Where have all the (ape) gestures gone?

Comparative analysis of the gestural communication of our nearest animal relatives, the great apes, implies that humans should have the biological potential to produce and understand 60–70 gestures, by virtue of shared common descent. These gestures are used intentionally in apes to convey separate requests, rather than as referential items in syntactically structured signals. At present, no such legacy of shared gesture has been described in humans. We suggest that the fate of “ape gestures” in modern human communication is relevant to the debate regarding the evolution of language through a possible intermediate stage of gestural protolanguage.     

Examining the Unique Characteristics of a Non-Probability Sample of Undocumented Female Sex Workers with Dependent Children: The Case of Haitians in the Dominican Republic

Haitians in the Dominican Republic (DR) are increasingly marginalized due to recent legislation that stripped Haitian-Dominicans of their citizenship and increased Haitian migrants’ deportation risk. Haitian female sex workers (FSWs) are particularly vulnerable, though little is known about them. This study will help public health efforts targeted at sex workers to better reach Haitian FSWs and address their needs by identifying a profile of characteristics unique to this group compared to Dominican FSWs. Data were collected in 2014 among Haitian and Dominican FSWs in Puerto Plata, DR. Surveys assessed respondents’ demographics, health consciousness, depression, and stigma. Adjusted logistic regressions showed that Haitian FSWs were disadvantaged: they had significantly lower rates of education, more children, and less permanent income. Furthermore, Haitian FSWs were more likely to work independently and for fewer hours. Interestingly, Haitian FSWs internalized less stigma than Dominicans. Though we can only speculate, this could be due to migration for sex work, or the lack of formal employment for Haitians. Initiatives to alleviate poverty, create formal jobs, and overturn discriminatory legislation may have the most impact for Haitian FSWs.     

Characterization of controlled gamblers and pathological gamblers using the social representation theory

Introduction

In industrialized countries, gambling disorder tends to become a major issue. The use of the social representation theory provides clues for a better understanding of pathological gamblers.

Perceptions on well-being at home of families with people with disabilities: A psycho-environmental perspective

Introduction

Although the home is of major importance in the lives of people with disabilities, few studies address disability in the literature on home and health. Moreover, people with disabilities and their family members’ perceptions of their homes has rarely been explored.

Seeing behind the surface: communicative demonstration boosts category disambiguation in 12‐month‐olds

In their first years, infants acquire an incredible amount of information regarding the objects present in their environment. While often it is not clear what specific information should be prioritized in encoding from the many characteristics of an object, different types of object representations facilitate different types of generalizations. We tested the hypotheses that 1‐year‐old infants distinctively represent familiar objects as exemplars of their kind, and that ostensive communication plays a role in determining kind membership for ambiguous objects. In the training phase of our experiment, infants were exposed to movies displaying an agent sorting objects from two categories (cups and plates) into two locations (left or right). Afterwards, different groups of infants saw either an ostensive or a non‐ostensive demonstration performed by the agent, revealing that a new object that looked like a plate can be transformed into a cup. A third group of infants experienced no demonstration regarding the new object. During test, infants were presented with the ambiguous object in the plate format, and we measured generalization by coding anticipatory looks to the plate or the cup side. While infants looked equally often towards the two sides when the demonstration was non‐ostensive, and more often to the plate side when there was no demonstration, they performed more anticipatory eye movements to the cup side when the demonstration was ostensive. Thus, ostensive demonstration likely highlighted the hidden dispositional properties of the target object as kind‐relevant, guiding infants’ categorization of the foldable cup as a cup, despite it looking like a plate. These results suggest that infants likely encode familiar objects as exemplars of their kind and that ostensive communication can play a crucial role in disambiguating what kind an object belongs to, even when this requires disregarding salient surface features.     

Psychosocial safety climate (PSC) and enacted PSC for workplace bullying and psychological health problem reduction

Bullying at work has profound effects on both the individual and organization. We aimed to determine if organizational psychosocial safety climate (PSC; a climate specific to worker psychological health) could reduce workplace bullying and associated psychological health problems (i.e., distress, emotional exhaustion, depression) if specific procedures were implemented (PSC enactment). We theorized that the PSC enactment mechanism works via psychosocial processes such as bullying mistreatment climate (anti-bullying procedures), work design (procedures reduce stress through work redesign), and conflict resolution (procedures to resolve conflict). We used two-wave national longitudinal interview data from 1,062 Australian employees (Australian Workplace Barometer project) and structural equation modelling to explore relationships over 4 years. PSC Time 1 predicted enacted PSC and reduced bullying 4 years later. PSC Time 1 was indirectly negatively related to poor psychological health Time 2 through enacted PSC and bullying. Bullying Time 1 also gave rise to procedures which in turn reduced bullying Time 2. Our findings suggest a multi-component approach to prevent or reduce bullying. Procedures (to reduce psychosocial hazards) that emerge in a high PSC context are more comprehensive than those triggered by bullying (reactive procedures), and can therefore be more effective in reducing worker mistreatment. Building PSC and a strong climate for psychological health, and enacting PSC is fundamental to bullying prevention.     

The effects of aging on the working memory processes of multimodal information

Normal aging is associated with deficits in working memory processes. However, the majority of research has focused on storage or inhibitory processes using unimodal paradigms, without addressing their relationships using different sensory modalities. Hence, we pursued two objectives. First, was to examine the effects of aging on storage and inhibitory processes. Second, was to evaluate aging effects on multisensory integration of visual and auditory stimuli. To this end, young and older participants performed a multimodal task for visual and auditory pairs of stimuli with increasing memory load at encoding and interference during retention. Our results showed an age-related increased vulnerability to interrupting and distracting interference reflecting inhibitory deficits related to the off-line reactivation and on-line suppression of relevant and irrelevant information, respectively. Storage capacity was impaired with increasing task demands in both age groups. Additionally, older adults showed a deficit in multisensory integration, with poorer performance for new visual compared to new auditory information.     

Executive functions and linguistic performance in SCD older adults and healthy controls

Subjective cognitive decline (SCD) might represent the preclinical phase of Alzheimer’s disease. Given the interest to characterize it, the present study explores (1) if there are differences in lexical retrieval (LexR) and sentence comprehension (SComp) between SCD and matched controls, and (2) the predictive value of demographic variables and executive functions in relation to LexR and SComp in each group. A sample of 135 participants voluntarily took part in this study (66 with SCD). They all completed the Trail Making, the Stroop, the Boston Naming, and the ECCO-Senior tests, as well as verbal fluency tasks (VF). Results show that (1) groups differ in LexR and in inhibition efficiency, and (2) VF is explained by years of formal education, particularly in the control group; SComp in the most complex items seems to rely in different strategies, related to flexibility in controls and to inhibition efficiency in SCD patients.     

Do ‘literate’ pigeons (<Emphasis Type="Italic">Columba livia</Emphasis>) show mirror-word generalization?

Many children pass through a mirror stage in reading, where they write individual letters or digits in mirror and find it difficult to correctly utilize letters that are mirror images of one another (e.g., b and d). This phenomenon is thought to reflect the fact that the brain does not naturally discriminate left from right. Indeed, it has been argued that reading acquisition involves the inhibition of this default process. In the current study, we tested the ability of literate pigeons, which had learned to discriminate between 30 and 62 words from 7832 nonwords, to discriminate between words and their mirror counterparts. Subjects were sensitive to the left–right orientation of the individual letters, but not the order of letters within a word. This finding may reflect the fact that, in the absence of human-unique top-down processes, the inhibition of mirror generalization may be limited.