STOP-IT: Windows executable software for the stop-signal paradigm

The stop-signal paradigm is a useful tool for the investigation of response inhibition. In this paradigm, subjects are instructed to respond as fast as possible to a stimulus unless a stop signal is presented after a variable delay. However, programming the stop-signal task is typically considered to be difficult. To overcome this issue, we present software called STOP-IT, for running the stop-signal task, as well as an additional analyzing program called ANALYZE-IT. The main advantage of both programs is that they are a precompiled executable, and for basic use there is no need for additional programming. STOP-IT and ANALYZE-IT are completely based on free software, are distributed under the GNU General Public License, and are available at the personal Web sites of the first two authors or at expsy.ugent.be/tscope/stop.html.     

Elizabeth Spelman,Gender Realism,and Women

Elizabeth Spelman has famously argued against gender realism (the view that women have some feature in common that makes them women). By and large, feminist philosophers have embraced Spelman's arguments and deemed gender realist positions counterproductive. To the contrary, Mikkola shows that Spelman's arguments do not in actual fact give good reason to reject gender realism in general. She then suggests a way to understand gender realism that does not have the adverse consequences feminist philosophers commonly think gender realist positions have.     

Nonlinear principal components analysis: introduction and application

The authors provide a didactic treatment of nonlinear (categorical) principal components analysis (PCA). This method is the nonlinear equivalent of standard PCA and reduces the observed variables to a number of uncorrelated principal components. The most important advantages of nonlinear over linear PCA are that it incorporates nominal and ordinal variables and that it can handle and discover nonlinear relationships between variables. Also, nonlinear PCA can deal with variables at their appropriate measurement level; for example, it can treat Likert-type scales ordinally instead of numerically. Every observed value of a variable can be referred to as a category. While performing PCA, nonlinear PCA converts every category to a numeric value, in accordance with the variable's analysis level, using optimal quantification. The authors discuss how optimal quantification is carried out, what analysis levels are, which decisions have to be made when applying nonlinear PCA, and how the results can be interpreted. The strengths and limitations of the method are discussed. An example applying nonlinear PCA to empirical data using the program CATPCA (J. J. Meulman, W. J. Heiser, & SPSS, 2004) is provided.     

Neuroticism and responses to social comparison among cancer patients

The present study examined how the effects of three audiotapes containing different types of social comparison information on the mood of cancer patients depended on the level of neuroticism. On the procedural tape, a man and woman discussed the process of radiation therapy, on the emotion tape, they focussed on emotional reactions to their illness and treatment, while on the coping tape they focussed on the way they had been coping. A validation study among 115 students showed that the tapes were perceived as they were intended. The main study was conducted among 226 patients who were about to undergo radiation therapy. Compared to patients in the control group, as patients were higher in neuroticism, they reported less negative mood after listening to the procedural and the coping tape. Furthermore, as patients were higher in neuroticism, they reported less negative mood after listening to the coping tape than to the emotion tape. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Brain dynamics of word familiarization in 20-month-olds: effects of productive vocabulary size

The present study investigated the brain mechanisms involved during young children's receptive familiarization with new words, and whether the dynamics of these mechanisms are related to the child's productive vocabulary size. To this end, we recorded event-related potentials (ERPs) from 20-month-old children in a pseudoword repetition task. Results revealed distinct patterns of repetition effects for children with large and small productive vocabularies. High producers showed evidence of recognizing the novel words already after three presentations, while the low producers needed five presentations to display a recognition effect. The familiarization process was manifested in the modulations of two components, the N200-400 and a later fronto-central component, which appeared to increase in amplitude until a certain level of encoding was reached and then decrease with further repetition. These findings suggest a relation between the onset of the productive vocabulary spurt and the rate of receptive word familiarization.     

Family,peer, and neighborhood influences on academic achievement among African-American adolescents: One-year prospective effects

Using a 1-year prospective design, this study examined the influence of family status variables (family income, parental education, family structure), parenting variables (maternal support and restrictive control), peer support, and neighborhood risk on the school performance of 120 African American junior high school students. In addition to main effects of these variables, neighborhood risk was examined as a moderator of the effects of parenting and peer support. Family status variables were not predictive of adolescent school performance as indexed by self-reported grade point average. Maternal support at Time 1 was prospectively related to adolescent grades at Time 2. Neighborhood risk was related to lower grades, while peer support predicted better grades in the prospective analyses. Neighborhood risk also moderated the effects of maternal restrictive control and peer support on adolescent grades in prospective analyses. These findings highlight the importance of an ecological approach to the problem of academic underachievement within the African American community.     

Development of visuomanual tracking in 5- to 9-year-old boys

Visuomanual sinusoidal tracking is investigated in 5- to 9-year-old children. The proportion of successful performances steadily increases with age, but adult proficiency is never attained even by those who can perform the task. Moreover, the progress in proficiency—as measured by systems analysis techniques—is not monotonic and suggests the presence of distinct stages in the development of visuomotor coordination. Qualitative analysis of unsuccessful performance demonstrates that failures cannot be ascribed only to insufficient motor coordination and emphasizes the role of cognitive and representational factors even in such a simple task.     

Language Delay and Externalizing Problems in Preschool Age: A Prospective Cohort Study

This study sought to examine the direction of causation between language delay and two externalizing problems; inattention and aggression. Autoregressive fixed effects models were fitted to data from 25,474 children (age 1.5 to 5 years; 50.8% boys) in the population-based longitudinal Norwegian Mother and Child Cohort Study (MoBa), to model the direction of causality for language delay and inattention and aggression, respectively. The most parsimonious model for the relationship between language delay and inattention was one where both common factors and reciprocal causation were estimated. Adjusted for common factors, language delay was estimated to have a non-significant effect on inattention by b?=?0.12 (p?=?0.06), and inattention to have a significant effect on language delay by b?=?0.19 (p?=?0.03). The most parsimonious model for the direction of causality for language delay and aggression was one where the entire association could be explained by language delay having effect on aggression b?=?0.12 (p?<?0.02). It appears that while language delay can best be conceptualized as an epiphenomenon of inattention partly related to both common factors and causal processes, aggression can best be conceptualized as caused by language delay. This illumination of the hypothetical causal links between two common problem domains in preschool-aged children has clear implications on where to implement interventions to prevent co-occurrence of language delay and externalizing problems.     

Jung’s Axioms: An Introduction to Jung’s “Note on Number”

This article is an introduction to C. G. Jung’s handwritten note on natural numbers (in this issue), which became the basis of Marie-Louise von Franz’s book Number and Time. I present the historical background of Jung’s note and discuss part of its content using mostly Jung’s own words.