Relations with Parents and with Peers,Temperament, and Trajectories of Depressed Mood During Early Adolescence

The present study examined (a) whether groups of children can be empirically identified with distinct longitudinal profiles of depressed mood from late childhood through early adolescence, (b) to what extent these different longitudinal depression profiles are predicted by problematic relations with parents, same-sex peers, and other-sex peers, and (c) what role individuals' temperamental characteristics play in this context. Based on a sample of 414 early adolescents (197 girls), four groups were identified with distinct longitudinal profiles of depressed mood between ages 11 and 14: One group with consistently low levels of depressed mood, another with consistently moderate levels of depressed mood, a third group whose depressed mood increased sharply from late childhood through early adolescence, and a fourth group who already showed clinical-range levels of depressed mood during late childhood and whose depressive feelings increased even slightly more thereafter. Subsequent analyses revealed that rejection by same-sex peers was related to the odds of following an increasing trajectory of depressed mood, but only for girls with a highly reactive temperament. A problematic relationship with parents increased the odds of an elevated trajectory of depressed mood regardless of individual temperament. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.     

The allure of the alignable: younger and older adults' false memories of choice features

When making choices, people often try to directly compare the features of different options rather than evaluating each option separately. Not every feature has an analogous (or alignable) feature in the other option, however. In this study, both younger and older adults filled in such gaps when remembering, creating features in the other option to contrast with existing features. Thus, participants had a tendency to remember choice options as more comparable than they originally were. High performance on tasks tapping strategic processing was associated with a pattern of mostly feature-based comparisons during choice for older adults but with a pattern of mostly option-based comparisons for younger adults. This pattern suggests that younger and older adults' comparison processes are influenced by different goals.     

Amygdala responses to emotionally valenced stimuli in older and younger adults

Abstract— As they age, adults experience less negative emotion, come to pay less attention to negative than to positive emotional stimuli, and become less likely to remember negative than positive emotional materials. This profile of findings suggests that, with age, the amygdala may show decreased reactivity to negative information while maintaining or increasing its reactivity to positive information. We used event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging to assess whether amygdala activation in response to positive and negative emotional pictures changes with age. Both older and younger adults showed greater activation in the amygdala for emotional than for neutral pictures; however, for older adults, seeing positive pictures led to greater amygdala activation than seeing negative pictures, whereas this was not the case for younger adults.     

Extensive lesions of cholinergic basal forebrain neurons do not impair spatial working memory

A recent studysuggests that lesions to all major areas of the cholinergic basal forebrain in the rat (medial septum, horizontal limb of the diagonal band of Broca, and nucleus basalis magnocellularis) impair a spatial working memory task. However, this experiment used a surgical technique that mayhave damaged cerebellar Purkinje cells. The present studytested rats with highlyselective lesions of cholinergic neurons in all major areas of the basal forebrain on a spatial working memorytask in the radial arm maze. In postoperative testing, there were no significant differences between lesion and control groups in working memory, even with a delayperiod of 8 h, with the exception of a transient impairment during the first 2 d of postoperative testing at shorter delays (0 or 2 h). This finding corroborates other results that indicate that the cholinergic basal forebrain does not playa significant role in spatial working memory. Furthermore, it underscores the presence of intact memoryfunctions after cholinergic basal forebrain damage, despite attentional impairments that follow these lesions, demonstrated in other task paradigms.     

“Celebrities to lean on!” Perceived celebrity support across two cultures—Iran and the United States

Though many people loathe celebrities and their lifestyles, celebrities can also be perceived as being available to provide community support. The purpose of this study was to establish the psychometric properties of the Perceived Celebrity Support Inventory. The scale was developed to capture three aspects of perceived celebrity support to the community: instrumental (i.e., providing tangible and concrete assistance), informational (i.e., advice, explanation, and information), and emotional (i.e., empathizing, encouraging, listening, and comforting) support. Factor and item analyses have revealed robust psychometric properties in samples drawn from the United States (US) and Iran. The US sample perceived higher community support from celebrities than the Iranian sample. In the Iranian sample, perceived celebrity support for the community was associated with more positive attitudes and less hatred of celebrity culture. In the US, perceived celebrity support was associated with negative attitudes and elevated hatred towards celebrities. The findings advance the literature by providing an instrument with which to measure positive aspects of celebrity influence across cultures.     

The Personality Inventory for Youth: validity and comparability of English and Spanish versions for regular education and juvenile justice samples

In this study we examined the comparability of the Personality Inventory for Youth (PIY; Lachar & Gruber, 1993, 1995)--Spanish version to its English counterpart among bilingual Mexican American male and female high school students (n = 120), and among incarcerated bilingual Mexican American male adolescents (n = 52). Results indicated that language (English vs. Spanish) was not associated with a significant effect on the PIY scales or subscales for male adolescents in the juvenile justice facility, but was associated with a marginal effect for regular education adolescents; more specifically, regular education students completing the PIY in Spanish reported somewhat lower levels of symptoms than those completing the English version. Also, incarcerated males obtained significantly higher scores than regular education males on all 9 clinical and 19 out of 24 clinical subscales. Overall, the results of this study suggest that both language versions of the PIY may be applied usefully in the study and treatment of a variety of problems relevant to juvenile populations. Additional findings are discussed.     

Aging and variety seeking

The authors examined the influence of age on variety seeking in 3 experiments. When given choices among jellybeans or music, age differences in variety seeking emerged. Younger adults selected similar levels of variety when choosing what to consume immediately and what to consume later. In contrast, older adults consistently chose less variety when making choices to be consumed at a later time than when making choices to be consumed immediately. This pattern may be related to an increased focus on regulating future emotional experience that is associated with age.     

Does remembering emotional items impair recall of same-emotion items?

In the part-set cuing effect, cuing a subset of previously studied items impairs recall of the remaining noncued items. This experiment reveals that cuing participants with previously-studied emotional pictures (e.g., fearevoking pictures of people) can impair recall of pictures involving the same emotion but different content (e.g., fear-evoking pictures of animals). This indicates that new events can be organized in memory using emotion as a grouping function to create associations. However, whether new information is organized in memory along emotional or nonemotional lines appears to be a flexible process that depends on people’s current focus. Mentioning in the instructions that the pictures were either amusement- or fear-related led to memory impairment for pictures with the same emotion as cued pictures, whereas mentioning that the pictures depicted either animals or people led to memory impairment for pictures with the same type of actor.     

Cultural pluralism and prejudice reduction

Predictions derived from models of cultural pluralism and cultural assimilation were tested. Previous research has shown that highlighting differences between ethnic groups, in conjunction with self-focus, can reduce prejudice. The presented research tested the following questions: (a) does highlighting differences function to reduce prejudice between groups that are dissimilar to each other as well as between those that are highly similar, (b) is prejudice reduction due to distinctiveness a function of the lessened ingroup positivity or lessened outgroup negativity, (c) does making distinctiveness salient reduce prejudice toward only the distinctive outgroups or to outgroups more generically, and (d) does the manipulation equally impact African American, Mexican American, Mexican National, and White American participants? Results demonstrated that highlighting differences while simultaneously focusing on the self reduces prejudice, although similarity mediates the relationship with those who are perceived as more different. Distinctiveness also reduced outgroup negativity and generalized to other outgroups. Finally, the manipulation reduced prejudice only for White Americans, Mexican Americans, and Mexican Nationals.