Early processing of emotional faces in children with autism: An event-related potential study

Social deficits are one of the most striking manifestations of autism spectrum disorders (ASDs). Among these social deficits, the recognition and understanding of emotional facial expressions has been widely reported to be affected in ASDs. We investigated emotional face processing in children with and without autism using event-related potentials (ERPs). High-functioning children with autism (n = 15, mean age = 10.5 ± 3.3 years) completed an implicit emotional task while visual ERPs were recorded. Two groups of typically developing children (chronological age-matched and verbal equivalent age-matched [both ns = 15, mean age = 7.7 ± 3.8 years]) also participated in this study. The early ERP responses to faces (P1 and N170) were delayed, and the P1 was smaller in children with autism than in typically developing children of the same chronological age, revealing that the first stages of emotional face processing are affected in autism. However, when matched by verbal equivalent age, only P1 amplitude remained affected in autism. Our results suggest that the emotional and facial processing difficulties in autism could start from atypicalities in visual perceptual processes involving rapid feedback to primary visual areas and subsequent holistic processing.     

Anticipatory reaching of seven- to eleven-month-old infants in occlusion situations

The present study examined 7- to 11-month-old infants’ anticipatory and reactive reaching for temporarily occluded objects. Infants were presented with laterally approaching objects that moved at different velocities (10, 20, and 40 cm/s) in different occlusion situations (no-, 20 cm-, and 40 cm-occlusion), resulting in occlusion durations ranging between 0 and 4 s. Results show that except for object velocity and occlusion distance, occlusion duration was a critical constraint for infants’ reaching behaviors. We found that the older infants reached more often, but that an increase in occlusion duration resulted in a decline in reaching frequency that was similar across age groups. Anticipatory reaching declined with increasing occlusion duration, but the adverse effects for longer occlusion durations diminished with age. It is concluded that with increasing age infants are able to retain and use information to guide reaching movements over longer periods of non-visibility, providing support for the graded representation hypothesis (Jonsson &; von Hofsten, 2003) and the two-visual systems model (Milner &; Goodale, 1995).     

Commemorating the Reformation in 2017

This article argues that the commemoration of the Reformation is not just a time to look back historically, but an occasion to reflect where reform and reformation is needed today in church and society. It is clear that in 2017 we cannot but celebrate in an ecumenical dimension, with a concern for religious dialogue, and in a global context.     

Attracting Immigrants to Smaller Urban and Rural Communities: Lessons Learned from the Manitoba Provincial Nominee Program

Low birth rates and population ageing have slowed population growth rates in Canada, and immigration has become the primary driver of population and labour force growth in the nation. The distribution of new arrivals to Canada, however, has been concentrated in a few major cities. Until recently, Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver have been the destination of approximately 75% of all immigrants. All orders of government have introduced policies and programs to influence the regional distribution of immigrants across the country, ostensibly so that the benefits of immigration will be more evenly shared on a national basis. An assessment of the Manitoba Provincial Nominee Program helps identify policy and program initiatives and best practices effective in changing the regional distribution of immigrants and attracting more new arrivals to smaller urban and rural communities.     

Capital juror questionnaires in death-penalty cases: A study of attitudes,denials, and deceptions

The Sixth Amendment right to an “impartial jury” should guarantee fundamental fairness that in capital cases may literally be a matter of life and death. For ecological validity, the current study focuses on capital jury questionnaires (CJQs) employed in actual death-penalty cases. Study I examined 248 undergraduates and their responses to death-penalty relevant questions. As an MTurk investigation, Study II consisted of 259 community members potentially eligible for capital trial jury trials. Misrepresentations were operationalized as either denials (concealing their true views) or outright deceptions (dissembling the opposite viewpoint). Both studies found that CJQ items were very susceptible to both types of misrepresentation, irrespective of support-life or support-death views. Nearly 30% of undergraduates openly acknowledged that they would misrepresent close to half their CJQ responses. Overall, community members were much more willing to engage in denials and outright deceptions. The discussion focuses on how CJQs could be improved to promote candor about death-penalty views.     

Inferring task performance and confidence from displays of eye movements

Eye movements reveal what is at the center of people's attention, which is assumed to coincide with what they are thinking about. Eye-movement displays (visualizations of a person's fixations superimposed onto the stimulus, for example, as dots or circles) might provide useful information for diagnosing that person's performance. However, making inferences about a person's task performance based on eye-movement displays requires substantial interpretation. Using graph-comprehension tasks, we investigated to what extent observers (N = 46) could make accurate inferences about a performer's multiple-choice task performance (i.e., chosen answer), confidence, and competence from displays of that person's eye movements. Observers' accuracy when judging which answer the performer chose was above chance level and was higher for displays reflecting confident performance. Observers were also able to infer performers' confidence from the eye-movement displays; moreover, their own task performance and perceived similarity with the performer affected their judgments of the other's competence.     

Acquired and developmental spelling dyslexia

Two cases of acquired spelling dyslexia and one case of developmental spelling dyslexia are described along with accounts of their performance on various psycholinguistic tasks. It is argued that there is some evidence that spelling dyslexia may exist in developmental form but that parallels are difficult to draw because of the very different histories of child and adult cases. It is also suggested that features of surface dyslexia exist in at least a proportion of spelling dyslexic cases and that this may be influenced by level of premorbid reading skill.     

Mothers in incestuous families

Based on the premise that mothers in father-daughter incest families are pivotal in the incestuous bond, this article considers the incestuous mother's personality dynamics and role within the context of parent-child nuclear and extended family interaction. Such fundamental issues as separation-individuation, identification, and fear of intimacy are addressed from a developmental perspective. Patterns of functioning of mothers who are both victims and colluders are highlighted, followed by treatment implications.     

Interference in a typeface variant of the Stroop test

Ss were asked to name the typeface in which a printed item appeared in a discrete trial variant of the Stroop color-word test. Two kinds of items were used: (a) typeface names appearing in antagonistic typefaces, e.g., the word SCRIPT printed in bold type; and (b) nonsense strings constructed by jumbling; the letters in a typeface name, e.g., PSRTCI printed in bold type. Typeface-naming latencies were found to be significantly longer for items of the first kind. Examination of the distributions of individual trial latencies for the two kinds of items indicated that modification of Morton’s (1969) account of the Stroop test is required.