Intelligence, Callous-Unemotional Traits, and Antisocial Behavior

Research has consistently shown that children with severe conduct problems often exhibit intellectual deficits, especially in their verbal abilities. We investigated whether or not this finding only applies to certain subgroups of children with severe conduct problems. In a sample of 117 clinic-referred children between the ages of 6 and 13, we assessed for Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD) and Conduct Disorder (CD) symptoms using a structured diagnostic interview with each child's parent and teacher, callous and unemotional traits using parent and teacher ratings, and intellectual functioning using a standard individually administered intelligence test. Children with an ODD or CD diagnosis who did not show callous and unemotional traits showed a deficit on subtests measuring verbal reasoning ability relative to a clinic control group. Children with an ODD or CD diagnosis who also showed callous and unemotional traits did not show a verbal deficit and, in fact, showed a trend toward having weaker nonverbal abilities. These results highlight the importance of recognizing distinct subgroups of children with severe conduct problems when studying potential intellectual deficits in these children.     

Exploring Parent-Adolescent Communication About Gender: Results from Adolescent and Emerging Adult Samples

Although parents are assumed to be children's primary models of socialization when it comes to gender, little is known about direct communication of gendered values in the family. Accordingly, this study assessed the amount and content of recalled parental gender socialization messages using data from 291 U.S. college undergraduates attending a large Midwestern university and 259 U.S. adolescents enrolled in public high schools in the Midwest. The study examined the amount and content of parental communications of five gendered discourses and then tested for connections to current gender beliefs. Findings indicate that gender socialization may be quite similar for sons and daughters, with some evidence of gender typing in patterns of communication. No significant age differences emerged in the patterns of socialization, although high school students reported receiving greater amounts of communication than college students on two of the five discourses. In general, receiving messages promoting traditional gender roles was associated with more traditional gender beliefs (and vice versa), although interpretation of some messages appeared to vary by gender.     

Influences on employee perceptions of organizational work–life support: Signals and resources

This study examined predictors of employee perceptions of organizational work–life support. Using organizational support theory and conservation of resources theory, we reasoned that workplace demands and resources shape employees' perceptions of work–life support through two mechanisms: signaling that the organization cares about their work–life balance and helping them develop and conserve resources needed to meet work and nonwork responsibilities. Consistent with our hypotheses, we found that higher demands (work hours and work overload) were associated with reduced perceptions that the organization was supportive of work–life integration. Resources (job security, fit between employees' needs and the flexible work options available to them, supervisor support and work group support) were positively associated with perceptions of organizational work–life support. The results of this study urge further scholarly attention to work-based demands and resources as predictors of perceived organizational work–life support and yield implications for managerial practice.     

A preliminary study of medial temporal lobe function in youths with a history of caregiver deprivation and emotional neglect

Previous research findings have linked caregiver deprivation and emotional neglect with sensitivity to threatening cues. The present preliminary study investigated whether dysfunctions of the medial temporal lobe could underlie these associations. Using fMRI, we measured medial temporal lobe responses to emotional faces (angry, fearful, happy, neutral) among 30 youths. Eleven of the youths had a history of caregiver deprivation and emotional neglect. Attention states (i.e., attention to anger, fear, or physical attributes, or passive viewing) were systematically manipulated. Relative to comparison youths, youths with a history of caregiver deprivation and emotional neglect showed significantly greater left amygdala and left anterior hippocampus activation during the processing of threatening information. To our knowledge, these findings are the first to demonstrate altered medial temporal lobe function during the processing of threat cues in youths with a history of caregiver deprivation and emotional neglect.     

