Economic cycles as a source of social influence on individuals

The current review summarizes emerging research in psychology and associated disciplines showing that the economic cycles exert social influence on individuals across a range of psychological domains. Most research on social influence focused on how factors in the proximal environment impact individuals, while influences emanating from the state of the economy as a whole received far less attention. I review the development of different intellectual traditions examining social influence to explain the relative lack of attention to economic cycles and position emerging work on the topic relative to past research. I then review research on how economic cycles influence individuals by focusing on influences relevant to intraindividual, interpersonal, and intergroup processes. A review of this work shows that the understanding of core phenomena of interest to social psychology (e.g., attributions, altruism, and racial tensions) can be meaningfully extended by studying the complex interplay between the economic system and the psychology of individuals embedded within it. This stream of research also uncovers mechanisms through which economic cycles generate or amplify problems for the broader society, which I propose is both the key reason why more work on the topic is needed as well as the key direction for future work.     

The emotional quality of childcare centers in Israel: The Haifa study of early childcare

Data from an Israeli project shows higher proportion of insecurely attached infants in center care as compared with noncenter care (Sagi, Koren‐Karie, Gini, Ziv, & Joels, 2002). The present study was designed to assess structural and emotional aspects characterizing infants' experiences in center care, aiming to explain, in part, the high incidence of attachment insecurity among center‐care infants. In the present study, we focus on 151 center‐care infants who were observed in the Ainsworth Strange Situation (Ainsworth, Blehar, Waters, & Wall, 1978) with their mothers. Sixty‐one percent of them were coded as securely attached to their mothers while 39% were coded as insecurely attached. In addition, 56 directors and 120 caregivers in 56 centers were videotaped throughout a full‐day observation. The Assessment Profile of Early Childhood Program (Abbott‐Shim & Sibley, 1987) was also employed. Results indicated that the centers in Israel are of low standards: Large group size, high caregiver–infants ratio, inadequate professional training, and minimal attention to individual emotional needs. No associations were found between infants' attachment and various aspects of the settings. The low quality of the Israeli settings may explain the higher rate of attachment insecurity in center‐care infants. ©2005 Michigan Association for Infant Mental Health.     

Self-regulation in error management training: emotion control and metacognition as mediators of performance effects

In error management training, participants are explicitly encouraged to make errors and learn from them. Error management training has frequently been shown to lead to better performance than conventional trainings that adopt an error avoidant approach. The present study investigated self-regulatory processes mediating this effect. Fifty-five volunteer students learned a computer program under 1 of 3 conditions: error avoidant training, error management training, or error management training supplemented with a metacognitive module. As predicted, both forms of error management training led to better transfer performance than did error avoidant training (d = 0.75). Mediation hypotheses were fully supported: Emotion control and metacognitive activity (from verbal protocols) mediated performance differences. These findings highlight the potential of promoting self-regulatory processing during training.     

Stability in schizophrenia symptoms over time: findings from the Mount Sinai Pilgrim Psychiatric Center Longitudinal Study

This study examined the stability of symptoms of schizophrenia over time, focusing on the stability of symptom structure. Symptoms were assessed with the Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale (PANSS). The sample consisted of 215 chronic patients followed up for as long as 4 years. Exploratory factor analysis identified 6 factors. Several statistical techniques were used to examine the stability of these symptoms, including longitudinal confirmatory factor analysis. Low-to-moderate rank-order stability and high absolute stability of the factors were found, with the structure of the PANSS-assessed symptoms consistent over time. The results demonstrate that despite changes in the severity of symptoms in individual patients with schizophrenia, the factor structure and interrelatedness of symptoms have considerable stability over time.     

Predictors of subjective age before and after cataract surgery: conscientiousness makes a difference

This study contributes to research on subjective age by examining the interplay of felt age with health, functional limitations, and personality. Individuals undergoing cataract surgery (N=134; 38 to 92 years of age) provided data for an assessment period of 6 weeks surrounding their scheduled surgery. Conscientiousness and repeated measurements of health indicators, functional limitations, and felt age were included in the analyses. Results indicated that functional limitations may be more important to the construction of felt age than their underlying health-related causes. Moreover, conscientious participants felt younger before and after surgery. Their functional status was less dependent on health than the functional status of less conscientious participants. This moderator effect is discussed along with health-related pathways leading to felt age.     

