The role of associative strength and conceptual relations in matching tasks in 4‐ and 6‐year‐old children

T he associative strength between target and associates, a factor assumed to be critical but generally not controlled, and the type of conceptual relation (thematic and taxonomic) were manipulated independently in a matching to sample task to determine their respective effects on the matching behaviour of 4‐ and 6‐year‐old children. Perceptual similarity between target and associates was controlled and maintained at a low level. A preliminary task was designed to assess the associative strength between targets and several associated pictures. These judgments served to construct for each child the sets of stimuli used in the matching task. Exp. 1 opposed a strong and a weak associate with the target in different configurations: the sets included a target and two thematic associates, two taxonomic associates, or one associate of each type. Children were asked to choose the picture that “went well” with the target. Data revealed the role of associative strength on matching choices. This factor interacted sometimes with the greater availability of thematic relations in 4‐ and 6‐year‐old children. In Exp. 2, two other configurations were tested. Thematic and taxonomic associates were both either strongly or weakly related with the target. Results replicated those of Exp. 1 and extended them. They showed that younger children were biased towards thematic relations only when these relations corresponded to strong associations. Thus, increasing experience with objects appears to reinforce both associative strength and thematic orientation. Finally, in Exp. 3, instructions orienting toward taxonomic choices modified responses in 6‐year‐olds only. Altogether, these results show the influence of specific instances and suggest that preschoolers' matching decisions are partly stimulus driven.     

Picture naming in 3- to 8-year-old French children: Methodological considerations for name agreement

Picture naming has become an important experimental paradigm in cognitive psychology. Young children are more variable than adults in their naming responses and less likely to know the object or its name. A consequence is that the interpretation of the two classical measures used by Snodgrass and Vanderwart (1980) for scoring name agreement in adults (the percentage of agreement, based on modal name, and theH statistic, based on alternative names) will differ because of the high rate of “don’t know object” responses, common in young children, relative to the low rate of “don’t know object” responses more characteristic of adults. The present study focused on this methodological issue in young French children (3–8 years old), using a set of 145 Snodgrass-Vanderwart pictures. Our results indicate that the percentage of agreement based on the expected name is a better measure of picture-naming performance than are the commonly used measures. The norms may be downloaded from www.psychonomic.org/archive.     

Structural environmental enrichment and the way it is offered influence cognitive judgement bias and anxiety-like behaviours in zebrafish

Animal Cognition - Environmental enrichment in zebrafish generally reduces anxiety-related behaviours, improves learning in maze trials and increases health and biological fitness. However, certain...     

A Qualitative Study of the Career Aspirations of Resettled Young Sudanese and Somali Refugees

The study documents and explicates the academic experiences, visions, hopes and desires which shape the vocational aspirations of young Sudanese and a Somali refugee who have resettled in Australia. Semi-structured interviews were conducted to examine the experiences of a sample of 14 young resettled refugees in Brisbane, Australia. Adopting a qualitative methodology, the interviews covered the aspirations of the participants across three time periods: life in the country of origin, transit and resettlement. Participants expressed high ambitions despite their experiences of school disruption pre resettlement and language difficulties post resettlement. The situation in the country of origin emerged as influential upon their aspirations in both pre and resettlement life. English language difficulties emerged as the most common consideration influencing aspirations following resettlement. A number of considerations were found that influenced their vocational aspirations before and after resettlement. Such considerations may enlighten service providers working with resettled young African refugees.     

Cardiovascular medicine at face value: a qualitative pilot study on clinical axiology

Introduction

Cardiology is characterized by its state-of-the-art biomedical technology and the predominance of Evidence-Based Medicine. This predominance makes it difficult for healthcare professionals to deal with the ethical dilemmas that emerge in this subspecialty. This paper is a first endeavor to empirically investigate the axiological foundations of the healthcare professionals in a cardiology hospital. Our pilot study selected, as the target population, cardiology personnel not only because of their difficult ethical deliberations but also because of the stringent conditions in which they have to make them. Therefore, there is an urgent need to reconsider clinical ethics and Value-Based Medicine. This study proposes a qualitative analysis of the values and the virtues of healthcare professionals in a cardiology hospital in order to establish how the former impact upon the medical and ethical decisions made by the latter.

