Source Monitoring and Executive Function in 2.5- to 3-Year-Olds

Hala, Brown, McKay, and San Juan (2013) found that children as young as 2.5 years of age demonstrated high levels of accuracy when asked to recall whether they or the experimenter had carried out a particular action. In the research reported here, we examined the relation of early-emerging source monitoring to executive function abilities. Participants were children aged 2.5- to 3-years old. For the source-monitoring procedure, we used the Hala et al. (2013) task in which children and the experimenter took turns placing a total of 20 items on a model farm (encoding phase). For the source memory test, children were asked who had placed each item (retrieval phase). Executive function measures included assessments of working memory, delay-inhibitory control, and conflict-inhibitory control. The main finding was that inhibitory control measures were significantly related to performance on the source-monitoring task. This relation held for the conflict-inhibitory control measures even when controlling for age and vocabulary. The findings of this research suggest that even at the early age of 2.5 years, development of executive control is linked to the emergence of source-monitoring ability.     

Bread and Roses: Empathy and Recognition

Empathy and Recognition represent two closely intertwined, crucial elements of human relatedness, and thus of the analytic relationship. Each ushers in a different quality of relatedness in the dyad: Empathy is a response to a basic human need, crucial to psychic safety and coherence, and may be imagined ahead of time as the need for someone to understand one’s experience, to get one’s pain. By contrast, recognition as a longing may be only partially formulated before it is emergent, because it is in the moments when it is realized that the desire for its inherent mutuality may be most keenly felt. It is in such moments, often arising through collision and unpacking between two distinct and suddenly more fully knowable subjectivities, that the experience of desire may be both held and renewed. Recent relational writing has made clear how deeply intersubjective empathy may be, in its fullest realization; however, with recognition, the desire for the other as other, who may now be known as such, arises anew out of the experience of being met in intersubjective encounter. Like bread and roses, both are vital as felt experience, and in potentiating transformation.     

Prerequisites to Human Activity on Mars: Scientific and Ethical Aspects

Humans want to go to Mars now. This entails many difficult but solvable challenges. However, human activity on Mars depends on the answers to three fundamental questions: (1) Is there life on Mars, does that life represent at second genesis of life? (2) Can Earth life, and humans in particular, adapt to the Martian gravity of 0.38?g, and will human generations on Mars speciate from humans on Earth? (3) Is there enough carbon, nitrogen, and water on Mars to create a global habitable environment? These answers must be determined on Mars and will decide the scope of human activities.     

Subtyping obsessive-compulsive disorder: A taxometric analysis

Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is a heterogeneous condition comprising multiple symptoms. Researchers have identified OCD subtypes using a range of symptom-based research methods, including factor and cluster analyses and examination of differential treatment response. These methods can be challenged on the grounds that they fail to demonstrate the existence of discrete taxonomic entities. Furthermore, no study has examined subtyping on the basis of cognitive characteristics. In the present study, the categorical vs. dimensional status of 6 possible subtypes of OCD was examined using taxometric methods. Three potential cognitive subtypes (based on high levels of responsibility/threat estimation, perfectionism/certainty, and importance/control of thoughts) and 3 potential symptomatic subtypes (based on elevated levels of contamination obsessions and cleaning compulsions, checking, and obsessionality) were examined using the MAXEIG and MAMBAC procedures in a sample of 404 diagnosed cases of OCD. Findings favored dimensional models of the potential responsibility, perfectionism, checking, and contamination subtypes, but offered qualified support for taxonic models of the importance/control of thoughts and obsessional subtypes. Implications for the subclassification of OCD are discussed.     

Correlation between Changes in Stress-Induced Corticosterone Secretion and GR mRNA Levels

The current study was conducted to determine the potential relationship between stress-induced corticosterone secretion and corticosteroid receptor mRNA levels after 5 days of intermittent stress. In particular, we were interested in the rate at which animals terminate a stress response, and how this termination may be altered by repeated stress. Adult male Sprague-Dawley rats were subjected to either 5 days of restraint stress or 5 days of an unpredictable stress paradigm. Restraint-stress induced corticosterone secretion was measured on Days 1 and 5 in both groups, and animals were killed on Day 6. Glucocorticoid receptor (GR), and mineralocorticoid (MR) mRNA levels were determined using in-situ hybridization techniques. Five days of restraint stress caused an habituation of the plasma corticosterone response to stress measured 60 and 90 min post-stress initiation; this pattern of corticosterone secretion was not observed in the animals subjected to unpredictable stress. Five days of either stress paradigm did not alter MR mRNA levels measured within the hippocampus or GR mRNA levels within the hippocampus or the medial parvocellular division of the paraventricular nucleus of the hypothalamus (mpPVN). However, an individual's GR mRNA levels measured within the CA1/2 region of the hippocampus and the mpPVN were significantly correlated with the degree of habituation of the corticosterone response to stress measured on Day 5. This suggests that an increase in the rate of termination of the stress response and levels of GR within the hippocampus and mpPVN may be functionally related.     

Predictors of physical aggression in children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder

The present investigation examined factors that predict physical aggression in children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Stepwise, multiple regression-analyses were used to examine predictors of children's physical aggression as rated by parents at a 1-year follow-up point and by teachers at both 1- and 2-year follow-up points. Early parent and teacher ratings of verbal aggression (ie, cursing, teasing, and threatening) accounted for the greatest proportion of the variance in physical aggression ratings obtained at follow-up. None of the other predictor variables, including early ratings of physical aggression and ADHD behaviors, contributed significant additional variance beyond that accounted for by early verbal aggression ratings. Temporal and cross-informant analyses revealed that the relationship between verbal aggression and later physical aggression was situation-specific for teacher ratings but not parent ratings. Although physical aggression may emerge early in development, these data suggest that verbal aggression represents a stable, temperamental characteristic that may be of greater value than early physical aggression for predicting later physically aggressive acts.