Language Experience Affects Grouping of Musical Instrument Sounds

Language experience clearly affects the perception of speech, but little is known about whether these differences in perception extend to non‐speech sounds. In this study, we investigated rhythmic perception of non‐linguistic sounds in speakers of French and German using a grouping task, in which complexity (variability in sounds, presence of pauses) was manipulated. In this task, participants grouped sequences of auditory chimeras formed from musical instruments. These chimeras mimic the complexity of speech without being speech. We found that, while showing the same overall grouping preferences, the German speakers showed stronger biases than the French speakers in grouping complex sequences. Sound variability reduced all participants’ biases, resulting in the French group showing no grouping preference for the most variable sequences, though this reduction was attenuated by musical experience. In sum, this study demonstrates that linguistic experience, musical experience, and complexity affect rhythmic grouping of non‐linguistic sounds and suggests that experience with acoustic cues in a meaningful context (language or music) is necessary for developing a robust grouping preference that survives acoustic variability.     

The Heritability of Job Satisfaction Reconsidered: Only Unique Environmental Influences Beyond Personality

Purpose

The purpose of this study was to investigate the degree to which genetic and environmental influences explain differences in job satisfaction and its relationship to personality in order to explain the heritability of job satisfaction.

Design

Behavior genetic analyses are based on a dataset containing 622 individuals, including 185 MZ (M = 39.5 years) and 126 DZ twin pairs (M = 40.1 years).

Findings

The results showed that all genetic influences (28 %) on job satisfaction could be explained by its relation to personality, especially Neuroticism, Extraversion, and Conscientiousness, representing a high genetic overlap between job satisfaction and personality. Non-shared environmental influences explained the remaining three fourths of the variance.

Implications

By showing that genetic influences of job satisfaction overlap completely with personality, including common non-additive genetic influences, the results support an interactionist view of job satisfaction in that both situational and dispositional determinants of job satisfaction are relevant.

Originality

In contrast to previous studies, we used a more appropriate behavior genetic approach meaning that our approach allows to directly estimate parameters of specific and common (additive and non-additive) genetic and environmental influences. Building on this, interpretations of behavior genetic findings were explained in detail to avoid common misunderstandings.

     

Incremental View on Intelligence and High Intrinsic Motivation Increase Working Memory Training Compliance

Working memory (WM) training is demanding both regarding time and cognitive endurance. Many participants who could benefit from completing the training lose their motivation to do so. Hence, it is valuable to address compliance with the training protocol from a motivational angle. Studies have shown that subjective views on intelligence influence motivation, where individuals believing that intelligence can increase with training, that is, an incremental mind‐set, tend to try harder after setbacks and that high‐intrinsic motivation relates to higher academic performance. We used questionnaires to measure the extent to which mind‐set and intrinsic motivation influenced compliance to complete a WM training program of a minimum of 20 sessions of WM training. Only 53 out of 112 recruited participants, (13 years old (SD = .61)) completed the training. Our results showed that mind‐set and motivation significantly predicted compliance to training, with high motivation and incremental mind‐set being associated with more completed sessions.Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

How Information Availability Interacts with Visual Attention during Judgment and Decision Tasks

Decisions in front of a supermarket shelf probably involve a mix of visually available information and associated memories—and interactions between those two. Several cognitive processes, such as decision making, search, and various judgments, are therefore likely to co‐occur, and each process will influence visual attention. We conducted two eye‐tracking experiments capturing parts of these features by having participants make either judgments or decisions concerning products that had been previously encoded. Half the time, participants made their choices with full information about the available products and half the time with crucial task‐relevant information removed. By comparing participants' use of visual attention during decisions and search‐based and memory‐based judgments, we can better understand how visual attention is differently employed between tasks and how it depends on the visual environment. We found that participants' visual attention during decisions is sensitive to evaluations already made during encoding and strongly characterized by preferential looking to the options later to be chosen. When the task environment is rich enough, participants engage in advanced integrative visual behavior and improve their decision quality. In contrast, visual attention during judgments made on the same products reflects a search‐like behavior when all information is available and a more focused type of visual behavior when information is removed. Our findings contribute not only to the literature on how visual attention is used during decision making but also to methodological questions concerning how to measure and identify task‐specific features of visual attention in ecologically valid ways. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

‘Meet Me Halfway’ : Socio‐cultural Adaptation and Perceived Contact Willingness of Host Nationals as Predictors of Immigrants' Threat Perceptions

