Children’s Coping Strategies to Inter-Parental Conflict: The Moderating Role of Attachment

In the literature on inter-parental conflict, little attention has been paid to the relationships among children’s attachment, coping strategies, and coping efficacy. The present study aims to explore whether and how children’s Internal Working Models of attachment moderate the associations among children’s perceived distress during the conflict, coping strategies, and coping efficacy. One hundred eighty-two school-aged children (87 secure, 46 anxious-ambivalent and 49 avoidant) and their parents completed measures of inter-parental conflict, attachment, coping strategies, and coping efficacy. The results indicate that children with different IWMs varied in the relations between coping strategies and coping efficacy. More precisely, the data show that secure children, when distressed, use the all of the coping strategies investigated, but the only ones that mediate the associations between their distress reactions and perceived coping efficacy were the positive cognitive restructuring strategies and the seeking support for feelings strategies. Avoidant children, when distressed, use higher levels of distraction and avoidance strategies and avoidance strategies mediated the effects of the children’s distress reactions on their coping inefficacy. Finally, anxious-ambivalent children, when distressed, activate all the coping strategies, with the exception of distraction and support for feelings. However, none of the strategies are correlated to their perceived coping efficacy.     

Global/local processing of hierarchical visual stimuli in a conflict–choice task by capuchin monkeys (<Emphasis Type="Italic">Sapajus</Emphasis> spp.)

In the last two decades, comparative research has addressed the issue of how the global and local levels of structure of visual stimuli are processed by different species, using Navon-type hierarchical figures, i.e. smaller local elements that form larger global configurations. Determining whether or not the variety of procedures adopted to test different species with hierarchical figures are equivalent is of crucial importance to ensure comparability of results. Among non-human species, global/local processing has been extensively studied in tufted capuchin monkeys using matching-to-sample tasks with hierarchical patterns. Local dominance has emerged consistently in these New World primates. In the present study, we assessed capuchins’ processing of hierarchical stimuli with a method frequently adopted in studies of global/local processing in non-primate species: the conflict–choice task. Different from the matching-to-sample procedure, this task involved processing local and global information retained in long-term memory. Capuchins were trained to discriminate between consistent hierarchical stimuli (similar global and local shape) and then tested with inconsistent hierarchical stimuli (different global and local shapes). We found that capuchins preferred the hierarchical stimuli featuring the correct local elements rather than those with the correct global configuration. This finding confirms that capuchins’ local dominance, typically observed using matching-to-sample procedures, is also expressed as a local preference in the conflict–choice task. Our study adds to the growing body of comparative studies on visual grouping functions by demonstrating that the methods most frequently used in the literature on global/local processing produce analogous results irrespective of extent of the involvement of memory processes.     

The attentional cost of inattentional blindness

When our attention is engaged in a visual task, we can be blind to events which would otherwise not be missed. In three experiments, 97 out of the 165 observers performing a visual attention task failed to notice an unexpected, irrelevant object moving across the display. Surprisingly, this object significantly lowered accuracy in the primary task when, and only when, it failed to reach awareness. We suggest that an unexpected stimulus causes a state of alert that would normally generate an attentional shift; if this response is prevented by an attention-consuming task, a portion of the attentional resources remains allocated to the object. Such a portion is large enough to disturb performance, but not so large that the object can be recognized as task-irrelevant and accordingly ignored. Our findings have one counterintuitive implication: irrelevant stimuli might hamper some types of performance only when perceived subliminally.     

Mother-child emotional availability in ecological perspective: three countries, two regions, two genders

This study used a cross-national framework to examine country, region, and gender differences in emotional availability (EA), a prominent index of mutual socioemotional adaptation in the parent-child dyad. Altogether 220 Argentine, Italian, and U.S. mothers and their daughters and sons from both rural and metropolitan areas took part in home observations when the children were 20 months old. In terms of country, Italian mothers were more sensitive and optimally structuring, and Italian children were more responsive and involving, than Argentine and U.S. dyads. In terms of region, rural mothers were more intrusive than metropolitan mothers, and boys from metropolitan areas were more responsive than boys from rural areas. In terms of gender, mothers of girls were more sensitive and optimally structuring than mothers of boys, and daughters were more responsive and involving than sons. Understanding how country, region, and gender influence EA exposes forces that shape child development, parent-infant interaction, and family systems.     

