The role of intersensory redundancy in the emergence of social referencing in 5½-month-old infants

Early evidence of social referencing was examined in 5?-month-old infants. Infants were habituated to 2 films of moving toys, one toy eliciting a woman's positive emotional expression and the other eliciting a negative expression under conditions of bimodal (audiovisual) or unimodal visual (silent) speech. It was predicted that intersensory redundancy provided by audiovisual (but not available in unimodal visual) events would enhance detection of the relation between emotional expressions and the corresponding toy. Consistent with predictions, only infants who received bimodal, audiovisual events detected a change in the affect-object relations, showing increased looking during a switch test in which the toy-affect pairing was reversed. Moreover, in a subsequent live preference test, they preferentially touched the 3-dimensional toy previously paired with the positive expression. These findings suggest social referencing emerges by 5? months in the context of intersensory redundancy provided by dynamic multimodal stimulation and that even 5?-month-old infants demonstrate preferences for 3-dimensional objects on the basis of affective information depicted in videotaped events.     

Childhood sexual behavior as an indicator of sexual abuse: professionals' criteria and biases

Some sexual behaviors are related to child sexual abuse experiences, but none unequivocally. Therefore, professionals might use non-empirical-based criteria and be biased when detecting and reporting victims. To check this hypothesis, we presented 974 Spanish and Latin American professionals from different fields (Psychology, Education, Health, Social Services, Justice, and Police Force) with hypothetical situations of child sexual behavior (varying the sex, age and behavior) by using an experimental vignette method based on Factorial Survey. Participants were asked to indicate whether such behaviors are a sign of abuse and whether they would report them. We also measured demographic, academic, professional and attitude factors. According to the analysis, professionals' suspicion of abuse is more affected by personal factors, whereas their reporting intention depends more on situational factors. The main criterion adopted is the type of sexual behavior, with professionals being more likely to suspect and report in response to aggressive sexual behavior and precocious sexual knowledge. Professionals' attitudes to sexuality seem to generate biases, as those who are erotophobic are more likely to suspect abuse. None of the sexual behaviors was seen as evidence of abuse.     

Can Constructive Thinking Predict Decision Making?

We assume that executive function constitutes an integrated set of cognitive processes that mediate working memory, planning, inhibition, flexibility, and decision making. Despite the acknowledged theoretical connection between executive function processes and emotional intelligence, such relationships have rarely been investigated. The purpose of this study was to examine the potential relationship between constructive thinking, conceived as a component of emotional intelligence, and executive function, as indexed by various existing neuropsychological and experimental instruments. We used the Constructive Thinking Inventory as a measure of emotional intelligence. We found that some constructive thinking subscales were able to predict distinct executive function variables. Emotional Coping, Categorical Thinking, and Esoteric Thinking subscales explained performance on various measures of executive function. Thus, we conclude that intervention programs designed to train a specific component of emotional intelligence, namely constructive thinking, could also facilitate performance in executive function processes, and vice versa. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Families, Gender Relations and Social Change in Brazil: Practices, Discourse, Policy

We discuss three different areas in which policies on gender and the family have been debated and formulated in Brazil, revealing both the forces of change and the many contradictions that are at work within this society today. After a brief look at the historical vicissitudes of families and family life in Brazil, as representations and as forms of social organization, we come to our more immediate context: the re-democratization processes that engulfed Brazilian society as of the 1980s and the social actors generated therein. Issues relating to gender and sexuality become increasingly visible on the broad political agenda that, notwithstanding national specificities, also converges with social, political and cultural trends emerging all over the world in the latter decades of the twentieth century. The three specific issues we discuss here—the Maria da Penha Law on domestic violence, efforts regarding the legalization of abortion and recent debates that have emerged around a bill introduced to give legal status to same-sex relationships—provide testimony of a society characterized by tensions between mechanisms sustaining restrictive definitions of family, linked to male dominance, heterosexism and hierarchical gender roles, and those that push toward more egalitarian, diverse and democratic family relations.     

Exploring Culture-Specific Differences in Beliefs about Causes, Kinship and the Heritability of Major Depressive Disorder: The Views of Anglo-Celtic and Chinese-Australians

The aim of this study was to explore cultural differences in causal attributions and beliefs about heritability of major depressive disorder (MDD). Face-to-face interviews with Anglo-Celtic- and Chinese-Australians community members with a family history of MDD were conducted and subjected to a rigorous qualitative analysis, using the computer software NVivo. Sixteen Anglo-Celtic-Australians and 16 Chinese-Australians were interviewed. Both groups believed that a combination of genetic and environmental factors contributed to MDD, that stress was an important cause of MDD, and that coping factors were significant moderators of the impact of stress on MDD. Both cultural groups believed that the causes of MDD affecting multiple family members included a shared family environment and a “contagion effect”, in addition to genetics. Unique to the Chinese-Australian group was the beliefs that parental pressures to exceed academically contributed to MDD; this cultural group also reported beliefs that depression was due to God’s will or alternatively fate, which in turn was related to attributions to feng shui and auspicious dates. This study documented key culture-specific differences in beliefs about causes and inheritance of MDD; such differences have major implications for clinician-patient communication about genetic risk associated with having a family history of MDD.     

Rapid volitional control of apparent motion during percept generation

How rapidly can one voluntarily influence percept generation? The time course of voluntary visual–spatial attention is well studied, but the time course of intentional control over percept generation is relatively unknown. We investigated the latter question using “one-shot” apparent motion. When a vertical or horizontal pair of squares is replaced by its 90º-rotated version, the bottom-up signal is ambiguous. From this ambiguous signal, it is known that people can intentionally generate a percept of rotation in a desired direction (clockwise or counterclockwise). To determine the time course of this intentional control, we instructed participants to voluntarily induce rotation in a precued direction (clockwise rotation when a high-pitched tone was heard, and counterclockwise rotation when a low-pitched tone was heard), and then to report the direction of rotation that was actually perceived. We varied the delay between the instructional cue and the rotated frame (cue-lead time) from 0 to 1,067 ms. Intentional control became more effective with longer cue-lead times (asymptotically effective at 533 ms). Notably, intentional control was reliable even with a zero cue-lead time; control experiments ruled out response bias and the development of an auditory–visual association as explanations. This demonstrates that people can interpret an auditory cue and intentionally generate a desired motion percept surprisingly rapidly, entirely within the subjectively instantaneous moment in which the visual system constructs a percept of apparent motion.     

Studying Children’s Religious Knowledge: Contributions of Ethnography and the Clinical-Critical Method

We analyze different methodological and conceptual contributions of anthropology and psychogenetic theory to the research of children’s religious knowledge. We argue that for the study of children’s points of view it is possible to build an approach that links aspects studied by both disciplinary fields. With this aim, we revise some of their basic theoretical assumptions and recent reviews as well as their methodological proposals. Then we review the core characteristics of ethnography and the clinical–critical method—proposed by Piaget’s psychogenetic theory—with the goal of stressing their potentialities as well as their limitations in research. We argue that within an ethnographic approach, we must establish certain restrictions on the clinical–critical method following basic premises of social anthropology. This approach lets us demonstrate the importance of understanding children’s constructions by placing them within social relations that children produce and update in everyday interactions.