Dynamics of the attentional control of word retrieval: analyses of response time distributions

Since W. Wundt (1904) and H. J. Watt (1906), researchers have found no agreement on how goals direct word retrieval. A prevailing associative account (E. K. Miller & J. D. Cohen, 2001) holds that goals bias association strength, which determines retrieval latency and whether irrelevant words interfere. A symbolic account (A. Roelofs, 2003) holds that goals enable retrieval rules and predicts no strict dependence of interference on latency. Here, 3 chronometric experiments in which the role of relative retrieval latency was investigated through distributional analyses, following Watt, are reported. Participants verbally categorized picture-word pairs that were semantically related or unrelated, or they categorized single pictures or words. The pairs yielded semantic latency effects in both word and picture categorizing, although single words were categorized slower than single pictures. Semantic effects occurred in word categorizing even when postexposure of the pictures compensated for the difference in categorizing latency. Vincentile and ex-Gaussian analyses revealed that the semantic effects occurred throughout the latency distributions, excluding goal neglect as the cause of the effects. The results were interpreted as most consistent with the symbolic account, which was corroborated by computer simulations.     

The effect of the uniqueness point in spoken-word recognition

Summary The study examines the possibility of observing on-line recognition of spoken words through manipulations of the location of the uniqueness point (UP) in a gender-classification task. The subjects were presented with spoken French nouns and had to indicate by a key-press response whether each was feminine or masculine. RTs measured from word onset were significantly correlated with UP location, a finding that supports the notion of on-line processing. The effect of UP location is, however, smaller than that predicted by the original cohort theory (that recognition occurs exactly at the UP). On the other hand, it is stronger when words with respectively early and late UPs are presented in homogeneous blocks rather than in mixed order. It is proposed that the results can be accounted for by the notion of a sub-optimal lexical strategy in which some monitoring of the phonetic data continues past the UP.     

A Case for Nondecomposition in Conceptually Driven Word Retrieval

Theories of lexical access in language use of a productive nature such as speaking, writing, and verbal thinking differ in whether they assume that words are retrieved from memory in a conceptually decomposed or nondecomposed manner. Decomposition has been the received view for centuries, while nondecomposition is mostly not taken very seriously—undeservedly so, as 1 demonstrate in this paper. I review several theoretical objections that have traditionally been raised against nondecomposition and indicate how a nondecompositional approach can cope with them. Furthermore, several theoretical arguments in favor of nondecomposition are given. The issues concern the componential analysis of word meanings, the conceptual primitives, word definitions, the acquisition of word meaning, the conceptual dissection of messages, context dependence of word meaning, decomposition for syntactic encoding, word-to-phrase synonymy, hyperonymy, hyponymy, and the locus of decomposition. In addition, the major computational models of conceptually driven word retrieval proposed during the last few decades are evaluated both informally and by computer simulation. The decompositional models are shown to fail, whereas a specific nondecompositional model is shown to account for the difficulties. It is concluded that there are no evidential grounds for rejecting nondecomposition. On the contrary, for a theory of word retrieval there are, instead, good reasons to prefer nondecomposition to decomposition. Nondecomposition should be given more serious consideration in future work in the field.     

Book review

Long-standing beliefs about one's self-efficacy and learning ability accumulate over the school years. Attributions, or causal perceptions and interpretations, of behavioural outcomes are also based on a person's learning history. And, it is evident from research on attributional bias and self-esteem that the perceived causes of success and failure have consequences for academic success. An important perspective on attributions, frequently neglected in educational research, pertains to content-specific beliefs about one's competence. We set up a field study in which students from the first form of secondary education were asked to report their causal attributions of regular school examinations in three school subjects: history, native language, and mathematics. The results suggest that students generate different causal attributions for successful or unsuccessful examinations, belonging to different school-subjects. Perception of specific examination conditions may or may not urge students to generate specific attributions. There is evidence for both school-subject specificity and examination-specificity in the observed causal attributions. But, the effect of school-subject seems to be more pronounced than the effect of examination. Information at the momentary level (examination conditions) interacts with information at the middle level (school-subject). Closer analyses of the observed causal attributions vis-à-vis perceived success and failure in the three school-subjects displayed marked differences, especially in relation to the effort attributions.