Adolescent Place Attachment, Social Capital, and Perceived Safety: A Comparison of 13 Countries

In adolescence, children become increasingly independent and autonomous, and spend more time in neighborhood settings away from home. During mid-to-late adolescence, youth often become more critical about the place they live. Their attachment to home and even community may decrease as they explore and develop new attachments to other specific places. The aim of this study is to understand how 15-year-old students from 13 countries perceive their local neighborhood area (place attachment, social capital and safety), and how these different community cognitions are interrelated. We hypothesize that their place attachment predicts safety, and that the relationship is mediated in part by social capital. Result show that, despite cross-cultural differences in neighborhood perceptions, the proposed theoretical model fits robustly across all 13 countries.     

The neural reality of syntactic transformations: evidence from functional magnetic resonance imaging

The functional anatomy of syntactic transformations, a major computational operation invoked in sentence processing, was identified through a functional magnetic resonance imaging investigation. A grammaticality judgment task was used, presented through a novel hidden-blocks design. Subjects listened to transformational and nontransformational sentences in which a host of other complexity generators (number of words, prepositions, embeddings, etc.) were kept constant. A series of analyses revealed that the neural processing of transformations is localizable, evoking a highly lateralized and localized activation in the left inferior frontal gyrus (Broca's region) and bilateral activation in the posterior superior temporal sulcus. The pattern of activation associated with transformational analysis was distinct from the one observed in neighboring regions, and anatomically separable from the effects of verb complexity, which yielded significant activation in the left posterior superior temporal sulcus. Taken together with neuropsychological evidence, these results uncover the neural reality of syntactic transformations.     

Can cognitive psychological research on reasoning enhance the discussion around moral judgments?

In this article we will demonstrate how cognitive psychological research on reasoning and decision making could enhance discussions and theories of moral judgments. In the first part, we will present recent dual-process models of moral judgments and describe selected studies which support these approaches. However, we will also present data that contradict the model predictions, suggesting that approaches to moral judgment might be more complex. In the second part, we will show how cognitive psychological research on reasoning might be helpful in understanding moral judgments. Specifically, we will highlight approaches addressing the interaction between intuition and reflection. Our data suggest that a sequential model of engaging in deliberation might have to be revised. Therefore, we will present an approach based on Signal Detection Theory and on intuitive conflict detection. We predict that individuals arrive at the moral decisions by comparing potential action outcomes (e.g., harm caused and utilitarian gain) simultaneously. The response criterion can be influenced by intuitive processes, such as heuristic moral value processing, or considerations of harm caused.     

Attitudes Toward Autism Spectrum Disorders Among Students of Allied Health Professions

The prevalence of autism has increased dramatically. The objectives of this study were to explore attitudes toward prenatal diagnosis to detect autism prenatally and avoid having an affected child and to understand social acceptability of these disorders among students of allied health professions. In this study, college students of nursing and health systems management answered a structured self-report questionnaire (n?=?305). The first part addressed the respondent’s personal data. The second part targeted the respondent’s attitudes toward prenatal diagnosis of non-life-threatening disorders, including autism spectrum disorders. We found that almost two thirds of the students responded that they would not proceed with a pregnancy if the child were diagnosed with autism, and more than half thought that they would not continue with a pregnancy if the fetus were diagnosed with Asperger’s. Age, level of religiosity, and years of education were influential. This study is limited in scope; however, the positive attitude of the students toward prenatal diagnosis to avoid having an affected child might also reflect a negative view of autism spectrum disorders in future health care professionals. Further research of attitudes and the social acceptability of autism spectrum disorders, particularly among health care professionals, is required.     

An examination of semantic radical combinability effects with lateralized cues in Chinese character recognition

Auclair and Siéroff examined lateralized cuing effects in the identification of centrally presented letter strings and reported no cuing effects for short word stimuli. They argued for a redistribution of attention over the entire word for short familiar words. We explored cuing effects with Chinese phonetic compounds, which can be considered extreme examples of short words, in a character-level semantic judgment task. When the semantic radical position was placed on the left of the characters, strong radical combinability and semantic transparency effects were observed. There was also a significant interaction between cue position (left vs. right) and radical combinability: A left cue facilitated semantic judgment of characters with small radical combinability more than did a right cue. This behavior reflects the information profile of Chinese phonetic compounds. Semantic radicals with small combinability are more informative than those with large combinability in determining the meaning of the whole character; they therefore benefit more from a left than a right cue. A mechanism redistributing attention over the whole of the character was not in evidence at the level of semantic processing.     

