Psychological distance boosts value-behavior correspondence in ultimatum bargaining and integrative negotiation

The present research examined how construal level and social motivation interact in influencing individuals’ behavior in social decision making settings. Consistent with recent work on psychological distance and value-behavior correspondence (Eyal, Sagristano, Trope, Liberman, & Chaiken, 2009), it was predicted that under high construal level individuals’ behavior is based on the social motivation they endorsed, no matter whether pro-social or pro-self. Two experiments involving ultimatum game (Experiment 1) and face to face negotiation (Experiment 2) supported the “increased value-behavior correspondence” hypothesis by showing that pro-socials were more cooperative and pro-selves were more competitive under high rather than low construal level. Implications for research on social decision making and psychological distance are discussed.     

Behavioral and Socio-emotional Functioning in Children with Selective Mutism: A Comparison with Anxious and Typically Developing Children Across Multiple Informants

We examined differences among 158 children, 44 with selective mutism (SM; M = 8.2 years, SD = 3.4 years), 65 with mixed anxiety (MA; M = 8.9 years, SD = 3.2 years), and 49 community controls (M = 7.7 years, SD = 2.6 years) on primary caregiver, teacher, and child reports of behavioral and socio-emotional functioning. Children with SM were rated lower than controls on a range of social skills, but the SM and MA groups did not significantly differ on many of the social skills and anxiety measures. However, children with SM were rated higher than children with MA and controls on social anxiety. Findings suggest that SM may be conceptualized as an anxiety disorder, with primary deficits in social functioning and social anxiety. This interpretation supports a more specific classification of SM as an anxiety disorder for future diagnostic manuals than is currently described in the literature. The present findings also have implications for clinical practice, whereby social skills training merits inclusion in intervention for children with anxiety disorders as well as children with SM.     

Increasing the vocal responses of children with autism and developmental disabilities using manual sign mand training and prompt delay

The purpose of this study was to determine the effect of manual sign mand training combined with prompt delay and vocal prompting on the production of vocal responses in nonvocal children with developmental disabilities. A multiple baseline design across participants verified the effectiveness of this intervention. All participants showed increases in vocal responses following the implementation of the independent variables.     

Autonomy and interdependence: beliefs of Brazilian mothers from state capitals and small towns

This study aimed to investigate characteristics of Brazilian mothers' beliefs system, in the dimensions of autonomy and interdependence. A group of 600 women, half from state capitals and half from small towns, participated in the study. They were individually interviewed with Scales of Allocentrism, Beliefs about Parental Practices and Socialization Goals. Paired and Independent samples t tests and Multivariate GLM were performed. The results indicate that although mothers from both contexts value autonomy, mothers inhabiting small towns considered the relational dimension as the most important; whereas mothers inhabiting capitals valued equally both dimensions, either in their beliefs about practices or in the socialization goals for their children. Mothers from small towns have a higher mean score for allocentrism than mothers living in capitals. Thus, place of residence proved to be a relevant variable in the modulation of maternal beliefs. Educational level was not a significant factor in the variables considered and with this group of mothers. The study results are discussed in terms of their contribution to the understanding of the complex relationship between dimensions of autonomy and interdependence in mothers' beliefs system.     

Gaze motion clustering in scan-path estimation

Visual attention is considered nowadays a paramount ability both in Cognitive Sciences and in Cognitive Vision to bridge the gap between perception and higher level reasoning functions, such as scene interpretation and decision making. Bottom-up gaze shifting is the main mechanism used by humans when exploring a scene without a specific task. In this paper we investigated which criteria allow for the generation of plausible fixation clusters by analysing experimental data of human subjects. We suggest that fixations should be grouped in cliques whose saliency can be assessed through an innovation factor encompassing bottom-up cues, proximity, direction and memory components.     

Dream actors in the theatre of memory: Their role in the psychoanalytic process2

The author notes that neuropsychological research has discovered the existence of two long‐term memory systems, namely declarative or explicit memory, which is conscious and autobiographical, and non‐declarative or implicit memory, which is neither conscious nor verbalisable. It is suggested that pre‐verbal and pre‐symbolic experience in the child's primary relations is stored in implicit memory, where it constitutes an unconscious nucleus of the self which is not repressed and which influences the person's affective, emotional, cognitive and sexual life even as an adult. In the analytic relationship this unconscious part can emerge essentially through certain modes of communication (tone of voice, rhythm and prosody of the voice, and structure and tempo of speech), which could be called the ‘musical dimension’ of the transference, and through dream representations. Besides work on the transference, the critical component of the therapeutic action of psychoanalysis is stated to consist in work on dreams as pictographic and symbolic representations of implicit pre‐symbolic and pre‐verbal experiences. A case history is presented in which dream interpretation allowed some of a patient's early unconscious, non‐repressed experiences to be emotionally reconstructed and made thinkable even though they were not actually remembered.     

Male–male combats in a polymorphic lizard: residency and size,but not color,affect fighting rules and contest outcome

Theoretical models predict that the outcome of dyadic agonistic encounters between males is influenced by resource‐holding potential, resource value, and intrinsic aggressiveness of contestants. Moreover, in territorial disputes residents enjoy a further obvious competitive advantage from the residency itself, owing to the intimate familiarity with their territory. Costs of physical combats are, however, dramatically high in many instances. Thus, signals reliably reflecting fighting ability of the opponents could easily evolve in order to reduce these costs. For example, variation in color morph in polymorphic species has been associated with dominance in several case studies. In this study, we staged asymmetric resident‐intruder encounters in males of the common wall lizard Podarcis muralis, a species showing three discrete morphs (white, yellow, and red) to investigate the effects of asymmetries in color morph, residency, and size between contestants on the outcome of territorial contests. We collected aggression data by presenting each resident male with three intruders of different color morph, in three consecutive tests conducted in different days, and videotaping their interactions. The results showed that simple rules such as residency and body size differences could determine the outcome of agonistic interactions: residents were more aggressive than intruders, and larger males were competitively superior to smaller males. However, we did not find any effect of color on male aggression or fighting success, suggesting that color polymorphism in this species is not a signal of status or fighting ability in intermale conflicts. Aggr. Behav. 35:274–283, 2009. © 2009 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.