Maternal expression of communicative intentions and pragmatic fine tuning in early infancy

This study focuses on pragmatic characteristics of infant-directed speech and pragmatic fine tuning during the first 18 months of life. The subjects of the study were a mother–child dyad involved in a longitudinal/observational study in a familial context. Audiovisual recordings were transcribed according to the conventions of the Child Language Data Exchange System ([MacWhinney, 2000] and [MacWhinney and Snow, 1990]). The Ninio and Wheeler's (1988) system for coding communicative intentions was adapted.The results of this research show that most of the communicative exchanges identified at 14, 20 and 32 months by Snow, Pan, Imbens-Bailey, and Herman (1996) appear in mother–child interaction from the beginning, while other communicative interchanges appear later. With respect to speech acts, the results highlight, from an early age, the general tendencies discussed by Snow et al. and some novelties. Interestingly, changes in some pragmatic measures were identified around 8 months of age, and the appearance of new communicative interchanges also took place around this age. These changes are interpreted as maternal adjustments to the child's communicative competence.     

Inverting faces does not abolish cultural diversity in eye movements

Face processing is widely understood to be a basic, universal visual function effortlessly achieved by people from all cultures and races. The remarkable recognition performance for faces is markedly and specifically affected by picture-plane inversion: the so-called face-inversion effect (FIE), a finding often used as evidence for face-specific mechanisms. However, it has recently been shown that culture shapes the way people deploy eye movements to extract information from faces. Interestingly, the comparable lack of experience with inverted faces across cultures offers a unique opportunity to establish the extent to which such cultural perceptual biases in eye movements are robust, but also to assess whether face-specific mechanisms are universally tuned. Here we monitored the eye movements of Western Caucasian (WC) and East Asian (EA) observers while they learned and recognised WC and EA inverted faces. Both groups of observers showed a comparable impairment in recognising inverted faces of both races. WC observers deployed a scattered inverted triangular scanpath with a bias towards the mouth, whereas EA observers uniformly extended the focus of their fixations from the centre towards the eyes. Overall, our data show that cultural perceptual differences in eye movements persist during the FIE, questioning the universality of face-processing mechanisms.     

A Structural Model for Adjustment to Aging among Older Women in Breast Cancer Remission

This study aims to build a structural model to explore the predictors of adjustment to aging (AtA) reported by older women in breast cancer remission. A community-dwelling sample of 771 older women in breast cancer remission aged between 75 and 98 years answered a questionnaire to determine socio-demographic (age, income, marital status, education, household, and living setting), and health-related characteristics (self-reported functional limitations and disabilities, time since remission, other type of cancer, breast reconstruction, perceived health, recent disease and medication). Several measures were employed to assess AtA, sense of coherence and subjective well-being. Structural equation modeling was used to explore a structural model of the self-reported AtA, encompassing all variables. Significant predictors of AtA are self-reported disability (β = .404; p < .001), time since remission (β = .371; p < .001), perceived health (β = .257; p < .001), other type of cancer (β = .231; p < .001), breast reconstruction (β = .153; p = .008), marital status (β = .141; p < .001), sense of coherence (β = .140; p < .001), and living setting (β = .139; p = .006). These variables accounted for 84.3% of the variability of AtA. Self-reported disability and time since remission were the strongest predictors of AtA. Our findings suggest that health care interventions with older women in breast cancer remission still living in the community may benefit from clearly including these predictors of AtA, as they are relevant for promoting older women’ s aging well.

     

Co-occurrence of sequential and practice effects in the Simon task: Evidence for two independent mechanisms affecting response selection

The Simon effect refers to the observation that responses to a relevant stimulus dimension are faster and more accurate when the stimulus and response spatially correspond than when they do not, even though stimulus position is irrelevant. Recent findings have suggested that the Simon effect can be strongly modulated by prior practice with a spatially incompatible mapping and by correspondence sequence. Although practice is thought to influence conditional stimulus —response (S-R) processing, leaving response priming through the unconditional route unaffected, sequential effects are thought to represent trial-by-trial adaptations that selectively involve unconditional S —R processing. In the present study, we tested this assumption by assessing the effects of correspondence sequence both when the Simon task alone was performed and when it was preceded by a spatial compatibility task with either incompatible (Experiments 1-2) or compatible (Experiment 2) instructions. The observation that practice and correspondence sequence co-occur and exert additive effects strongly demonstrates that the two factors affect different processing routes.     

Gray matter and intelligence factors: Is there a neuro-g?

