Mood reactivity to daily negative events in early adolescence: relationship to risk for psychopathology

Emotional responses to negative daily experiences in young adolescents may provide important clues to the development of psychopathology, but research is lacking. This study assessed momentary mood reactivity to daily events as a function of risk profile in a school sample, ages 11-14. High-risk (HR, n=25) and low-risk (LR, n=106) subgroups completed frequent self-reports of mood and events for 5 days. HR adolescents reported more negative events involving family and peers. Multilevel modeling results showed that negative events, especially if stressful, were associated with increased negative and decreased positive affects, with heightened responses in HR adolescents. HR adolescents with greater stress over the last 3 months showed additional increases in depressed mood following negative events. Altered reactivity to and dysfunctional appraisals of daily events may link adolescent risk profiles to later mental health problems.     

Performance of Dyslexic Children on Cerebellar and Cognitive Tests

In a previous study (A. J. Fawcett, R. I. Nicolson, & P. Dean, 1996), the authors had found strong behavioral evidence for cerebellar deficit in a panel of children with dyslexia. In the present study, the generality of those results was assessed. A battery of clinical tests for cerebellar dysfunction was administered, together with selected cognitive tests, to a further 59 dyslexic and 67 control children. The dyslexic children showed highly significant impairments on the cerebellar tests, with deficits on postural stability and muscle tone comparable in magnitude with their reading and spelling deficits. Furthermore, over 95% of the dyslexic children showed clear evidence of deficit on muscle tone or stability. The findings provide further evidence of the generality of cerebellar impairment in dyslexia. The implications of the cerebellar tests for screening in dyslexia are discussed.     

Book Reviews

There is long-standing evidence for verbal working memory impairments in both children and adults with dyslexia. By contrast, spatial memory appears largely to be unimpaired. In an attempt to distinguish between phonological and central executive accounts of the impairments in working memory, a set of phonological and spatial working memory tasks was designed to investigate the key issues in working memory, task type, task demands (static, dynamic, and updating), and task complexity. Significant differences emerged between the dyslexic and nondyslexic participants on the verbal working memory tasks employed in Experiment 1, thereby providing further evidence for continuing dyslexic impairments of working memory into adulthood. The nature of the deficits suggested a problem with the phonological loop, with there being little evidence to implicate an impairment of the central executive. Due to the difficulties associated with separating verbal working memory and phonological processing, however, performance was investigated in Experiment 2 using visuospatial measures of working memory. The results of the visuospatial tasks indicated no between-group differences in static spatial memory, which requires the short-term storage of simultaneously presented information. In almost all conditions there were no between-group differences in dynamic spatial memory that demands the recall of both location and order of stimuli presented sequentially. However, a significant impairment occurred on the dynamic task under high memory updating load, on which dyslexic adults showed nonphonological working memory deficits. In the absence of an explanation involving verbal recoding, this finding is interpreted in terms of a central executive or automaticity impairment in dyslexia.     

Eye movements during scene inspection: A test of the saliency map hypothesis

Both attentional difficulties and rapid processing deficits have recently been linked with dyslexia. We report two studies comparing the performance of dyslexic and control teenagers on attentional tasks. The two studies were based on two different conceptions of attention. Study 1 employed a design that allowed three key components of attention--focusing, switching, and sustaining--to be investigated separately. One hypothesis under investigation was that rapid processing problems--in particular impaired ability to switch attention rapidly--might be associated with dyslexia. However, although dyslexic participants were significantly less accurate than their controls in a condition where they had to switch attention between two target types, the nature of the deficit suggested that the problem was not in switching attention per se. Thus, in Study 2, we explored an alternative interpretation of the Study 1 results in terms of the classic capacity-limited models of "central" attention. We contrasted two hypotheses: (1) that dyslexic teenagers have reduced cognitive resources versus (2) that they suffer from a general impairment in the ability to automatise basic skills. To investigate the automaticity of the shape recognition component of the task a similar attention paradigm to that used in Study 1 was employed, but using degraded, as well as intact, stimuli. It was found that stimulus degradation led to relatively less impairment for dyslexic than for matched control groups. The results support the hypothesis that dyslexic people suffer from a general impairment in the ability to automatise skills--in this case the skill of automatic shape recognition.     

