Synesthetic grapheme-color percepts exist for newly encountered Hebrew,Devanagari, Armenian and Cyrillic graphemes

Grapheme-color synesthetes experience color, not physically present, when viewing symbols. Synesthetes cannot remember learning these associations. Must synesthetic percepts be formed during a sensitive period? Can they form later and be consistent? What determines their nature? We tested grapheme-color synesthete, MC2, before, during and after she studied Hindi abroad. We investigated whether novel graphemes elicited synesthetic percepts, changed with familiarity, and/or benefited from phonemic information. MC2 reported color percepts to novel Devanagari and Hebrew graphemes. MC2 monitored these percepts over 6 months in a Hindi-speaking environment. MC2 and synesthete DN, reported synesthetic percepts for Armenian graphemes, or Cyrillic graphemes + phonemes over time. Synesthetes, not controls, reported color percepts for novel graphemes that gained consistency over time. Phonemic information did not enhance consistency. Thus, synesthetes can form and consolidate percepts to novel graphemes as adults. These percepts may depend on pre-existing grapheme-color relationships but they can flexibly shift with familiarity.     

The Universality of Childhood Emotional Abuse: A Meta-Analysis of Worldwide Prevalence

This comprehensive meta-analysis combined prevalence figures of child emotional abuse reported in 29 studies, including 46 independent samples with a total of 7,082,279 participants. The overall estimated prevalence was 3/1,000 for studies using informants and 363/1,000 for studies using self-report measures of child emotional abuse. Procedural factors seem to exert a greater influence on the prevalence of childhood emotional abuse than sample characteristics and definitional issues, without fully explaining the vast variation of prevalence rates reported in individual studies. We conclude that child emotional abuse is a universal problem affecting the lives of millions of children all over the world, which is in sharp contrast with the United Nation's Convention on the Rights of the Child.     

The five factor model of personality: Openness a distinct but related construct

It has been argued that the Openness (O) dimension from the five factor model (FFM) of personality may in fact be an associate of the ability domain more than the personality domain. This paper explores this hypothesis using a sample of 101 managers. Participants completed the NEO-FFI and a measure of ability assessing the construct as typical performance. This measure was an occupational specific measure of typical intellectual engagement (TIE), termed the “problem solving through challenge” PSC scale. A combination of LISREL CFA and hierarchical multiple linear regression (HMLR) indicated that in fact O was a distinct but related construct to the other four dimensions of the FFM (N, E, A and C), but that O was more strongly correlated with PSC than the other dimensions. These results are taken to indicate that O, while associated with personality, assesses something to do with problem solving as a personality trait. Further the results suggest that E linked O to the other personality scales.     

Reducing delusional speech in chronic, paranoid schizophrenics

Four schizophrenic patients with paranoid and grandiose delusions who had been hospitalized for an average of 17 yr were exposed to social reinforcement contingencies in a multiple baseline design. During the baseline period, each patient was interviewed for four 10-min sessions each day. The elapsed time from onset of conversation to onset of delusional talk was recorded. At the end of each day, the patients engaged in a 30-min informal chat with a nurse-therapist while relaxing with coffee, snacks, and cigarettes. The intervention introduced two contingencies: (1) The 10-min interviews were terminated as soon as the patient began talking delusionally; (2) The patients earned time for their evening chat by talking rationally during their daytime interviews. Increases of from 200 to 600% in the amount of rational talk exhibited during the interviews occurred as the contingencies were introduced for each patient sequentially over time. These increases were maintained in three patients when the amount of reinforcement was halved, but declined when the patients were confronted directly with their delusional ideas. A modest amount of generalization occurred from the day-time interviews to the evening chats but did not extend to the behavior of the patients on the ward.