The Relationship between Temperamental Negative Affect,Effortful Control,and Sensory Regulation: A New Look

Temperamental negative affectivity (NA) and effortful control (EC) have long been of interest to psychologists, but sensory regulation (SR) has received less attention. Using confirmatory factor analysis, the present study reexamined the Rothbart model of EC and NA using the Children's Behavior Questionnaire (CBQ; M.K. Rothbart, S.A. Ahadi, K.L. Hershy, & P. Fisher, 2001), along with alternative models of EC, NA, and SR using the CBQ and Short Sensory Profile. The results failed to replicate the Rothbart model of EC and NA, which includes SR within the EC and NA factors. A good fit was found for a three‐factor model (EC, NA, and SR) that was replicated in a holdout sample. A three‐factor model also showed a good fit when EC, NA, and SR items similar to symptoms of behavior problems were eliminated.     

The symptom perception hypothesis revised: depression and anxiety play different roles in concurrent and retrospective physical symptom reporting

According to the classic symptom perception hypothesis (Costa & McCrae, 1987; Watson & Pennebaker, 1989), the global predisposition to frequently experience a variety of negative emotions-that is, neuroticism (N) or trait negative affectivity (NA)-is associated with inflated physical symptom reporting. We tested a revision of this hypothesis, which posits distinctive roles for depression and anxiety in the physical symptom experience. Three studies tested predictions from the revised symptom perception hypothesis: (a) that depressive affect should be related to inflated retrospective physical symptom reports and (b) that anxious affect should be related to inflated concurrent, or momentary, physical symptom reports. Study 1 assessed the relations among N/NA, depressive affect, and recall of physical symptoms experienced in the previous 3 weeks. Depressive affect was uniquely and positively associated with recalling more symptoms. When entered with depressive affect in multiple regression analyses, neuroticism was not associated with level of symptoms recalled. In Study 2, participants were randomly assigned to anxious, depressed, angry, happy, or neutral mood inductions and then reported about concurrent symptom experience. Participants in the anxious mood condition reported significantly more concurrent physical symptoms than did those in the other 4 conditions. In Study 3, anxious, depressed, or neutral mood was induced, followed by assessment of both concurrent and retrospective physical symptoms. Those assigned to the anxious mood induction reported more concurrent symptoms, while those in the depressed mood condition reported having experienced more symptoms in the past. These findings are consistent with the idea that encoding and retrieval processes, which are differentially associated with anxious versus depressed affect, influence different aspects of physical symptom reporting. The results have implications for self-diagnosis, medical treatment-seeking, and care, and potential insights about other complex social and interpersonal behaviors are discussed.     

Exposure to severe urban air pollution influences cognitive outcomes, brain volume and systemic inflammation in clinically healthy children

Exposure to severe air pollution produces neuroinflammation and structural brain alterations in children. We tested whether patterns of brain growth, cognitive deficits and white matter hyperintensities (WMH) are associated with exposures to severe air pollution. Baseline and 1 year follow-up measurements of global and regional brain MRI volumes, cognitive abilities (Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-Revised, WISC-R), and serum inflammatory mediators were collected in 20 Mexico City (MC) children (10 with white matter hyperintensities, WMH⁺, and 10 without, WMH⁻) and 10 matched controls (CTL) from a low polluted city. There were significant differences in white matter volumes between CTL and MC children - both WMH⁺ and WMH⁻ - in right parietal and bilateral temporal areas. Both WMH⁻ and WMH⁺ MC children showed progressive deficits, compared to CTL children, on the WISC-R Vocabulary and Digit Span subtests. The cognitive deficits in highly exposed children match the localization of the volumetric differences detected over the 1 year follow-up, since the deficits observed are consistent with impairment of parietal and temporal lobe functions. Regardless of the presence of prefrontal WMH, Mexico City children performed more poorly across a variety of cognitive tests, compared to CTL children, thus WMH⁺ is likely only partially identifying underlying white matter pathology. Together these findings reveal that exposure to air pollution may perturb the trajectory of cerebral development and result in cognitive deficits during childhood.     

