Mood trajectories following daily life events

Little is known about the magnitude and duration of mood responses to daily negative events as a function of gender, history of mood disorder, and current substance use. Using computerized ambulatory monitoring techniques, perceived negativity of minor daily events and state affect were prospectively examined every 3 h on average for a 7-day period. Event negativity was associated with depressed mood for 6–9 h following event occurrence, and was associated with happy mood for 3–6 h. Gender and substance use moderated the relationship between event negativity and mood states concurrently, and remained influential for approximately 3 h following the event. History of mood disorder did not moderate any within- or across-day relationships between event negativity and mood. No evidence was found for mood uplifts following daily events in either within- or across-day analyses. The findings are discussed relative to assessment timing in investigations of vulnerability-stress theories.     

Development and validation of the Eyewitness Metamemory Scale

Metamemory can be defined as the knowledge about one's memory capabilities and about strategies that can aid memory. In this paper, we describe the development and validation of the Eyewitness Metamemory Scale (EMS), tailored specifically for use in face memory and eyewitness identification settings. Participants (N = 800) completed the EMS and other measures on general metamemory. Results from exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis revealed good factorial validity, internal consistency, and content validity. The EMS items emerged into three distinct factors: memory contentment, memory discontentment, and memory strategies. The EMS is a brief and easily administrable questionnaire that might be used to assess self‐ratings of face recognition capacity and use of strategies to encode faces.     

Effects of aging and divided attention on episodic feeling-of-knowing accuracy

This research investigated the effect of aging on episodic feeling-of-knowing (FOK) using a divided attention (DA) paradigm in order to examine whether DA in younger adults mimics the effects of aging when decreasing either memory encoding or monitoring processes. To that end, four groups of participants were tested on the FOK task: young adults (control group), young adults under DA at encoding, young adults under DA when making FOK judgments, and older adults. Our results showed that DA at encoding in young adults mimicked the effect of aging on memory performance, and also on FOK magnitude and accuracy, supporting the memory-constraint hypothesis ( Hertzog et al., 2010). However, our results do not completely contradict the monitoring-deficit hypothesis, as DA during FOK judgments also affected FOK accuracy, but to a lesser extent than the aging effect or DA during encoding. We suggest that the age-related FOK deficit may be due to a lower level of deep encoding, leading to difficulty retrieving target-related contextual details enabling accurate prediction of subsequent recognition.     

Mutual mother–pup vocal recognition in the highly colonial Cape fur seal: evidence of discrimination of calls with a high acoustic similarity

Animal Cognition - The Cape fur seal (Arctocephalus pusillus pusillus) is one of the most colonial mammal species in the world. Females exclusively nurse their pups for 9 to 11 months,...     

Self-reported mental health problems and performance in mathematics and reading in children across Europe

ABSTRACT

The study examines the associations of specific self-reported internalizing and externalizing problems and performance in mathematics and reading in school-aged children across Europe. Data were drawn from 5,842 children between 6 and 13 years of age participating in the School Children Mental Health in Europe study and a large cross-sectional survey in France. Self-reported child mental health was assessed using the Dominic Interactive, academic performance was reported by teachers. Across Europe, controlling for key sociodemographic factors associated with achievement including maternal education, performance in mathematics was more often associated with the presence of externalizing and internalizing problems as compared to performance in reading. In addition, the findings point to significant sex differences in the associations of internalizing problems and academic achievement. Considering the impact of early academic difficulties in terms of later internalizing and externalizing problems and academic attainment, school-based interventions interrupting the cycle as early as possible are warranted.     

Effects of phonological and orthographic neighbourhood density interact in visual word recognition

The present study investigated the role of phonological and orthographic neighbourhood density in visual word recognition. Three mechanisms were identified that predict distinct facilitatory or inhibitory effects of each variable. The lexical competition account predicts overall inhibitory effects of neighbourhood density. The global activation (familiarity) account predicts overall facilitatory effects of neighbourhood density. Finally, the cross-code consistency account predicts an interaction, with inhibition of phonological neighbours in sparse orthographic regions and facilitation of phonological neighbours in dense orthographic regions. In Experiment 1 (lexical decision), a cross-over interaction was indeed found, supporting the prediction of the cross-code consistency account. In Experiment 2, this cross-over interaction was exaggerated by adding pseudohomo-phone stimuli (e.g., brane) among the nonword targets. Finally, in Experiment 3 (progressive demasking), we tried to shift the balance between inhibitory and facilitatory mechanisms by using a perceptual identification task. As predicted, the inhibitory effects of phonological neighbourhood were amplified, whereas the facilitatory effects disappeared. We conclude that the level of compatibility across co-activated orthographic and phonological representations is a major causal factor underlying this pattern of effects.     

Birth rank as a determinant of academic achievement:results from a European survey of primary school children

ABSTRACT

The present study investigates the relationship between birth rank and academic achievement of children in a cross-country study to examine whether firstborn children perform better in primary school than later-born children when controlling for individual, social and parental characteristics. Data were drawn from the School Children Mental Health in Europe (SCMHE) study, which included samples from Bulgaria, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Lithuania, Romania and Turkey (n = 7,518). Children’s academic performance in reading and mathematics was evaluated by teachers and parents reported sociodemographic variables including birth rank and parental attitudes. Controlling for individual, sociodemographic variables and parental attitudes in multinomial regressions, first- or second-born children displayed greater performance in mathematics and in reading as compared to children whose birth rank was third or above. Children from large families, especially when they are not first- or second-born appear to be at greater risk for academic difficulties and should benefit from targeted prevention efforts.