Parental bonding and personality disorder: the mediating role of alexithymia

This study explored whether alexithymic features mediate the effect of perceived adverse parenting during childhood on being diagnosed with a PD in adulthood. Two hundred sixty-five psychiatric outpatients were evaluated with the Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS-20), the Parental Bonding Instrument (PBI), the Structured Interview for DSM-IV Personality, the Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-IV Axis I Disorders, the Clinical Global Impression scale, and the Global Assessment of Functioning scale. The statistical model for mediation proposed by Baron and Kenny (1986) was employed to detect whether the TAS scores account for the relation between PBI scores and a PD diagnosis. The results indicated that although altered parental bonding (and specifically, excessive maternal protection) may enhance the risk of PD, its effect is completely mediated by the alexithymic feature Difficulty Describing Feelings to Others (DDF), after controlling for gender, age, educational level, type, severity and age of onset of Axis I disorders. Therefore, this study suggests that the presence of DDF accounts for the effect of maternal overprotection as a risk factor for PD.     

Do updating tasks involve updating? Evidence from comparisons with immediate serial recall

Updating tasks require participants to process a sequence of items, varying in length, and afterwards to remember only a fixed number of the elements of the sequence; the assumption being that participants actively update the to-be-recalled list as presentation progresses. However recent evidence has cast doubt on this assumption, and the present study examined the strategies that participants employ in such tasks by comparing the serial position curves found in verbal and visuo-spatial updating tasks with those seen in standard serial recall tasks. These comparisons showed that even when the same number of items are presented or recalled, participants perform less well in an updating than a serial recall context. In addition, while standard serial position effects were observed for serial recall, marked recency and reduced or absent primacy effects were seen in updating conditions. These findings suggest that participants do not typically adopt a strategy of actively updating the memory list in updating tasks, but instead tend to wait passively until the list ends before trying to recall the most recently presented items.     

The role of in-group identification in infra-humanization

People tend to infra-humanize by attributing more human essence to their in-group than to out-groups. In the present article, we focus on the attribution of primary and secondary emotions to operationalize the human essence. We propose that, in order to infra-humanize, people need to be categorized in meaningful groups. In addition, we argue that what differentiates meaningful from nonmeaningful groups is that the people essentialize, perceiving members of the group as sharing an underlying, common essence. Also, we hypothesize that participants will identify more with their in-group in the case of meaningful groups. Three types of groups were created to manipulate the meaningfulness of the categorization. Participants were either randomly assigned to a group or they chose their group as a function of their preferences for a colour or the type of career they wished to pursue. As expected, infra-humanization occurred only where the categorization's criterion was meaningful. In addition, in-group identification, but not essentialism, mediated the impact of the categorization criteria on the tendency to infra-humanize. Data also showed that infra-humanization is different from classic in-group favouritism. This is because in-group favouritism, but not infra-humanization, was observed in the situation where group membership was based on random assignment. In other words, for infra-humanization to occur mere categorization is not enough; meaningfulness is also needed. For in-group favouritism to arise, the knowledge of being part of a group is a sufficient prerequisite. The discussion focuses on conditions for reducing infra-humanization and on the relationship between in-group favouritism and out-group derogation.     

The measurement of left—right asymmetries in the Simon effect: A fine-grained analysis

The spatial Simon effect is often asymmetric, being greater on one side than on the other. To date, not much attention has been paid to these asymmetries, and explanations of the Simon effect do not take them into account. In the present article, we attempt to clarify the statistical implications of the asymmetries so as to provide a useful tool for future empirical investigation. Starting with examples from our laboratory and previous well-known studies, we point out the consequences of ignoring the asymmetries in the Simon effect. We suggest an alternative data analysis that might render the results clearer. Finally, through a comparison of left- and right-handed subjects, we demonstrate that asymmetries in the Simon effect are linked to the lateralization of processes involved in the Simon task—that is, attention and response selection. This approach provides a strong argument against collapsing data from the two sides to measure the Simon effect.     

Completeness Theorems via the Double Dual Functor

The aim of this paper is to apply properties of the double dual endofunctor on the category of bounded distributive lattices and some extensions thereof to obtain completeness of certain non-classical propositional logics in a unified way. In particular, we obtain completeness theorems for Moisil calculus, n-valued Łukasiewicz calculus and Nelson calculus. Furthermore we show some conservativeness results by these methods. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.