Change and continuity in early spatial development: claiming the “radical middle”

Debate over change and continuity in cognitive development has revolved around questions of qualitative transitions versus quantitative and incremental improvement. Piaget’s stage theory is the best-known example of a change/qualitative transition approach, while both nativism and empiricism have, for very different reasons, taken a continuity/quantitative increment stance. Recent proposals have, however, attempted to transcend this stark dichotomy, in a move that can be termed claiming the “radical middle.” This paper presents two examples of developmental analyses in spatial development. These two transitions are characterizable as either qualitative or quantitative, but are best thought of as both. A position of this kind allows for much more precise answers to practical questions about issues such as sensitive periods than would otherwise be possible.     

Conflicting Judgments and Weakness of Will

Philosophia - This paper shows that our popular account of weakness of will is inconsistent with dilemmas. In dilemmas, agents judge that they ought to do one thing, that they ought to do something...     

Rumination in migraine: Mediating effects of brooding and reflection between migraine and psychological distress

Objective: The relationship between migraine and psychological distress has been consistently reported in cross-sectional and longitudinal studies. We hypothesised that a stable tendency to perseverative thoughts such as rumination would mediate the relationship between migraine and psychological distress.

Design and Main Outcomes Measures: Self-report questionnaires measuring depressive rumination, current psychological distress and migraine symptoms in two independent European population cohorts, recruited from Budapest (N = 1139) and Manchester (N = 2004), were used. Structural regression analysis within structural equation modelling was applied to test the mediational role of brooding and reflection, the components of rumination, between migraine and psychological distress. Sex, age and lifetime depression were controlled for in the analysis.

Results: Migraine predicted higher brooding and reflection scores, and brooding proved to be a mediator between migraine and psychological distress in both samples, while reflection mediated the relationship significantly only in the Budapest sample.

Conclusions: Elevated psychological distress in migraine is partially attributed to ruminative response style. Further studies are needed to expand our findings to clinical samples and to examine how rumination links to the adjustment to migraine.     

The Shape of Things: The Origin of Young Children’s Knowledge of the Names and Properties of Geometric Forms

How do toddlers learn the names of geometric forms? Previous work suggests that preschoolers have fragmentary knowledge and that defining properties are not understood until well into elementary school. The current study investigated when children first begin to understand shape names and how they apply those labels to unusual instances. We tested 25- and 30-month-old children’s (N = 30 each) understanding of names for canonical shapes (commonly encountered instances, e.g., equilateral triangles), noncanonical shapes (more irregular instances, e.g., scalene triangles), and embedded shapes (shapes within a larger picture, e.g., triangular slices of pizza). At 25 months, children knew very few names, including those for canonical shapes. By 30 months, however, children had acquired more shape names and were beginning to apply them to some of the less typical instances of the shapes. Possible mechanisms driving this initial development of shape knowledge and implications of that development for school readiness are explored.     

Weiterbildungsm?glichkeiten in der Verhaltensmedizin

Die Verhaltensmedizin ist das Arbeits- und Forschungsgebiet, in dem empirisch geprüfte Methoden der Verhaltenstherapie in unterschiedlichsten medizinischen Disziplinen eingesetzt werden. Biopsychosoziale Erklärungsansätze für körperliche Gesundheit und Krankheit werden zur Ableitung präventiver, diagnostischer, therapeutischer und rehabilitativer Maßnahmen herangezogen. Dieses interdisziplinäre Arbeitsgebiet ist im Rahmen der psychotherapeutischen Weiterbildung etabliert. In diesem Beitrag wird ein Weiterbildungscurriculum mit den Schwerpunkten Verhaltensmedizin und Kognitive Verhaltenstherapie vorgestellt.     

Vantage perspective in analogue trauma memories: an experimental study

Vantage perspective during recall is thought to affect the emotionality and accessibility of distressing memories. This study aimed to test the effects of vantage perspective during recall on memory associated distress and intrusion development. An adapted version of the trauma film paradigm was used in an experimental design with three conditions. Participants were asked to listen to eyewitness reports of car accidents (e.g. Trauma Analogue Induction) and imagine the scenes vividly using mental imagery. Afterwards, they were asked to recall the most distressing scene from field perspective, observer perspective, or to recall a neutral image from observer perspective (control condition) (e.g. Trauma Analogue Recall). Recall from field perspective resulted in higher negative mood, state-anxiety, and a higher number of short-term intrusions compared to the observer perspective condition and control condition. Negative mood and state-anxiety were mediators in the relationship between vantage perspective and intrusions. In comparison to observer perspective, field perspective increased the amount of short-term intrusions as a result of higher levels of negative mood and state-anxiety after memory retrieval. Future research on the interaction between vantage perspective at recall and negative mood and anxiety effects is warranted.     

Developing symbolic capacity one step at a time

The present research examines the ability of children as young as 4 years to use models in tasks that require scaling of distance along a single dimension. In Experiment 1, we found that tasks involving models are similar in difficulty to those involving maps that we studied earlier (Huttenlocher, J., Newcombe, N., & Vasilyeva, M. (1999). Spatial scaling in young children. Psychological Science, 10, 393-398). In Experiment 2, we found that retrieval tasks, where children indicate the location of a hidden object in an actual space are substantially more difficult than placement tasks, where children put a visible object in a particular location in an actual space. We discuss possible implications of the differential difficulty of retrieval and placement tasks for the understanding of symbolic development.     

Preferences for emotional information in older and younger adults: a meta-analysis of memory and attention tasks

The authors conducted a meta-analysis to determine the magnitude of older and younger adults' preferences for emotional stimuli in studies of attention and memory. Analyses involved 1,085 older adults from 37 independent samples and 3,150 younger adults from 86 independent samples. Both age groups exhibited small to medium emotion salience effects (i.e., preference for emotionally valenced stimuli over neutral stimuli) as well as positivity preferences (i.e., preference for positively valenced stimuli over neutral stimuli) and negativity preferences (i.e., preference for negatively valenced stimuli to neutral stimuli). There were few age differences overall. Type of measurement appeared to influence the magnitude of effects; recognition studies indicated significant age effects, where older adults showed smaller effects for emotion salience and negativity preferences than younger adults.