Results

We point out the need for strengthening the roles of healthcare personnel as educators and guidance counselors in order to meet the ends of medicine, as well as the need for an ethical discernment that is compatible with our results, namely, that the ethical values developed by healthcare professionals stem from their life history as well as their professional education.

Conclusion

We establish the kind of actions, communication skills and empathy that are required to build a stronger patient-healthcare professional relationship, which at the same time improves prognosis, treatment efficiency and therapeutic adhesion.

     

Implicit attitudes and the improvement of exercise capacity during pulmonary rehabilitation

The aim of this study was to examine the role of explicit and implicit attitudes in the improvement of exercise capacity during a 5-week pulmonary rehabilitation (PR). A total of 105 patients performed walking tests at baseline and at the end of PR. Change between performances was computed at the end of PR, and Minimal-Clinically-Important-Difference (MCID) were used to categorize patients as responders (i.e. change above MCID, N = 54) or non-responders (i.e. change below MCID, N = 51). At baseline, implicit attitudes were measured through a physical activity versus sedentary behavior Implicit Association Test; explicit attitudes toward physical activity and sedentary behavior were measured by questionnaires. Only implicit attitudes significantly differed between the two groups (p = .015), responders displaying implicit attitudes significantly more in favor of physical activity (M = .91, SD = .54) than non-responders (M = .60, SD = .71) at baseline. Measuring implicit attitudes in PR could help to accurately estimate patients’ motivation, and design more individualized rehabilitation programs.     

Inhibitory control of threat remembering in PTSD

ABSTRACT

Intrusive traumatic recollections suggest an inability in Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) to control and notably to inhibit memories for trauma-related information. Supported by inhibitory deficits found on experimental settings in PTSD, memory functioning and memory biases in the disorder were usually explained through inhibitory and control deficits in the processing of trauma-related information. The present study aimed to directly assess this hypothesis by investigating memory control abilities for emotional information in PTSD. For this purpose, 34 patients diagnosed with PTSD were compared to 37 non-PTSD controls on an item-cued directed forgetting paradigm for emotional words combined with a Remember/Know recognition procedure. Results revealed enhanced amounts of Remember recognitions for trauma-related words in PTSD. Moreover, we replicated findings of memory control impairments in the disorder. However, such impairments only occurred for non-trauma-related words. Accordingly, it appeared that PTSD patients presented preserved memory control abilities for trauma-related words, at the expenses of other emotional valences. Surprisingly, PTSD patients presented a preserved ability to control and notably to inhibit their memory functioning for trauma-related material. In addition to potential theoretical and clinical relevance, these results are discussed in the light of resource reallocation hypotheses and vigilant-avoidant theories of information processing in PTSD.     

Development and Practice of the Systems Paradigm in Argentina, Chile and Peru

The systems paradigm has been developing in the southern region of South America for more than three decades, albeit at different paces and with a variety of achievements as can be expected when describing the process of countries as diverse as Argentina, Chile and Peru. This article describes the circumstances and actions that have enabled the systemic approach to gain a legitimate place in the local psychotherapy field permeating family, marital/couple, and individual therapy. Moreover, the family/contextual perspective has attained a valued respectability in the family legal system as well as in community interventions. Overall, the community is aware of and at ease with this efficacious contextual approach. As in other parts of the world, the universities have joined the private entities in the training endeavor and the accreditation process is a complex goal with obstacles that have not yet been surmounted.     

Categorization Deficit in Old Age: Reality or Artefact?

When categorization behaviour is compared between young and elderly adults, results usually show a decrease in taxonomic choices along with an increase in thematic choices. This can be interpreted in two ways: a decline in the ability to perceive and use taxonomic relations, or a modification of conceptual preferences with aging related to a bias stemming from material which favours young adults. We evaluated the second hypothesis by studying whether the salience of categorical associations could explain the differences generally observed between young and elderly adults. This hypothesis was tested on 25 young subjects (M = 45.3 years, SD =5.6 years) and 30 elderly subjects (M = 71.5 years, SD = 7.1 years) using a matching task: individual judgments were used to build triads in which a target was presented along with a strong and a weak associate. In line with our hypothesis, both age groups were influenced by associative strength and type of relation in the same way. Results are interpreted with Baltes’s [1987, Developmental Psychology, 23, 611–626] model.