Heterogeneous results among neuro-imaging studies using psychometric intelligence measures may result from the variety of tests used. The g-factor may provide a common metric across studies. Here we derived a g-factor from a battery of eight cognitive tests completed by 6929 young adults, 40 of whom also completed structural MRI scans. Regional gray matter (GM) was determined using voxel-based-morphometry (VBM) and correlated to g-scores. Results showed correlations distributed throughout the brain, but there was limited overlap with brain areas identified in a similar study that used a different battery of tests to derive g-scores. Comparable spatial scores (with g variance removed) also were derived from both batteries, and there was considerable overlap in brain areas where GM was correlated to the respective spatial scores. The results indicate that g-scores derived from different test batteries do not necessarily have equivalent neuro-anatomical substrates, suggesting that identifying a “neuro-g” will be difficult. The neuro-anatomical substrate of a spatial factor, however, appears more consistent and implicates a distributed network of brain areas that may be involved with spatial ability. Future imaging studies directed at identifying the neural basis of intelligence may benefit from using a psychometric test battery chosen with specific criteria.     

Gender Differences in the Representation of Violence on Spanish Television: Should Women be More Violent?

Gender differences in the representation of aggressors and victims are an important issue in the study of television violence in order to ascertain whether television contributes (and how) to reproduce or transform the traditional gender regime. Eighty-four hours of Spanish main TV broadcasting stations were randomly recorded during years 2000 and 2005. Variables related to the presentation of aggressors and victims and to the normative context of aggression were selected through content analysis. The results show the minimal presence of women in violent scenes. But women are also the victims of more serious violence. Paradoxically, women’s aggressions appear to have more positive consequences and to be less legitimized. The implications of these findings are discussed from a gender studies perspective.     

Internal representations reveal cultural diversity in expectations of facial expressions of emotion

Facial expressions have long been considered the "universal language of emotion." Yet consistent cultural differences in the recognition of facial expressions contradict such notions (e.g., R. E. Jack, C. Blais, C. Scheepers, P. G. Schyns, & R. Caldara, 2009). Rather, culture--as an intricate system of social concepts and beliefs--could generate different expectations (i.e., internal representations) of facial expression signals. To investigate, they used a powerful psychophysical technique (reverse correlation) to estimate the observer-specific internal representations of the 6 basic facial expressions of emotion (i.e., happy, surprise, fear, disgust, anger, and sad) in two culturally distinct groups (i.e., Western Caucasian [WC] and East Asian [EA]). Using complementary statistical image analyses, cultural specificity was directly revealed in these representations. Specifically, whereas WC internal representations predominantly featured the eyebrows and mouth, EA internal representations showed a preference for expressive information in the eye region. Closer inspection of the EA observer preference revealed a surprising feature: changes of gaze direction, shown primarily among the EA group. For the first time, it is revealed directly that culture can finely shape the internal representations of common facial expressions of emotion, challenging notions of a biologically hardwired "universal language of emotion."     

Culture and the distinctiveness motive: constructing identity in individualistic and collectivistic contexts

The motive to attain a distinctive identity is sometimes thought to be stronger in, or even specific to, those socialized into individualistic cultures. Using data from 4,751 participants in 21 cultural groups (18 nations and 3 regions), we tested this prediction against our alternative view that culture would moderate the ways in which people achieve feelings of distinctiveness, rather than influence the strength of their motivation to do so. We measured the distinctiveness motive using an indirect technique to avoid cultural response biases. Analyses showed that the distinctiveness motive was not weaker-and, if anything, was stronger-in more collectivistic nations. However, individualism-collectivism was found to moderate the ways in which feelings of distinctiveness were constructed: Distinctiveness was associated more closely with difference and separateness in more individualistic cultures and was associated more closely with social position in more collectivistic cultures. Multilevel analysis confirmed that it is the prevailing beliefs and values in an individual's context, rather than the individual's own beliefs and values, that account for these differences.     

Increasing outgroup trust,reducing infrahumanization,and enhancing future contact intentions via imagined intergroup contact

The present study was designed to test whether imagined intergroup contact (Crisp & Turner, 2009) affects attributions of human emotions to outgroup members and positive behavioral intentions toward the outgroup via increased outgroup trust. Italian fourth-graders took part in a three-week intervention, where they were asked to imagine meeting an unknown immigrant child in various social settings. One week after the last session, they were administered the dependent measures. Results revealed an indirect effect of imagined contact on both behavioral intentions and attributions of uniquely human emotions to outgroup members via outgroup trust. The theoretical and practical implications are discussed, and an integration of the imagined contact and infrahumanization literature is suggested.