Parenting, achievement strategies and satisfaction in ice hockey

The aim of this study is to understand adolescent players' satisfaction as a function of parenting styles, players' achievement strategies, and their norm breaking behavior. Finnish 14- and 16-year-old ice-hockey players (n=1018) completed a questionnaire measuring their achievement strategies (SAQ; Nurmi, Salmela--Aro & Haavisto, 1995 b), as well as scales of norm breaking and satisfaction, prepared for the present study. The parents (n=979) filled in scales measuring their parenting styles (CRPR; Pulkkinen, 1996) and attitudes towards norm breaking. Results revealed that players from authoritative families who showed a high level of mastery-orientation expressed high satisfaction in playing ice hockey. Results also showed negative associations between authoritative parenting and both task irrelevant and norm breaking behavior. Parents with parental stress and those with authoritarian parenting styles showed positive attitudes to norm breaking behavior, and players from authoritarian and parental stress homes showed norm breaking behavior in ice hockey. There was no association between norm breaking behavior and player satisfaction. Our results contribute to the planning of a coaching system that serves more educational and developmental purposes, and that encourages the desire to play ice hockey as a hobby.     

Rapid serial naming: relations between different stimuli and neuropsychological factors

We report two studies on rapid serial naming (RSN). Study 1 addressed the relations among RSN tasks comprising different stimuli. Separate components for RSN of alphanumeric and non-alphanumeric stimuli, as well as for tasks in which the stimuli alternated between categories were identified. In Study 2, phonological skills, processing speed, motor dexterity, and verbal fluency were found to explain RSN performance. The studies indicate: (1) that RSN tasks vary in their properties according to the stimuli used and according to the way the tasks are arranged, and (2) that RSN tasks are multi-componented.     

Impaired verb fluency: a sign of mild cognitive impairment

We assessed verb fluency vs. noun and letter-based fluency in 199 subjects referred for cognitive complaints including Subjective Cognitive Impairment, Mild Cognitive Impairment, and Alzheimer's disease. ANCOVAs and factor analyses identified verb, noun, and letter-based fluency as distinct tasks. Verb fluency performance in Mild Cognitive Impairment differed significantly from Subjective Cognitive Impairment and Alzheimer's disease. Reduced verb fluency thus appears to be a linguistic marker for incipient dementia. One possibility is that the verb fluency deficit in Mild Cognitive Impairment results from degenerative processes known to occur in the parahippocampal region.     

Detection of sound rise time by adults with dyslexia

Low sensitivity to amplitude modulated (AM) sounds is reported to be associated with dyslexia. An important aspect of amplitude modulation cycles are the rise and fall times within the sound. In this study, simplified stimuli equivalent to just one cycle were used and sensitivity to varying rise times was explored. Adult participants with dyslexia or compensated dyslexia and a control group performed a detection task with sound pairs of different rise times. Results showed that the participants with dyslexia differed from the control group in rise time detection and a correlation was found between rise time detection and reading and phonological skills. A subgroup of participants with lower sensitivity to rise time detection characterized by low accuracy in syllable-level phonological skills was found within the dyslexic group. Short stimuli containing only one rise time produced associations with phonological skills and reading, even in a language where the perception of rise time contrasts are not crucial for the signaling of phonemic contrast.     

Finger gnosia: a predictor of numerical abilities in children?

This paper aimed to test the specificity of predicting power of finger gnosia on later numerical abilities in school-age children and to contribute to the understanding of this effect. Forty-one children were tested in the beginning of Grade 1 on finger gnosia, left-right orientation (another sign of the Gerstmann "syndrome"), and global development. Fifteen months later, numerical and reading abilities were assessed. Analyses of the results indicated that, contrary to the general measures of cognitive development, performance in the finger gnosia test was a good predictor of numerical skills 1 year later but not of reading skills, which proves the specificity of that predictor. The same conclusion was also true for the left-right orientation. However, finger gnosia could equally predict performance in numerical tasks that do or do not rely heavily on finger representation or on magnitude representation. Results are discussed in terms of the localizationist and the functional hypotheses.     