This three‐wave study investigated the interplay between perceived socio‐cultural adaptation and perceived willingness of the majority group to engage in contact, when predicting realistic and symbolic threats perceived by ethnic migrants from Russia to Finland. To sum up our key findings, the less immigrants perceived difficulties in socio‐cultural adaptation soon after migration, the more positive were their later perceptions of the majority group members' contact willingness. Majority's perceived contact willingness was associated with lower levels of perceived realistic threats, and perceived contact willingness and perceived socio‐cultural adaptation were both associated with lower levels of perceived symbolic threats. As regards practical implications of our findings for culturally diverse communities, equal efforts should be made to help newcomers' socio‐cultural adaptation and to support their positive intergroup interactions with majority group members. That way, the beneficial impact of both of these factors on immigrant integration could be maximized. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Parent–child warmth as a potential mediator of childhood exposure to intimate partner violence and positive adulthood functioning

Background and Objectives: Links between childhood exposure to intimate partner violence (IPV) and adult functioning are clear, but less research has examined the potential underpinnings of this association, especially the long-term effects of the parent–child relationship on adult well-being. We hypothesized that (i) childhood exposure to IPV would be negatively related to parent–child warmth and positively related to symptoms of psychopathology during adulthood and (ii) the relationship between IPV exposure and positive outcomes in adulthood (i.e., high life satisfaction and low psychopathology) would be mediated by parent–child warmth. Design: Participants included 703 Swedish adults (20–24). Methods: Participants responded to a self-report survey assessing violence exposure, parental warmth in childhood, and current mental health and well-being. Using multivariate regression and path analysis, models of the relationships between IPV exposure, parent–child warmth, symptoms of psychopathology during adulthood, and life satisfaction were examined. Mediation models were considered exploratory. Results: IPV exposure was related to lower levels of parent–child warmth, higher levels of psychopathology symptoms, and lower life satisfaction. The relationship between IPV exposure and positive outcomes in adulthood was mediated by parent–child warmth. Conclusions: Warm parent–child interactions may play a key role in long-term positive functioning for those exposed to IPV during childhood.     

Comparing perceptual and preferential decision making

Perceptual and preferential decision making have been studied largely in isolation. Perceptual decisions are considered to be at a non–deliberative cognitive level and have an outside criterion that defines the quality of decisions. Preferential decisions are considered to be at a higher cognitive level and the quality of decisions depend on the decision maker’s subjective goals. Besides these crucial differences, both types of decisions also have in common that uncertain information about the choice situation has to be processed before a decision can be made. The present work aims to acknowledge the commonalities of both types of decision making to lay bare the crucial differences. For this aim we examine perceptual and preferential decisions with a novel choice paradigm that uses the identical stimulus material for both types of decisions. This paradigm allows us to model the decisions and response times of both types of decisions with the same sequential sampling model, the drift diffusion model. The results illustrate that the different incentive structure in both types of tasks changes people’s behavior so that they process information more efficiently and respond more cautiously in the perceptual as compared to the preferential task. These findings set out a perspective for further integration of perceptual and preferential decision making in a single ramework.     

Back to School in a New Country? The Educational Participation of Adult Immigrants in a Life-Course Perspective

While the education of the children of immigrants is a much-researched theme, we know very little about the participation of adult immigrants in education. And yet, lifelong learning is a common demand in highly industrialized societies. This article provides a first empirical analysis of adult immigrants’ educational participation in Germany. It uses the novel German National Educational Panel Study with unique retrospective life-course data. By adopting a life-course perspective, both transnational continuities in the life-course as well as the ruptures caused by migration are captured. The analysis investigates in what ways participation in education is embedded in immigrants’ transnational life-course. It can be shown that immigrants’ participation in formal and nonformal full-time education is common. Hypotheses predict a central influence of (1) pre-immigration activities and (2) of legal immigration gateways. Sequence and cluster analysis detect two education-related incorporation patterns: one is marked by a dominance of educational activities and the other by phases in education alternate with employment and unemployment. The results of multivariate models underline the predictive power of pre-immigration activity, i.e., transnational continuity in immigrants’ life courses. But we can also observe substantial disruption like the transnational transition from employment to education which can be the enforced response to nonrecognition or devaluation of foreign educational credentials. Institutional opportunities and dispositions linked to legal immigration gateways are even more powerful predictors of educational participation. Altogether, the article illustrates how the interaction of structural opportunities and individual agency plays out in the formation of different incorporation trajectories of adult immigrants.