Dimensions of Oppositional Defiant Disorder in Young Children: Heterotypic Continuity with Anxiety and Depression

There are distinct dimensions of Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD) that have been associated with symptoms of other disorders (heterotypic continuity). The present study compared the heterotypic continuity of a two-factor (Pitt-2) model and the three-factor model incorporated into DSM-5 with symptoms of anxiety and depression. Participants were a diverse community sample of 796 children (38.8 % minority, 49.1 % boys) assessed at ages 4, 5 and 6 years. Symptoms were assessed with the dimensional scales of the Diagnostic Interview Schedule for Children-Young Child version and the Child Symptom Inventory. Dimensions of both the two- and three-factor DSM-5 models were associated with later symptoms of anxiety and depression. The association, however, was weak when accounting for initial levels of internalizing symptoms: thus there was little evidence for the unique contributions of ODD dimensions to symptoms of subsequent internalizing disorders for either model.     

Changes Over Time in the Comprehension of <Emphasis Type="Italic">He</Emphasis> and <Emphasis Type="Italic">They</Emphasis> as Epicene Pronouns

An epicene pronoun is a gender-neutral singular pronoun used in sentences when the gender of the subject is unknown or unspecified. In English, he and they are commonly-used epicene pronouns. Until recently, he has been widely accepted as being grammatically correct. However, many have argued that he is sexist because it may bias people to think about males. Two experiments were performed using a lexical decision task in which participants reacted to gendered words (e.g., aunt and uncle) after reading sentences using he, they, or unrelated epicene pronouns. We conducted the experiments 15 years apart in order to explore whether change in pronoun usage and the social significance of pronouns would be associated with different priming effects. Both experiments demonstrated that pronouns influence the processing of gendered nouns. However, in Experiment 1 they facilitated the processing of feminine nouns whereas in Experiment 2, he slowed the processing of feminine nouns. We discuss these results with respect to language change and conclude that they is a more effective epicene.     

Activating attachment representations impact how we retrieve autobiographical memories

Although much research indicates that proximity to attachment figures confers many psychological benefits, there is little evidence pertaining to how attachment activation may impact autobiographical memory retrieval. Following a negative mood induction to elicit overgeneral autobiographical retrieval, participants (N?=?70) were administered an induction in which they imagined a person who is a strong attachment figure or an acquaintance. Participants then completed an autobiographical memory task to retrieve memories in response to neutral and negative cue words. Attachment priming resulted in less distress, increased retrieval of specific memories, and reduced retrieval of categoric memories. These findings indicate that activation of mental representations of attachment figures can impact on the specificity of autobiographical memory retrieval, and extends prevailing models of autobiographical memory by integrating them with attachment theory.     

Measurement and Predictive Invariance of a Work–Life Boundary Measure Across Gender

Pervasive gender norms influence the way in which men and women create and experience work–life boundaries and work–life conflict, which may lead to differing conceptions of work–life boundary management. Measurement equivalence/invariance (ME/I) and predictive invariance analyses were conducted on the WorkLife Indicator^TM (WLI), a measure of work–life boundary management, to determine if men and women maintain similar conceptualizations of work–life boundary constructs and if work–life outcomes are predicted equally well by WLI scales across gender. Three of the five WLI scales exhibited ME/I; however, half of the WLI scale–criterion pairings failed to demonstrate predictive invariance. These results indicate that measurement and/or predictive invariance cannot be assumed when using work–life boundary assessments across gender.     

Object-centred spatial reference in 4-month-old infants

An appreciation of object-centred spatial relations involves representing a 'within-object' spatial relation across changes in the object orientation. This representational ability is important in adult object recognition [Biederman, I. (1987). Recognition-by-components: A theory of human image understanding. Psychological Review, 94, 115-147; Marr, D., & Nishihara, H. K. (1978). Representation and recognition of the spatial organisation of three-dimensional structure. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, Series B (Biological Sciences), 200, 269-294; Tarr, M. J., & Pinker, S. (1990). When does human object recognition use a viewer-centred reference frame? Psychological Science, 1, 253-256] and is also thought to be a fundamental component of the mature object concept [Piaget, J. (1954). The Construction of Reality in the Child. Routledge & Kegan-Paul: London, UK. (Originally published in French in 1937)]. An experiment is reported in which eighteen 4-month-old infants were familiarised to a specific spatial relation within an object, across six different orientations of the object. On subsequent test trials the object was presented to the infants in an entirely novel orientation. Between successive test trials the within-object spatial relation was alternated between novel and familiar. The infants demonstrated significant sensitivity of their looking to both the novelty of the stimuli and the order in which novel and familiar stimuli were presented. It is concluded that by 4 months of age infants are able to form object-centred spatial frames of reference. These findings are discussed in the light of our current understanding of the development of object representation during infancy.