Maternal expressed emotion predicts children's antisocial behavior problems: using monozygotic-twin differences to identify environmental effects on behavioral development

If maternal expressed emotion is an environmental risk factor for children's antisocial behavior problems, it should account for behavioral differences between siblings growing up in the same family even after genetic influences on children's behavior problems are taken into account. This hypothesis was tested in the Environmental Risk Longitudinal Twin Study with a nationally representative 1994-1995 birth cohort of twins. The authors interviewed the mothers of 565 five-year-old monozygotic (MZ) twin pairs and established which twin in each family received more negative emotional expression and which twin received more warmth. Within MZ pairs, the twin receiving more maternal negativity and less warmth had more antisocial behavior problems. Qualitative interviews were used to generate hypotheses about why mothers treat their children differently. The results suggest that maternal emotional attitudes toward children may play a causal role in the development of antisocial behavior and illustrate how genetically informative research can inform tests of socialization hypotheses.     

Being ourselves and knowing ourselves: an adverbial account of mental representations

This paper takes an evolutionary approach to what we are, namely autopoietic systems with a first person perspective on our surroundings and ourselves. This in contrast with Thomas Metzinger's views in his Being No One. Though perception does involve internal processing and representations, it is argued that perception is direct. We track real features of the world, but fallibly, in a certain way. Moreover, it is claimed that mental representations are quite different from internal neural representations. They are best construed in an adverbial way. What we perceive, the object of perception, is the real world. Internal neural representations are the means by which we perceive the world. And mental representations are the way in which we experience the world, the adverbial content of perception. Finally, what goes for the world goes for ourselves as well: in self-consciousness we track real features of ourselves, but fallibly, in a certain way.     

Is severe obesity a form of addiction? Rationale, clinical approach, and controlled clinical trial.

For many, obesity is just a problem of energy input and expenditure: more energy input than expenditure. However, the clinical practice and epidemiological data clearly show that weight control is more complex than expected by this simple equation. This is particularly true in morbid obesity, a form of severe obesity in which a person's Body Mass Index (BMI, kg/m(2)) is over 40. If we compare the definitions and diagnostic criteria for "dependence" and "addiction" with the situation of many severe obese subjects, it is apparent that they match very well. Further, different neurological studies confirm this similarity: both addiction and obesity patients have a deficiency of dopamine receptors. Nevertheless, when we compare many of the actual obesity treatments with the ones used in the area of addictions it is possible to find relevant differences: obesity treatments neither consider different levels of type and intensity of care, nor a multidimensional approach. To overcome these limitations, in this paper we propose a bio-psychosocial approach in which the genetic influence (lack of dopamine receptors) is matched by psychosocial issues (pressure for thinness and diet as main body image dissatisfaction treatment). Further, the paper outlines how this approach may influence the treatment options, by focusing both on the lessons coming from actual addiction treatment and the opportunities offered by virtual reality. Finally, the paper presents and discusses the outcome of a controlled trial, based on the proposed approach, including a 6-month follow-up (211 morbid obese females with a BMI of >40 and a documented history of failures.     

Dissociating the influence of familiarity and meaningfulness from word frequency in naming and lexical decision performance

Performance in two experiments was compared on a list of words of high and low frequency in which familiarity/meaningfulness (FM) was balanced and on a list of high- and low-frequency words in which FM was confounded with frequency (i.e., high frequency--high familiarity vs. low frequency--low familiarity). Both repetition and task (lexical decision and naming) were investigated. In the lexical decision task of Experiment 1, both frequency and repetition effects were larger in the list with FM confounded than in the list with FM matched. In the naming task, frequency and repetition effects and their interaction were significant, but there was no influence of FM list context. In Experiment 2, in which the repetitions occurred across blocks, as opposed to randomly intermixed within a list, similar results were found; however, there was no interaction between list and repetition. The results suggest that an evaluation of items in terms of their meaning and familiarity explains a large part of the variance, only in lexical decision. These dimensions may be cued both by subjective feelings of familiarity and the extent to which semantic information is available and by episodic traces due to recent encounters with the item.     