A psychometric assessment of a Swedish translation of Spreitzer's empowerment scale

The psychometric properties of a Swedish translation of Spreitzer's (1995a) empowerment scale were assessed. Three parallel assessments were made of data from 1,107 female registered nurses, 758 female assistant nurses, and 107 male registered and assistant nurses. The analyses indicated that the psychometric properties of the scale can be considered satisfactory. Suggestions are made regarding future research in the fields of psychometrics and work- and health-psychology.     

Stability, growth, and decline in adult life span development of declarative memory: cross-sectional and longitudinal data from a population-based study

Five-year changes in episodic and semantic memory were examined in a sample of 829 participants (35-80 years). A cohort-matched sample (N=967) was assessed to control for practice effects. For episodic memory, cross-sectional analyses indicated gradual age-related decrements, whereas the longitudinal data revealed no decrements before age 60, even when practice effects were adjusted for. Longitudinally, semantic memory showed minor increments until age 55, with smaller decrements in old age as compared with episodic memory. Cohort differences in educational attainment appear to account for the discrepancies between cross-sectional and longitudinal data. Collectively, the results show that age trajectories for episodic and semantic memory differ and underscore the need to control for cohort and retest effects in cross-sectional and longitudinal studies, respectively.     

Do chickens (Gallus gallus f. domestica) decompose visual figures?

To investigate whether learning to discriminate between visual compound stimuli depends on decomposing them into constituting features, hens were first trained to discriminate four features (red, green, horizontal, vertical) from two dimensions (colour, line orientation). After acquisition, hens were trained with compound stimuli made up from these dimensions in two ways: a separable (line on a coloured background) stimulus and an integral one (coloured line). This compound training included a reversal of reinforcement of only one of the two dimensions (half-reversal). After having achieved the compound stimulus discrimination, a second dimensional training identical to the first was performed. Finally, in the second compound training the other dimension was reversed. Two major results were found: (1) an interaction between the dimension reversed and the type of compound stimulus: in compound training with colour reversal, separable compound stimuli were discriminated worse than integral compounds and vice versa in compound training with line orientation reversed. (2) Performance in the second compound training was worse than in the first one. The first result points to a similar mode of processing for separable and integral compounds, whereas the second result shows that the whole stimulus is psychologically superior to its constituting features. Experiment 2 repeated experiment 1 using line orientation stimuli of reversed line and background brightness. Nevertheless, the results were similar to experiment 1. Results are discussed in the framework of a configural exemplar theory of discrimination that assumes the representation of the whole stimulus situation combined with transfer based on a measure of overall similarity.     

The functional significance of theta and upper alpha oscillations

Recent findings are reviewed indicating that upper alpha oscillations - when analyzed with appropriate time/ frequency resolution - show a similar physiological reactivity as theta in working memory tasks. Comparable to theta, a load dependent increase in power can be observed during retention and increased evoked activity during retrieval. During retrieval attempts theta behaves like a traveling wave spreading from anterior to posterior sites. During actual retrieval, however, evoked upper alpha becomes transiently nested in theta. We suggest that theta reflects working memory functions whereas upper alpha may be important for the reactivation of long-term memory codes in short-term memory.     

Social dominance orientation,prejudice, and discrimination: A new computer-based method for studying discriminatory behaviors

A number of studies have shown that the scale of social dominance orientation (SDO), used to measure the degree of preference for inequality among social groups, is a predictive measure of social and political attitudes toward stigmatized outgroups. However, the relationship between SDO and discrimination has received little attention. The main goal of this study was to assess the validity of a new computer-based method used to measure discriminatory behaviors in a laboratory setting. An additional goal was to test the mediating role of prejudice in the relation between SDO and discrimination. The results provide a first validation of this new method and demonstrate that the effect of SDO on discrimination is mediated by prejudice.