Random dynamics and the research programme of classical mechanics

The modern mathematical theory of dynamical systems proposes a new model of mechanical motion. In this model the deterministic unstable systems can behave in a statistical manner. Both kinds of motion are inseparably connected, they depend on the point of view and researcher's approach to the system. This mathematical fact solves in a new way the old problem of statistical laws in the world which is essentially deterministic. The classical opposition: deterministic‐statistical, disappears in random dynamics. The main thesis of the paper is that the new theory of motion is a revolution in the research programme of classical mechanics. It is the revolution brought about by the development of mathematics.     

Is attention allocation sensitive to word informativeness?

Summary When two words are presented simultaneously, where one of them is predictable from the context and the other one is not, it is conceivable that attention is captured by the expected word (cf. Flowers, Polansky, & Kerl, 1981), or that attention is directed to where it is presumably more needed, namely to the unexpected word. To explore these possibilities we used a paradigm in which the subjects' primary task was to report either one or both of two simultaneously presented words, and attention was measured by performance on a secondary task, that is, detecting small gaps in a letter stroke. In a preliminary test, this measure of attention was found to be sensitive to the manipulation of attention by means of an arrow pointer. Word predictability was manipulated by presenting an incomplete sentence immediately before the two words. The sentence was either semantically congruent with one of the words or with neither of them. The mode of word report (partial vs. full) was manipulated between subjects. No difference was found in either mode between the gap detection scores in the expected and the unexpected words. Neither of those scores differed from the score for trials in which both words were unexpected. The results suggest that at the time of selection, or attention allocation, cues about word identity are not yet available, or are not utilized.Most of the work reported here was done as an M.A. thesis of the second author under the supervision of the first and third authors. The research was supported in part by a grant from the United States-Israel Binational Science Foundation (BSF), Jerusalem, Israel     

On the Positive Side of Avoidance Motivation: An Increase in Avoidance Motivation Reduces Procrastination among Students

People who procrastinate often pay a heavy price in terms of illness, stress, and poor performance. Because procrastination has harmful consequences, we predicted that avoidance motivation, a self‐regulation system that protects people from harm, would also protect them against procrastination. We hypothesised that avoidance motivation reduces procrastination, despite the known destructive effects avoidance motivation has on thriving. In Study 1, students high in chronic‐avoidance motivation had the lowest dropout rates from a bonus‐granting longitudinal study. In Study 2, avoidance motivation was negatively related to delay in submitting a term paper, when controlling for chronic procrastination, self‐efficacy, impulsiveness, and age. In Study 3, an experimental manipulation of avoidance motivation reduced procrastination three times, but only once significantly. In Study 4, manipulations of both avoidance motivation and approach motivation, relative to a control motivation, using a within‐subjects design, indicated that the avoidance manipulation reduced procrastination in submitting subsequent reading reports, whereas the approach manipulation did not. We subjected all our results to a meta‐analysis that indicated that avoidance motivation had a significant preventive effect on procrastination. We conclude that avoidance motivation can reduce procrastination, and suggest that our avoidance‐manipulation techniques could be applied across a variety of organisational and educational settings.     

Skeletal structure of printed words: evidence from the stroop task

Do readers encode the sequencing of consonant (C) and vowel (V) phonemes (skeletal structure) in printed words? The authors used the Stroop task to examine readers' sensitivity to skeletal structure. In Experiment 1, CVC nonwords (e.g., pof) facilitated the naming of colors with congruent frames (e.g., red, a CVC word) but not with incongruent ones (e.g., green). In Experiment 2, the color black (a CCVC frame) was named faster with a congruent CCVC frame (e.g., grof) compared to either CCVCC (e.g., groft) or CVC (e.g., gof) incongruent controls. Finally, in Experiment 3, the color pink (a CVCC frame) was named faster with a CVCC frame (e.g., goft) compared to either CCVCC or CVC incongruent controls. In most cases, congruent frames shared no segments with the color name. These findings demonstrate that readers automatically assemble the skeletal structure of printed words.