Lesion analysis of the brain areas involved in language comprehension

The cortical regions of the brain traditionally associated with the comprehension of language are Wernicke's area and Broca's area. However, recent evidence suggests that other brain regions might also be involved in this complex process. This paper describes the opportunity to evaluate a large number of brain-injured patients to determine which lesioned brain areas might affect language comprehension. Sixty-four chronic left hemisphere stroke patients were evaluated on 11 subtests of the Curtiss-Yamada Comprehensive Language Evaluation - Receptive (CYCLE-R; Curtiss, S., & Yamada, J. (1988). Curtiss-Yamada Comprehensive Language Evaluation. Unpublished test, UCLA). Eight right hemisphere stroke patients and 15 neurologically normal older controls also participated. Patients were required to select a single line drawing from an array of three or four choices that best depicted the content of an auditorily-presented sentence. Patients' lesions obtained from structural neuroimaging were reconstructed onto templates and entered into a voxel-based lesion-symptom mapping (VLSM; Bates, E., Wilson, S., Saygin, A. P., Dick, F., Sereno, M., Knight, R. T., & Dronkers, N. F. (2003). Voxel-based lesion-symptom mapping. Nature Neuroscience, 6(5), 448-450.) analysis along with the behavioral data. VLSM is a brain-behavior mapping technique that evaluates the relationships between areas of injury and behavioral performance in all patients on a voxel-by-voxel basis, similar to the analysis of functional neuroimaging data. Results indicated that lesions to five left hemisphere brain regions affected performance on the CYCLE-R, including the posterior middle temporal gyrus and underlying white matter, the anterior superior temporal gyrus, the superior temporal sulcus and angular gyrus, mid-frontal cortex in Brodmann's area 46, and Brodmann's area 47 of the inferior frontal gyrus. Lesions to Broca's and Wernicke's areas were not found to significantly alter language comprehension on this particular measure. Further analysis suggested that the middle temporal gyrus may be more important for comprehension at the word level, while the other regions may play a greater role at the level of the sentence. These results are consistent with those seen in recent functional neuroimaging studies and offer complementary data in the effort to understand the brain areas underlying language comprehension.     

The emergence of kind-based object individuation in infancy

Four experiments investigated whether 12-month-old infants use perceptual property information in a complex object individuation task, using the violation-of-expectancy looking time method (Xu, 2002; Xu & Carey, 1996). Infants were shown two objects with different properties emerge and return behind an occluder, one at a time. The occluder was then removed, revealing either two objects (expected outcome, if property differences support individuation) or one object (unexpected outcome). In Experiments 1-3, infants failed to use color, size, or a combination of color, size, and pattern differences to establish a representation of two distinct objects behind an occluder. In Experiment 4, infants succeeded in using cross-basic-level-kind shape differences to establish a representation of two objects but failed to do so using within-basic-level-kind shape differences. Control conditions found that the methods were sensitive. Infants succeeded when provided unambiguous spatiotemporal information for two objects, and they encoded the property differences during these experiments. These findings suggest that by 12 months, different properties play different roles in a complex object individuation task. Certain salient shape differences enter into the computation of numerical distinctness of objects before other property differences such as color or size. Since shape differences are often correlated with object kind differences, these results converge with others in the literature that suggest that by the end of the first year of life, infants' representational systems begin to distinguish kinds and properties.     

An overview on Primary Progressive Aphasia and its variants

We present a review of the literature on Primary Progressive Aphasia (PPA) together with the analysis of neuropschychological and neuroradiologic profiles of 42 PPA patients. Mesulam originally defined PPA as a progressive degenerative disorder characterized by isolated language impairment for at least two years. The most common variants of PPA are: 1) Progressive nonfluent aphasia (PNFA), 2) semantic dementia (SD), 3) logopenic progressive aphasia (LPA). PNFA is characterized by labored speech, agrammatism in production, and/or comprehension. In some cases the syndrome begins with isolated deficits in speech. SD patients typically present with loss of word and object meaning and surface dyslexia. LPA patients have word-finding difficulties, syntactically simple but accurate language output and impaired sentence comprehension. The neuropsychological data demonstrated that SD patients show the most characteristic pattern of impairment, while PNFA and LPA overlap within many cognitive domains. The neuroimaging analysis showed left perisylvian region involvement. A comprehensive cognitive, neuroimaging and pathological approach is necessary to identify the clinical and pathogenetic features of different PPA variants.     

Measurement and structural invariance of parent ratings of ADHD and ODD symptoms across gender for American and Malaysian children

The purpose of this study was to examine the measurement (configural, metric, scalar, and residual) and structural (factor variance, factor covariance, and factor means) invariance of parent ratings of the attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder - inattention (ADHD-IN), ADHD - hyperactivity/impulsivity (ADHD-HI), and oppositional defiant disorder (ODD) symptoms as described in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (4th ed.; American Psychiatric Association, 1994) across boys and girls. In an American pediatric sample (N = 1,015) and a Malaysian elementary school-age sample (N = 928), there was strong support for configural, metric, scalar, residual, factor variance, and covariance invariance across gender within each sample. Both American and Malaysian boys had significantly higher scores on the ADHD-IN and ADHD-HI factor means than did girls, whereas only in the American sample did boys score significantly higher on the ODD factor than did girls. The implications of the results for the study of gender, ethnic, and cultural differences associated with ADHD and ODD are discussed.