Self-criticism in adulthood and recalled childhood experience.

We investigated in a sample of 75 medical students the hypothesis that higher levels of self-criticism, a major vulnerability factor for depression, are related to retrospective reports of less satisfactory parenting, even when the potentially confounding factors of mood state and social desirability response set are controlled. At each of 2 measurement times, there were significant cross-sectional correlations between parental ratings and both depression and self-criticism, but the associations with self-criticism were no longer significant when depression was controlled. However, even after controlling for the effects of mood state and social desirability, persons with high levels of self-criticism at both measurement points (high trait self-criticism subjects) reported significantly worse relationships with their mothers than did the remaining subjects. They were also more likely to report below average relationships with both parents jointly.     

Forms of memory failure in schizophrenia.

Effortful and automatic memory task performances were examined in 36 schizophrenic patients and 18 normal control Ss. Tasks included free recall, recognition, and frequency estimation. Patients demonstrated impairment in recall, in recognition, in semantic encoding, and in frequency estimation. Deficits were observed across tasks despite differences in attentional demands. The results suggest a basic compromise of memory function, which is consistent with recent neuroimaging evidence of structural or physiological abnormalities in frontal and temporal lobe structures in schizophrenia.     

Predictors and consequences of childhood depressive symptoms: a 5-year longitudinal study.

A 5-year longitudinal study investigated the interrelationships among children's experiences of depressive symptoms, negative life events, explanatory style, and helplessness behaviors in social and achievement situations. The results revealed that early in childhood, negative events, but not explanatory style, predicted depressive symptoms; later in childhood, a pessimistic explanatory style emerged as a significant predictor of depressive symptoms, alone and in conjunction with negative events. When children suffered periods of depression, their explanatory styles not only deteriorated but remained pessimistic even after their depression subsided, presumably putting them at risk for future episodes of depression. Some children seem repeatedly prone to depressive symptoms over periods of at least 2 years. Depressed children consistently showed helpless behaviors in social and achievement settings.     

Explaining Choices in Procedural and Distributive Justice Across Cultures

A previous study (Leung, Bond, & Schwartz, 1990) established that an expectancy-valence model could be used effectively to explain behaviours in three social domains both within and across cultures. In this study the model was applied to the domains of resource allocation and conflict resolution in order to pinpoint which expectancies and which valences were carrying the explanatory weight of the respondents' behavioural strategies. For both Israeli and Hong Kong students the expectancies and, less strongly, the valences tapping harmony and performance quality were important for resource allocation; those tapping animosity reduction and process control, for conflict resolution. Suggestions were offered for broadening the net of explanatory constructs for future work aimed at specifying subjective factors associated with justice-related behaviours.     

Covariation detection in treated and untreated spider phobics.

Twenty treated and 18 untreated spider phobics were exposed to a series of 72 slides. Three different categories of slides were used: phobia-relevant slides (spiders), alternative fear-relevant slides (weapons), and neutral slides (flowers). Slides were randomly paired with either a shock, a tone, or nothing at all. Despite the absence of a systematic correlation between slides and outcomes, untreated phobics strongly overestimated the covariation between spider slides and shock. Treated phobics did not show a covariation bias, suggesting that such bias can be modulated by behavioral treatment. In addition, untreated subjects were more confident about their contingency estimates than were treated subjects. The present results fit with earlier studies.     

Some consequences of stimulus variability on speech processing by 2-month-old infants.

