Tool innovation may be a critical limiting step for the establishment of a rich tool-using culture: a perspective from child development

Recent data show that human children (up to 8 years old) perform poorly when required to innovate tools. Our tool-rich culture may be more reliant on social learning and more limited by domain-general constraints such as ill-structured problem solving than otherwise thought.     

Beyond “Empowerment”? Sexuality in a Sexist World

The subject of girls’ sexual empowerment is a fertile area for feminist debate. While most feminists are committed to the promotion of diverse and egalitarian sexual possibilities for girls (and women), we differ in our views on how to hold an aspirational vision alongside paying attention to real world constraints on its unfolding. A specific instance of this tension is posed in considering how relevant claims to individual empowerment are within a broader context that remains broadly sexist and limiting as well as saturated with racist and other forms of discrimination and inequality. In this paper, I join the dialogue opened by Lamb and Peterson (2011) to explore some of these questions. I argue that the concept of sexual empowerment, as taken up in these debates, might be too flexible to do the work we require of it. In particular, I suggest that it is unhelpful to fix our lens on claims of individual empowerment, if and where this involves eliding the broader sociocultural conditions of possibility for “intimate justice” (McClelland 2010) for girls and women; and, where it leads us to over-ride the psychosocial complexity of all individuals in ways that distract us from attending to ambivalence and understanding the “cruel attachments” that can bind us to injustice. Rather than seeking to offer an “‘expert’ view of empowerment,” I argue for the value of reflexive, empathic, and respectful feminist critique of the cultural conditions of possibility for such a thing.     

The effect of meaningfulness and integrative processing in expressive writing on positive and negative affect and life satisfaction

Meaningfulness and integrative processing of expressive writing may influence the effect of expressive writing. Participants completed measures of positive affect, negative affect and life satisfaction before and after an expressive writing intervention. Participants were randomly assigned to one of four expressive writing instruction conditions, which combined higher and lower levels of meaning and integrative processing instructions. Meaningfulness and integrative processing instructions had significant effects in increasing positive affect and there was a significant interaction between meaningfulness instructions and integrative processing instructions; participants in the high meaningfulness and high integrative processing instruction condition showed the greatest increase in positive affect. Meaningfulness had a significant effect in decreasing negative affect. The intervention did not influence life satisfaction. Both meaningfulness and integrative processing instructions led to more self-reported personal meaningfulness of the writing and more cognitive, emotional, behavioural and situational changes. More self-reported meaningfulness of the writing and more cognitive, emotional, behavioural and situational changes made as a result of the writing were in turn associated with greater increases in positive affect. The results of the study affirm the importance of meaningfulness and processing in expressive writing and potentially provide information regarding how to increase the effectiveness of expressive writing.     

Affective state and event-based prospective memory

Event-based prospective memory tasks require the realisation of a delayed intention at the occurrence of a specific target event. The present research investigates how performance in this kind of prospective memory task is influenced by the current affective state. By manipulating participants' mood during intention realisation we tested two competing models of mood effects on memory (i.e., a capacity consuming account and a processing style account). Furthermore, we manipulated the valence of the target event to investigate mood-congruency effects in prospective memory. No evidence was found for a mood-congruency effect, but the results showed that prospective memory performance increased with a sad mood. This effect is consistent with recent theories on mood-dependent processing-style regulation, postulating that a sad mood produces a more analytic and detailed processing style whereas a happy mood produces a more global and less detailed processing style.     

Evidence for a Needs-Based Model of Organizational-Meeting Leadership

The aim of this study was to investigate whether an association exists between 19 meeting-leader behaviors of the type that tend to meet attendee needs and attendee ratings of satisfaction with the meeting and productivity of the meeting. An observer blind to the ratings of attendees recorded which of 19 needs-related behaviors the leader showed and then collected anonymous meeting-rating data from the attendees. The study included data from 60 organizational meetings and a total of 401 meeting attendees. The results indicate that the overall level of leader behaviors shown, out of 19 different behaviors observed, was significantly associated with attendee ratings of the meeting. Several individual meeting-leader behaviors showed significant associations with ratings of either meeting productivity or satisfaction with the meeting: arriving before the start of the meeting, speaking succinctly, moving the meeting along, encouraging participation, encouraging decision making, paraphrasing someone’s, smiling more than once, saying something positive about the future of the organization, and summarizing the decisions made. The results provide preliminary support for a new needs-based model of organizational-meeting leadership. The results also suggest specific leader behaviors that may contribute to meeting productivity and satisfaction.     

