from our laboratory and elsewhere, that support the construal hypothesis. We end by raising the question of what kind of mechanism operates in the process of interpreting a nonprimary phrase (a phrase that receives an underspecified syntactic analysis), and conclude that it is not a process of competition between multiple activated possible analyses but instead is a process in which the sheer existence of ambiguity need not result in increased processing cost.     

Do Negative Cognitive Styles Confer Vulnerability to Depression?

According to the cognitive-vulnerability hypothesis of depression, negative cognitive styles confer vulnerability to depression when people confront negative life events. In this article, we present evidence that negative cognitive styles do indeed confer vulnerability to clinically significant depressive disorders and suicidality and discuss possible developmental antecedents of cognitive vulnerability to depression. We consider the issue of stability versus change in cognitive vulnerability to depression and discuss the broader implications of the cognitive-vulnerability findings for mental and physical health.     

Development of associative and perceptual interference

In a choice reaction-time letter-identification task, the temporal development of perceptual and associative interference was studied with visual displays containing identical, irrelevant, or response-incompatible noise letters. Using the methods of variable-criterion theory, it was determined that perceptual interference is complete very early and has no effect on the shape of the function for the growth of associative strength. Associative interference begins later, gradually increases to a maximum, and then declines to zero at long latencies. In experiments with speeded performance, it was also found that the growth of excitatory strength for errors contains the same nonmonotonic process as for correct responses, but in reverse form. In addition, it was observed that the discriminability of the target stimuli affects the rate of growth of associative strength for the correct response. Analyses of individual differences in theoretical parameters indicate information-processing patterns similar to those reported for simple auditory tasks.     

Depression and the generation of complex hypotheses in the judgment of contingency

This experiment tests the hypothesis that relative to nondepressed college students, depressed college students will underestimate the potential amount of control they can exert over an environmental outcome when they must generate a complex hypothesis in order to exert control, but not when the complex hypothesis is generated for them. Following the method of Alloy and Abramson (1979b), depressed and nondepressed students' judgments of response-outcome contingency were assessed in either a ‘self-generated’ or an ‘experimenter-generated’ condition. In the ‘self-generated’ condition, subjects generated and tested potential hypotheses for controlling the outcome themselves. In the ‘experimenter-generated’ condition, the experimenter generated a small set of potential hypotheses to be tested by the subject. Relative to nondepressed students, depressed students were less likely to perform the correct controlling response, received fewer rewards, and judged that they exerted less control over the outcome in the ‘self-generated’ condition. These results fail to support the ‘associative’ deficit of the learned helplessness theory of depression, but are consistent with the ‘motivational’ deficit of helplessness theory.     

Severity of sleep problems in children with severe learning difficulties: Description and correlates

In this study we have examined the percentage occurrence of settling and waking problems and of sleeping in the parents' bed in a sample of children with sleep problems. We found that about two-thirds had settling problems, nearly nine-tenths had waking problems, and one-third slept regularly in their parents' bed. Parents of children with sleep problems were more likely to experience a range of family problems than were parents of children without problems, and they were more likely to report a range of symptoms of stress. Most children with settling problems took at least two hours to settle to sleep at night. This behaviour was mainly tolerated or accepted by the parents. Parents gave a variety of suggestions as to triggers for settling problems, from being upset during the day to fears, illness and alterations in routine. Most parents thought the underlying explanation was the child's intellectual impairment. Over half the children with waking problems woke up every night, while 85% woke up at least three nights a week. One-third woke up three or more times a night. About two-thirds took up to half an hour to resettle, with one-third taking up to an hour. Parents (mainly mothers) tended to get up to attend to the waking child. About half of the children were thought to need attention because of physical disabilities. Illness, alteration in routine, becoming ‘overtired’ and ‘upset’ were thought to trigger waking problems. Intellectual impairment was again seen as the more general underlying reason for waking problems. Very few children were receiving treatment for their problems—7% were receiving medication and one was receiving a behavioural programme. Few parents had a systematic bedtime routine for their child and few had a consistent agreed response to settling or waking problems. When we examined the relationship between certain family variables and severity of sleep problems a number of relationships were found. Sleep problem severity was related to maternal responsiveness, maternal stress, impact of the child on the family, maternal behaviour towards the child, maternal attitudes towards the child and marital satisfaction. Severity of sleep problems was also related to certain child characteristics. Children with more severe problems tended to present more problems in their daytime behaviour. Sleep problem severity was also found to be related to child communication skills. These findings, together with those from other pilot studies, suggest that using behavioural methods of managing sleep problems might prove a promising way forward.     

Temporal factors in the discrimination of coherent motion

When observers view the relative movements of a pair of bars defined by the difference of spatial Gaussian functions (DOGs), they can accurately discriminate coherent movements over a range of temporal frequencies and temporal asynchronies. Of particular interest is the fact that performance accuracy is maintained even when the two bars differ in spatial-frequency content and contrast. On each trial, observers viewed two brief presentation intervals in which a pair of vertically oriented DOGs moved randomly back and forth within a restricted range. During one observation interval, both elements moved in the same direction and by the same magnitude (correlated), and in the other interval, the movements were independent (uncorrelated). Temporal asynchronies were introduced by delaying the displacement of the right bar relative to that of the left bar in each interval. Observers were able to discriminate correlated versus uncorrelated movements up to a 45–60-msec temporal delay between the two elements’ relative displacements. If motion processing is accomplished by mechanisms operating over multiple spatial and temporal scales, the visual system’s tolerance of temporal delays among correlated signals may facilitate their space-time integration, thereby capitalizing on the perceptual utility of coherent-motion information for image segmentation and interpolating surface structure from the movements of spatially separated features.     

Judgments of moving and intending to move in a timed-response task

Summary Subjects performed a timed-response task in which they attempted to synchronize a rapid flexion of the index finger of their preferred hand with the last of a train of four regularly spaced acoustic clicks. The task was used to stabilize the execution time of a simple voluntary response in order to facilitate psychophysical judgments about the subjects' perception of having responded and of having intended to respond. In the first experiment, male subjects (N = 6) adjusted the appearance time of a reference stimulus (a brief percutaneous pulse to the responding finger) until it appeared to be simultaneous with their perception of having made the response. All subjects adjusted the reference stimulus to appear after response onset during the latter half of the force impulse. This finding suggests that the perception of having responded is based on peripheral feedback from the response. In the second experiment, male subjects (N = 6) performed the same motor task, but adjusted the time of the reference stimulus so that it appeared to be simultaneous with their intention to respond. Two subjects were not able to do the task successfully; the remaining four subjects adjusted the reference stimulus to appear from 101 to 145 ms before response onset. This finding suggests that the intention to respond is perceptually separable from the response itself and occurs at a measurable time before response onset.