The present study explores how stimulus variability in speech production influences the 2-month-old infant's perception and memory for speech sounds. Experiment 1 focuses on the consequences of talker variability for the infant's ability to detect differences between speech sounds. When tested with high-amplitude sucking (HAS) procedure, infants who listened to versions of a syllable, such as [symbol: see text], produced by 6 male and 6 female talkers, detected a change to another syllable, such as [symbol: see text], uttered by the same group of talkers. In fact, infants exposed to multiple talkers performed as well as other infants who heard utterances produced by only a single talker. Moreover, other results showed that infants discriminate the voices of the individual talkers, although discriminating one mixed group of talkers (3 males and 3 females) from another is too difficult for them. Experiment 2 explored the consequences of talker variability on infants' memory for speech sounds. The HAS procedure was modified by introducing a 2-min delay period between the familiarization and test phases of the experiment. Talker variability impeded infants' encoding of speech sounds. Infants who heard versions of the same syllable produced by 12 different talkers did not detect a change to a new syllable produced by the same talkers after the delay period. However, infants who heard the same syllable produced by a single talker were able to detect the phonetic change after the delay. Finally, although infants who heard productions from a single talker retained information about the phonetic structure of the syllable during the delay, they apparently did not retain information about the identity of the talker. Experiment 3 reduced the range of variability across talkers and investigated whether variability interferes with retention of all speech information. Although reducing the range of variability did not lead to retention of phonetic details, infants did recognize a change in the gender of the talkers' voices (from male to female or vice versa) after a 2-min delay. Two additional experiments explored the consequences of limiting the variability to a single talker. In Experiment 4, with an immediate testing procedure, infants exposed to 12 different tokens of one syllable produced by the same talker discriminated these from 12 tokens of another syllable.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)     

The effect of object alignment on the representation of depth in young children's drawings.

Light and Humphreys (1981, Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 31, 521-530) provided evidence that young children's drawings, despite infrequently showing view-specific occlusion, do systematically reflect spatial relations within an array. The present research tested the hypothesis that young children's preferences for canonical "best views" interact with array-faithful tendencies to increase early uses of occlusion. Forty-three children between 4 and 7 years of age drew arrays like Light and Humphreys' end-to-end alignments, with end-on views of objects in depth, and arrays aligned side-to-side, with canonical side-views of objects in depth. Significantly fewer single-object, view-specific occlusions were produced for end-to-end than for side-to-side alignments. Nevertheless, the former reveal that more children are able to use the vertical dimension to depict multiple objects in depth. Other comparisons suggest an interaction in multiple-object depictions of canonicality with spatial dimension and graphic complexity.     

Difference and ratio information in children's and adults' memory representations.

A study was made of the choice reaction times of 8-, 10-, 12-year-olds and adults in order to investigate whether length information stored in memory was coded to preserve numerical relations between stimuli. Subjects learned unique line length-color associations and were later presented with pairs of colors and were instructed to choose the color that had been associated with the longer line. For all age groups, choice reaction times were related to both differences and ratios. These results were interpreted as supporting the analog theory of representation.     

Effect of a means-end contingency on young children's food preferences.

This study showed that a means-end relationship between two snacks exerts a negative influence on preference for the means snack in the contingency. Two snacks ranked of approximately equal medium appeal were individually chosen from an array by each of 86 children (ages 4 years, 4 months to 7 years, 2 months). Children were then assigned to a means-end condition (where one snack was eaten as a means of gaining the other), a temporal order control group (where one snack was presented and eaten before the other), or a mere exposure control group (where the children chose the order in which they ate the two snacks). Post-treatment rankings of the snacks showed that children in the means-end group came to devalue the means snack relative to the reward snack, despite the demonstrably equal prior appeal of the two snacks. Children in the temporal order and mere exposure control groups did not come to prefer the two snacks preferentially. Implications of the finding that adults can affect children's preferences by relatively minor variations in the manner of presentation are discussed.     

Hypermnesia using auditory input.

The author investigated whether hypermnesia would occur with auditory input. In addition, the author examined the effects of subjects' knowledge that they would later be asked to recall the stimuli. Two groups of 26 subjects each were given three successive recall trials after they listened to an audiotape of 59 high-imagery nouns. The subjects in the uninformed group were not told that they would later be asked to remember the words; those in the informed group were. Hypermnesia was evident, but only in the uninformed group.