Images of Men and Women in Mobile Phone Advertisements: A Content Analysis of Advertisements for Mobile Communication Systems in Selected Popular Magazines

The present study was designed to analyze gender stereotypes in print advertisements for mobile communication systems in German popular magazines intended for men, women, and general readership. Depictions of both women and men are addressed. A total of 288 depictions were examined using Goffman’s (Gender advertisements, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1979) framework for content analysis. Other variables studied were the setting in which men and women are depicted and the different types of magazines in which the advertisements appeared. It is shown that certain means of emphasizing stereotypes (such as Feminine Touch) are still widely used, at least in mobile phone advertising, whereas others have decreased in frequency since Goffman’s time (for example, Function Ranking).     

Does the presentation of multiple facial composites improve suspect identification?

Previous research that has evaluated the accuracy of facial composites has reported low identification rates. Two studies are reported here that consider whether showing more than one composite of the same suspect might improve the rate of identification. Sixteen participant‐witnesses saw one of two staged events, each involving a different unfamiliar target. Each participant‐witness worked with a police operator to construct a composite of the target they had seen. One, four or eight composites depicting the same target were then shown to individuals familiar with the target. Overall, the results showed that presenting more than one composite increased the rate of identification. In addition, the results of Study 2 suggest that if the police must select just one composite from a number produced by witnesses, then a promising method might be to choose the one which bears most similarity to the other composites in the set. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Response inhibition and interference control: Effects of schizophrenia,genetic risk,and schizotypy

The ability to inhibit inappropriate responses and suppress irrelevant information is a core feature of executive control. In this study, we provide a detailed analysis of prepotent response inhibition and interference in patients with schizophrenia. To further test the role of genetic factors and subclinical schizophrenia‐like traits, we additionally studied clinically unaffected, first‐degree relatives of schizophrenia patients and assessed dimensions of schizotypy in both relatives and healthy controls. Inhibition and interference control were assessed using a battery comprising the antisaccade, Stroop, stop signal, go/no‐go, flanker, and Simon tasks. Schizophrenia patients differed from both relatives and controls in making more errors on the antisaccade task and having longer response times on the Stroop task, especially the incongruent condition. Patients also had general, that is, condition independent, increases in reaction times on the go/no‐go and flanker tasks and made more errors on the flanker and Simon tasks, suggesting general performance impairments independent of inhibitory demand. Relatives were characterized by hypometric antisaccade amplitude gain despite normal prosaccades, suggesting a selective deficit in non‐standard sensorimotor transformations. Schizotypy was correlated with inhibitory performance across a number of tasks in both relatives and controls. Generally, these effects were independent of verbal intelligence levels. Overall, the findings point to rather selective impairments of inhibitory control in the schizophrenia spectrum and confirm a previously observed deficit in antisaccade spatial accuracy as an endophenotype of schizophrenia.     

The role of perception, language, and preference in the developmental acquisition of basic color terms

When learning basic color vocabulary, young children show a selective delay in the acquisition of brown and gray relative to other basic color terms. In this study, we first establish the robustness of this finding and then investigate the extent to which perception, language, and color preference may influence color conceptualization. Experimental tasks were designed to measure different aspects of perceptual color processing (discrimination and saliency), color preference and objective counts of color term frequency in preschool-directed language (books and mothers' speech) were used to compare the acquisition of three groups of colors: primary colors, secondary colors (orange, pink, and purple) that appear at the same time as the primary colors, and secondary colors (brown and gray) that appear late. Although our results suggest that perception does not directly shape young children's color term acquisition, we found that children prefer brown and gray significantly less than basic colors and that these color terms appear significantly less often in child-directed speech, suggesting that color preference, linguistic input, and developing color cognition may be linked.