Psychiatric correlates of childhood shyness in a nationally representative sample

Relations between adult anxiety and mood disorders and retrospective reports of excessive childhood shyness were investigated in the US National Comorbidity, Survey (n=5877). Results indicated that 26% of women and 19% of men described themselves as 'very shy' when they were growing up. Of these shy individuals, 53% of women and 40% of men met criteria for a lifetime diagnosis of one or more anxiety or mood disorders. Relations between excessive shyness and each of the anxiety and mood disorders were examined after adjusting for elevated neuroticism, self-criticism, and low maternal care. The largest odds ratios were found for social phobia in both men and women, particularly for the complex subtype of this disorder. Significant associations also emerged for posttraumatic stress disorder in women and for major depressive disorder in men. Childhood shyness remained significantly associated with a lifetime history of social phobia when individuals with current (past year) social phobia were excluded from the analysis. The results of this study suggest that childhood shyness is strongly related to the complex subtype of social phobia in the general population. Excessive shyness does not appear to be strongly associated with other anxiety and mood disorders when related psychosocial and developmental dimensions are statistically controlled. Finally, many individuals who report excessive childhood shyness do not meet criteria for any anxiety or mood disorder. In a similar fashion, approximately 50% of individuals with a lifetime history of complex social phobia did not view themselves as very shy when growing up.     

An abbreviated PTSD checklist for use as a screening instrument in primary care

Although the importance of recognizing posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in primary care has been well-established, routine screening for PTSD remains unfeasible for many primary care clinics because of the length of the available screening instruments. Thus, the purpose of this work was to develop and validate a brief screening tool for PTSD. In Study 1, four short forms of the PTSD Checklist-civilian version were identified that captured a majority of the variance in the measure. In Study 2, the performance of these short forms was evaluated in a separate sample of primary care patients. We found that both two-item and six-item versions have adequate psychometric properties for screening purposes and suggest that the selection of one version over the other depends on the specific needs of each primary care clinic.     

Colour matching of isoluminant samples and backgrounds: a dimming effect

Sequential asymmetrical colour matching of forty Munsell samples simulated under illuminant C and one of eight test illuminants was carried out. The subjects matched the appearance of each sample under illuminant C with its appearance under the test illuminant. Samples and background (N7) were presented for 1 s under the test illuminant and were isoluminant with each other. Subjects adjusted hue, chroma, and value under illuminant C. The experiments distinguished two groups of subjects; some observers needed to reduce the luminance of the sample to make a match while others did not. This 'dimming' occurred when the matches were close to cardinal axes, especially the tritanopic confusion line. A model of luminance and cone-opponent mechanisms contributing to brightness can account for the dimming effect. Details of analysis in cone-opponent space (L - M, L + M - S, L + M) are presented in the companion paper (Stanikunas et al, 2005 Perception 34 this issue).     

The perceptual-mnemonic/feature conjunction model of perirhinal cortex function.

The perirhinal cortex was once thought to be "silent cortex", virtually ignored by researchers interested in the neurobiology of learning and memory. Following studies of brain damage associated with cases of amnesia, perirhinal cortex is now widely regarded as part of a "medial temporal lobe (MTL) memory system". This system is thought to be more or less functionally homogeneous, having a special role in declarative memory, and making little or no contribution to other functions such as perception. In the present article, we summarize an alternative view. First, we propose that components of the putative MTL system such as the hippocampus and perirhinal cortex have distinct and dissociable functions. Second, we provide evidence that the perirhinal cortex has a role in visual discrimination. In addition, we propose a specific role for perirhinal cortex in visual discrimination: the contribution of complex conjunctive representations to the solution of visual discrimination problems with a high degree of "feature ambiguity". These proposals constitute a new view of perirhinal cortex function, one that does not assume strict modularity of function in the occipito-temporal visual stream, but replaces this idea with the notion of a hierarchical representational continuum.     

Perception as abduction: turning sensor data into meaningful representation

This article presents a formal theory of robot perception as a form of abduction. The theory pins down the process whereby low-level sensor data is transformed into a symbolic representation of the external world, drawing together aspects such as incompleteness, top-down information flow, active perception, attention, and sensor fusion in a unifying framework. In addition, a number of themes are identified that are common to both the engineer concerned with developing a rigorous theory of perception, such as the one on offer here, and the philosopher of mind who is exercised by questions relating to mental representation and intentionality.     

Source recall enhances children's discrimination of seen and heard events

The effects of rehearsing actions by source (slideshow vs. story) and of test modality (picture vs. verbal) on source monitoring were examined. Seven- to 8-year-old children (N = 30) saw a slideshow event and heard a story about a similar event. One to 2 days later, they recalled the events by source (source recall), recalled the events without reference to source (no-source-cue recall), or engaged in no recall. Seven to 8 days later, all children received verbal and picture source-monitoring tests. Children in the source recall group were less likely than children in the other groups to claim they saw actions merely heard in the story. No-source-cue recall impaired source identification of story actions. The picture test enhanced recognition, but not source monitoring, of slide actions. Increasing the distinctiveness of the target events (Experiment 2) allowed the picture test to facilitate slideshow action discrimination by children in the no-recall group.     

Retrieving text inferences: Controlled and automatic influences

Bridging inferences contribute to text coherence by identifying the connections among ideas, whereas elaborative inferences simply specify sensible extrapolations from text. Bridging inferences have been indistinguishable from explicit text ideas on numerous measures, suggesting similar longterm memory (LTM) representations for the two, whereas elaborative inferences are inferior. To evaluate the LTM representations of text ideas, we used the extended process-dissociation procedure (Buchner, Erdfelder, & Vaterrodt-Plunnecke, 1995; Jacoby, 1991) to partition the controlled, recollective contributions to text retrieval from the automatic, familiarity-based contributions. The automatic contribution to the recognition of implied concepts was consistently negligible, an outcome consistent with the absence of perceptual processing of those concepts during the original reading. In addition, the controlled basis of recognition was consistently higher for explicit than for implicit concepts, which suggests a more robust conceptual representation for explicit text ideas (Yonelinas, 2002). These results were interpreted to reflect the asymmetric representation of explicit ideas and inferences (elaborative and even bridging inferences) in the surface, propositional textbase, and situational levels of text representation.     

Removing eyebrows impairs recognition of famous faces, or doesn't, depending on how the eyebrows are removed

Matching photos of famous people's faces with their names was as fast with photos that had eyebrows masked by adhesive plaster as with unretouched original photos. But matching was slower with photos that had eyebrows erased and replaced with adjacent skin texture and colour than with original photos. The conjecture that erasure impairs recognition because it alters a face's configuration was examined by repeating the experiment with the photos shown upside down, the rationale being that because configural information is difficult to encode from inverted faces the erasure effect should diminish. With inverted faces, matching was no different for original, eyebrows-masked, and eyebrows-erased photos. Eyebrows appear to be less important for face recognition as informative parts and features than as sources of information about a face's configuration.