The role of stressful events in the relationship between positive and negative affects: evidence from field and experimental studies

Three studies are presented that examine the effects of stress on the relationship between positive and negative affective states. In the first study, recently bereaved and disabled older adults were compared to matched control groups without these recent stressors. Negative affect was inversely correlated with positive affect to a significantly greater extent for the highly stressed groups compared with controls. In a second study, older adults were exposed to a laboratory stressor, and their positive and negative affective reactions recorded. Immediately following a speech stressor task, the inverse correlation between positive and negative affect was significantly greater than in pre- and postassessments of affects. The third study was an attempt to replicate and extend the findings from Study 2 with a mid-aged sample of women. The speech stressor had the same effects as in Study 2. A second stressor, which induced pain through immersion of an arm into cold water, had no effects on the correlation between affective states. Alternative explanations for these effects and the implications for cognitive interventions are discussed.     

自我面孔识别的神经机制：基于fMRI研究的ALE元分析

自我面孔识别反映了个体通过自我与他人的区分识别出自我面孔的过程。本文采用ALE元分析的方法, 对自我面孔识别的fMRI研究进行系统的定量分析, 探究自我面孔识别的神经基础。结果显示, 自我面孔识别的关键脑区包括顶上小叶、额中回、额下回、脑岛、梭状回、楔前叶和枕叶皮层。另外, 自我面孔识别可能包括两个层面的加工过程：知觉层面的加工整合过程以及由知觉引发的评价和情绪反应过程。知觉加工整合涵盖了自我面孔识别的各个加工阶段, 主要涉及枕叶、梭状回和楔前叶的功能; 而评价加工及情绪反应过程则发生在自我面孔识别的中晚期, 主要涉及顶上小叶、额中回、额下回及脑岛的功能。未来研究可结合时间和空间数据并关注脑区间的协同功能, 考察与内感受的神经关联, 开展临床研究并探索威胁信息的影响机制。     

Is domestic violence a gender issue? Views from a British city1

Domestic violence involves the abuse, whether emotional, physical, sexual and/or economic, of one or more family (or ex‐family) members by another family member within the home or wider domestic context. It is typically associated with increasing entrapment, injury, medical complaints, psycho‐social problems and (sometimes) unsuccessful help‐seeking. Research evidence demonstrates that domestic abuse is prolific, prolonged, impacts physically, emotionally and economically upon women and children in particular, over the long‐term including well after they are ‘safe’ from the perpetrator. Furthermore, such abuse is widespread and happens all over the world. The findings reported here are from an observational population survey conducted in one British city to assess awareness of domestic violence. While there appears to be a broadly held and well‐informed definition of what actions constitute domestic violence and why it occurs, there are striking differences in perspective concerning public awareness of the frequency of domestic violence and knowledge of its importance as a safety issue indicating that it is still not seen generally as a serious social problem. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A brief report of women's expectations of men's behaviour in the transition to parenthood: Contradictions and conflicts for counselling psychology practice

Couples often seek counselling in the first year following the birth of a baby. The role and image of active fatherhood has affected women's expectations that their male partners will engage in baby/child care and other domestic activities. This pilot study of women undergoing the transition to motherhood within a heterosexual couple relationship indicates that women's expectations and men's ‘promises' and media images of fatherhood do not coincide with behaviour and that this causes and amplifies stress in the relationship. Counselling psychologists often focus upon the woman's involvement with the baby or lack of partner support as the main problematic dimension in the couple's well-being. It is suggested here, from the findings summarized, that more research needs to be done on the mismatch between changing attitudes to fathering and the impact of the consequent, apparently false expectations of men's behaviour in the early years of parenthood.     

Evaluation of a brief multiple-stimulus preference assessment in a naturalistic context

We evaluated a brief multiple-stimulus preference assessment within the context of an early intervention program for 3 children who had been diagnosed with autism. Subsequent curriculum-based reinforcer evaluations confirmed the predictions of the preference assessments. In addition, eight additional preference assessments that were conducted over a period of 1 month indicated generally stable preferences for 2 of the 3 participants.