The development of phonological awareness in preschool children

A short-term longitudinal study was carried out on a group of 67 preschool children. At three points in time over a 12-month period, the children were given tests measuring their syllable, rime, and phoneme awareness, speech and language skills, and letter knowledge. In general, children's rime skills developed earlier than their phoneme skills. Structural equation models showed that articulatory skills and syllable and rime awareness predicted later phoneme awareness.     

Healing after Columbine: reflections of psychoanalytic responders to community trauma

Following the shootings at Columbine High School on April 20, 1999, the Denver Psychoanalytic Society provided both immediate and long-term interventions to those closely impacted by the tragedy. In this effort, analytically trained volunteers faced many personal challenges and role adjustments. To address these issues a reflective study group was formed twenty months after the traumatic event. Group discussions revealed a surprising number of residual symptoms from secondary trauma, as well as opportunities for shared coping among analysts. Little has been written about the very human and subjective responses of analysts in such circumstances. These experiences may be helpful to others in today's world of terrorism and unexpected violent events.     

Probing Lexical Ambiguity: Word Vectors Encode Number and Relatedness of Senses

Lexical ambiguity—the phenomenon of a single word having multiple, distinguishable senses—is pervasive in language. Both the degree of ambiguity of a word (roughly, its number of senses) and the relatedness of those senses have been found to have widespread effects on language acquisition and processing. Recently, distributional approaches to semantics, in which a word's meaning is determined by its contexts, have led to successful research quantifying the degree of ambiguity, but these measures have not distinguished between the ambiguity of words with multiple related senses versus multiple unrelated meanings. In this work, we present the first assessment of whether distributional meaning representations can capture the ambiguity structure of a word, including both the number and relatedness of senses. On a very large sample of English words, we find that some, but not all, distributional semantic representations that we test exhibit detectable differences between sets of monosemes (unambiguous words; N = 964), polysemes (with multiple related senses; N = 4,096), and homonyms (with multiple unrelated senses; N = 355). Our findings begin to answer open questions from earlier work regarding whether distributional semantic representations of words, which successfully capture various semantic relationships, also reflect fine-grained aspects of meaning structure that influence human behavior. Our findings emphasize the importance of measuring whether proposed lexical representations capture such distinctions: In addition to standard benchmarks that test the similarity structure of distributional semantic models, we need to also consider whether they have cognitively plausible ambiguity structure.     

Relating the perception of visual ensemble statistics to individual levels of autistic traits

Integrating information across the visual field into an ensemble (e.g., seeing the forest from the trees) is an effective strategy to efficiently process the visual world, and one that is often impaired in autism spectrum disorder. Individual differences in sensory processing predict ensemble encoding, providing a potential mechanism for differing perceptual strategies across individuals, and possibly across diagnostic groups exhibiting atypical sensory processing. Here, we explore whether ensemble encoding is associated with traits associated with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Participants (N=68) were presented with an ensemble display consisting of circles of varying sizes and colors, and were asked to remember the size of the red and blue circles, while ignoring the green circles. Participants were then cued to a target location after a brief delay, and instructed to report the remembered size of the circle they had previously viewed in that location, as ensemble information commonly biases memory for individual objects toward the probed mean of a set of similar objects. The Autism-spectrum Quotient (AQ) was completed to measure each individual’s level of autistic traits. We found that an individual’s level of ensemble perception, measured as their bias toward the probed mean, was negatively associated with a higher level of ASD traits. These results suggest that individuals with higher levels of ASD traits are less likely to integrate perceptual information. These findings may shed light on different perceptual processing within the autism spectrum, and provide insight into the relationship between individual differences and ensemble encoding.     

Psychosocial Impact of a Positive Gene Result for Asymptomatic Relatives at Risk of Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy

Families with a history of hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM) may be offered genetic testing in addition to clinical surveillance. Asymptomatic family members who are gene positive (silent gene carriers) represent a new group of “patients” who may not develop HCM, with little evidence available to assist clinical management. This study explored experiences of HCM genetic testing to identify potential benefits and harms. Thirty-two individuals previously offered genetic testing for HCM were recruited. Semi-structured interviews were conducted face-to-face or by phone, and transcribed audio-recordings were coded using framework analysis. Key themes were as follows: (1) helping the next generation, (2) misunderstanding risk, (3) discrepancy between actual/perceived impact. Participants described multiple psychological (shock, worry, uncertainty) and behavioural (career, sport, insurance, family planning) consequences, depending on perceived risk. Most considered only the benefits of genetic testing for children or grandchildren, but there were some cases of significant adverse impact. The interpretation of the HCM genetic test result is variable for silent gene carriers and can lead to psychological and behavioural changes. The impact of a positive gene result may be mitigated by increased clarity of the clinical consequences and efforts to ensure informed decision-making, highlighting even further the important role of cardiac genetic counselling.     

