Supporting adolescents who have a sibling with a life-threatening illness: An exploratory study

Aims: This research explores issues encountered by adolescents who have a sibling with a life-threatening illness, and those who work therapeutically with them. Method: Eight semi-structured, face-to-face interviews were conducted with participants who work therapeutically with this client group. Attention was given to the empathic quality of interviews. The interview sample included six females and two males, encompassing a wide demographic area within England and Wales. Five were counsellors and three had other professional trainings. Findings: Data was analysed using grounded theory. Results showed that the provision of family as well as individual therapeutic support for young people would ease stress for families and professionals alike, and that peer support was considered important. Implications for practice: The results of this research suggest that organisations working with families experiencing a life-threatening illness would benefit from attending to the quality of support offered to their staff, as well as the families they work with.     

Characteristic sounds make you look at target objects more quickly

When you are looking for an object, does hearing its characteristic sound make you find it more quickly? Our recent results supported this possibility by demonstrating that when a cat target, for example, was presented among other objects, a simultaneously presented “meow” sound (containing no spatial information) reduced the manual response time for visual localization of the target. To extend these results, we determined how rapidly an object-specific auditory signal can facilitate target detection in visual search. On each trial, participants fixated a specified target object as quickly as possible. The target’s characteristic sound speeded the saccadic search time within 215–220 msec and also guided the initial saccade toward the target, compared with presentation of a distractor’s sound or with no sound. These results suggest that object-based auditory—visual interactions rapidly increase the target object’s salience in visual search.     

A cross-cultural study of trait self-enhancement, explanatory variables, and adjustment

We investigated trait self-enhancement, explanatory variables, and adjustment in European American (n = 141), Asian American (n = 72), Mexican (n = 141), and Filipino (n = 174) college students. Consistent with trait perspectives, students in all cultural groups rated their traits with moderate to high accuracy, using peer ratings as a criterion. European Americans did not exhibit self-enhancement relative to peers, but both self and peer ratings were higher (i.e., more positive) for European Americans than for the other three groups. Support was found for some, but not all, cultural psychology explanations of self-enhancement. In all cultural groups, self-enhancement was more associated with personal (intrapsychic) adjustment than interpersonal adjustment, as judged by peers. The results provided support for an integration of trait and cultural psychology perspectives.     

Odometry and backtracking: social and individual navigation in group foraging desert harvester ants (Veromessor pergandei)

Animal Cognition - Veromessor pergandei harvester ants are group foragers which use a combination of social cues (pheromone-marked columns) and individual cues (e.g., self-generated movement,...     

Distortions in location memory

Memory for the location of a briefly presented target is often distorted in systematic ways. When people remember dot locations within a circular space, they typically show memory biases that appear to reflect a categorical strategy. However, memory for a target location can also be biased toward visible markers or landmarks. In the present study, we investigated the interaction of categorical and landmark effects by providing sectioning lines in a circular space. In the absence of lines, response biases showed categorical effects, whereas in the presence of lines, response biases suggested that participants used a landmark-based scheme. Possible relations between the strategies are discussed.     

Characteristic sounds facilitate visual search

In a natural environment, objects that we look for often make characteristic sounds. A hiding cat may meow, or the keys in the cluttered drawer may jingle when moved. Using a visual search paradigm, we demonstrated that characteristic sounds facilitated visual localization of objects, even when the sounds carried no location information. For example, finding a cat was faster when participants heard a meow sound. In contrast, sounds had no effect when participants searched for names rather than pictures of objects. For example, hearing “meow” did not facilitate localization of the word cat. These results suggest that characteristic sounds cross-modally enhance visual (rather than conceptual) processing of the corresponding objects. Our behavioral demonstration of object-based cross-modal enhancement complements the extensive literature on space-based cross-modal interactions. When looking for your keys next time, you might want to play jingling sounds.     

Interparental conflict and children's school adjustment: the explanatory role of children's internal representations of interparental and parent-child relationships

This study examined how children's insecure internal representations of interparental and parent-child relationships served as explanatory mechanisms in multiple pathways linking interparental conflict and parent emotional unavailability with the emotional and classroom engagement difficulties the children had in their adjustment to school. With their parents, 229 kindergarten children (127 girls and 102 boys, mean age = 6.0 years, SD = .50, at Wave 1) participated in this multimethod, 3-year longitudinal investigation. Findings revealed that children's insecure representations of the interparental relationship were a significant intervening mechanism in associations between observational ratings of interparental conflict and child and teacher reports on children's emotional and classroom difficulties in school over a 2-year period. Moreover, increased parental emotional unavailability accompanying high levels of interparental conflict was associated with children's insecure representations of the parent-child relationship and children's difficulties in classroom engagement at school entry. The findings highlight the importance of understanding the intrinsic processes that contribute to difficulties with stage-salient tasks for children who are experiencing interparental discord.     

A COMPUTATIONAL THEORY OF SELECTION BY CONSEQUENCES APPLIED TO CONCURRENT SCHEDULES

Virtual organisms animated by a computational theory of selection by consequences responded on symmetrical and asymmetrical concurrent schedules of reinforcement. The theory instantiated Darwinian principles of selection, reproduction, and mutation such that a population of potential behaviors evolved under the selection pressure exerted by reinforcement from the environment. The virtual organisms' steady‐state behavior was well described by the power function matching equation, and the parameters of the equation behaved in ways that were consistent with findings from experiments with live organisms. Together with previous research on single‐alternative schedules (McDowell, 2004; McDowell & Caron, 2007) these results indicate that the equations of matching theory are emergent properties of the evolutionary dynamics of selection by consequences.