Jealousy and the threatened self: getting to the heart of the green-eyed monster

Several theories specifying the causes of jealousy have been put forth in the past few decades. Firm support for any proposed theory, however, has been limited by the difficulties inherent in inducing jealousy and examining any proposed mediating mechanisms in real time. In support of a theory of jealousy centering on threats to the self-system, 2 experiments are presented that address these past limitations and argue for a model based on context-induced variability in self-evaluation. Experiment 1 presents a method for evoking jealousy through the use of highly orchestrated social encounters and demonstrates that threatened self-esteem functions as a principal mediator of jealousy. In addition to replicating these findings, Experiment 2 provides direct evidence for jealousy as a cause of aggression. The ability of the proposed theory of jealousy to integrate other extant findings in the literature is also discussed.     

Contextual cueing in naturalistic scenes: Global and local contexts

In contextual cueing, the position of a target within a group of distractors is learned over repeated exposure to a display with reference to a few nearby items rather than to the global pattern created by the elements. The authors contrasted the role of global and local contexts for contextual cueing in naturalistic scenes. Experiment 1 showed that learned target positions transfer when local information is altered but not when global information is changed. Experiment 2 showed that scene-target covariation is learned more slowly when local, but not global, information is repeated across trials than when global but not local information is repeated. Thus, in naturalistic scenes, observers are biased to associate target locations with global contexts.     

Delay of gratification: impulsive choices and problem behaviors in early and late adolescence

High school students were offered a monetary incentive for participating in research. They were given a choice between a smaller fee immediately or a larger fee one week later. Compared to students who delayed gratification, those who chose the immediate fee showed more self-regulatory deficits. They showed greater involvement with cigarettes, alcohol, and marijuana, had a poorer self-concept and underperformed academically. A replication study with middle-school students and different reward parameters yielded equivalent results. Younger adolescents who chose the immediate monetary incentive showed a similar pattern of problem behaviors as the high school students. The findings indicate that this simple choice-delay procedure yields an unobtrusive behavioral measure of self-regulation and offers a developmentally appropriate extension of the delay-of-gratification paradigm for use with older children and adolescents.     

Courtship communication and perception

Although ethologists have detailed courtship rituals for many species, courting behavior of humans has not received extensive study from an ethological standpoint. Yet there are clearly facial expressions and gestures that are commonly labeled "flirting behaviors." These nonverbal signals have been documented recently by several investigators in field studies, but the receptivity of nonverbal courtship signals is still in question. The current research project attempted to assess the perceptual skill of naive male and female observers who were presented videotaped samples of females' nonverbal courtship and rejection behaviors and asked to rate their intensity. The results showed that overall, men rated invitational behaviors more positively than women. In contrast, signals of rejection were seen by men as sending a less potent message than that perceived by women. Evolutionary theory may offer a framework for understanding these results.     

Psychoanalysis and the Catholic Church in Italy: the role of Father Agostino Gemelli, 1925-1953

Agostino Gemelli, a Catholic priest, psychiatrist, administrator, and educator, was an important figure in the early history of psychoanalysis in Italy. He was one of the few establishment figures to grapple with Freud's ideas in Italy during the first half of the twentieth century, a period during which Italy, compared to the rest of Europe and to the United States, was relatively impermeable to psychoanalysis. One of the factors that contributed to this was the opposition of the powerful Catholic Church, which identified in psychoanalysis a challenge to its authority. The author argues that Father Gemelli's shifting positions about psychoanalysis between 1925 and 1953 reflected the exigencies of his historical circumstances. Gemelli was able to identify in psychoanalysis an integrated view of the human condition in stark opposition to the brutal reductionism of psychiatry in Italy at that time, but also encountered in it elements intolerable to the Church. Examining specifically what it is that Gemelli could accept of psychoanalysis, and what needed to be rejected, between 1925 and 1953, illustrates the particular challenge posed by psychoanalysis to Catholicism in Italy.