Sexual dimorphism and attractiveness in Asian and White faces

Marriages between White men and Asian women are over twice as frequent as those between White women and Asian men. Recent research has proposed that this imbalance may be explained by the finding that, on average, White men are perceived as more attractive than Asian men, and Asian women are perceived as more attractive than White women, possibly because Asian faces are perceived as more feminine than White faces. Here, we explore whether Asian faces are perceived as more feminine than White faces. Thirty-five Malaysian Chinese (20 male) and 30 Australian White (12 male) participants manipulated 100 face photographs (50 Asian; 50 White; half male) on a masculinity/femininity axis to optimize attractive appearance. As predicted, White women’s faces were increased more in femininity than Asian women’s faces, and White men’s faces were feminized more than Asian men’s faces to optimize attractiveness. These findings suggest that White faces are perceived as more masculine than Asian faces.     

Adolescents' responses to online peer conflict: How self‐evaluation and ethnicity matter

For parents, online platforms where their children interact with others often feel like a “black box” in terms of what exactly is happening. In this study, we developed an ecologically valid online computer game in which a (computer‐generated) peer teammate tried to provoke frustration, in order to examine (a) adolescents' responses and (b) how indices of self‐evaluation (i.e., sense of coherence and self‐esteem) and demographic variables (i.e., gender and ethnicity) matter to these responses. Like gender, being a member of a minority or majority group may influence how provocations by peers are interpreted, influencing how one responds. Fifteen‐year‐old Dutch and Moroccan‐Dutch adolescents (N = 167) completed self‐reports and played the online computer game. The game indeed elicited frustration, with increased self‐reported anger. Moreover, expressions of displeasure were much more common during and after provocation than before provocation. Crucially, perceived self‐evaluation mattered; higher levels of sense of coherence but lower levels of self‐esteem (only in Moroccan‐Dutch group) contributed to fewer expressions of displeasure. Gender did not play a moderating role. Our findings provide initial insights into individual differences in adolescents' responses in an online peer‐conflict situation.

Highlights

• We studied Dutch and Moroccan-Dutch adolescents' responses during online peer provocation and how self-evaluation and demographic variables matter.
• Provocation by the (computer-generated) peer teammate increased expressions of displeasure.
• More sense of coherence but less self-esteem was associated with fewer expressions of displeasure, but ethnicity moderated the effect with self-esteem.

     

Metaphor: Bridging embodiment to abstraction

Embodied cognition accounts posit that concepts are grounded in our sensory and motor systems. An important challenge for these accounts is explaining how abstract concepts, which do not directly call upon sensory or motor information, can be informed by experience. We propose that metaphor is one important vehicle guiding the development and use of abstract concepts. Metaphors allow us to draw on concrete, familiar domains to acquire and reason about abstract concepts. Additionally, repeated metaphoric use drawing on particular aspects of concrete experience can result in the development of new abstract representations. These abstractions, which are derived from embodied experience but lack much of the sensorimotor information associated with it, can then be flexibly applied to understand new situations.     

The Language of Violence: Chiastic Encounters

In her recent book, Violence and the Philosophical Imaginary (2012), Ann Murphy suggests that the philosophical imaginary, in particular that of contemporary continental philosophy, is imbued with images of violence (2012, 117). The concept of the philosophical imaginary is drawn from the work of Michèle Le D?uff to explore the role of images of violence in philosophy. Murphy sets the language of violence, reflexivity, and critique against that of vulnerability, ambiguity and responsibility. Her concern is that images of violence have become and may become more ‘neutralised, domesticated or eroticised’ in objectionable ways (2012, 3). There is no doubt Murphy has isolated and highlighted a striking feature of the continental imaginary in a clear and thoughtful way. My paper takes Murphy’s argument further by elaborating a Le D?uffian argument that theorises the reversal of priority from violent language to the violence of language. I take Murphy’s injunction for attention and sensitivity seriously by examining the language of violence and exposing that which is unfamiliar, what has become incorporated and what is revealed by the language that is used. The language of the third Reich and the language of the Rwandan genocide will be briefly compared to demonstrate these points. Our responsibility is to recognise the use of euphemism and metaphor to sometimes cover and sometimes blatantly advertise the horrifying truth. The focus on violence in philosophical language can lead us away from the violence of genocidal language and other violent language that philosophers, like all responsible people, are called to witness.     

Explaining effervescence: Investigating the relationship between shared social identity and positive experience in crowds

We investigated the intensely positive emotional experiences arising from participation in a large-scale collective event. We predicted such experiences arise when those attending a collective event are (1) able to enact their valued collective identity and (2) experience close relations with other participants. In turn, we predicted both of these to be more likely when participants perceived crowd members to share a common collective identity. We investigated these predictions in a survey of pilgrims (N = 416) attending a month-long Hindu pilgrimage festival in north India. We found participants' perceptions of a shared identity amongst crowd members had an indirect effect on their positive experience at the event through (1) increasing participants' sense that they were able to enact their collective identity and (2) increasing the sense of intimacy with other crowd members. We discuss the implications of these data for how crowd emotion should be conceptualised.