Why ritualized behavior? Precaution Systems and action parsing in developmental, pathological and cultural rituals

Ritualized behavior, intuitively recognizable by its stereotypy, rigidity, repetition, and apparent lack of rational motivation, is found in a variety of life conditions, customs, and everyday practices: in cultural rituals, whether religious or non-religious; in many children's complicated routines; in the pathology of obsessive-compulsive disorders (OCD); in normal adults around certain stages of the life-cycle, birthing in particular. Combining evidence from evolutionary anthropology, neuropsychology and neuroimaging, we propose an explanation of ritualized behavior in terms of an evolved Precaution System geared to the detection of and reaction to inferred threats to fitness. This system, distinct from fear-systems geared to respond to manifest danger, includes a repertoire of clues for potential danger as well as a repertoire of species-typical precautions. In OCD pathology, this system does not supply a negative feedback to the appraisal of potential threats, resulting in doubts about the proper performance of precautions, and repetition of action. Also, anxiety levels focus the attention on low-level gestural units of behavior rather than on the goal-related higher-level units normally used in parsing the action-flow. Normally automatized actions are submitted to cognitive control. This "swamps" working memory, an effect of which is a temporary relief from intrusions but also their long-term strengthening. Normal activation of this Precaution System explains intrusions and ritual behaviors in normal adults. Gradual calibration of the system occurs through childhood rituals. Cultural mimicry of this system's normal input makes cultural rituals attention-grabbing and compelling. A number of empirical predictions follow from this synthetic model.     

Specifying emotional information: Regulation of emotional intensity via executive processes

The degree of specificity at which emotional information is activated might determine evoked emotional intensity. However, the nature of this effect remains unclear. Four studies tested (a) whether people hold the na?ve theory that activating specific details of emotional information arouses acute feelings; (b) whether an emotionally distressed population (social phobics) also holds that theory; and (c) whether voluntarily focusing on specific aspects of a distressing situation reduces its emotional impact. Results indicate that control as well as emotionally distressed people hold a na?ve theory that specifying emotion increases its intensity. However, Studies 3 and 4 showed that voluntarily elaborating specific aspects of a distressing situation reduces distress. Results are discussed in terms of voluntary versus automatic processing of emotional information.     

Facial Reactions to Emotional Facial Expressions: Affect or Cognition?

This study investigated whether observers' facial reactions to the emotional facial expressions of others represent an affective or a cognitive response to these emotional expressions. Three hypotheses were contrasted: (1) facial reactions to emotional facial expressions are due to mimicry as part of an affective empathic reaction; (2) facial reactions to emotional facial expressions are a reflection of shared affect due to emotion induction; and (3) facial reactions to emotional facial expressions are determined by cognitive load depending on task difficulty. Two experiments were conducted varying type of task, presentation of stimuli, and task difficulty. The results show that depending on the nature of the rating task, facial reactions to facial expressions may be either affective or cognitive. Specifically, evidence for facial mimicry was only found when individuals made judgements regarding the valence of an emotional facial expression. Other types of judgements regarding facial expressions did not seem to elicit mimicry but may lead to facial responses related to cognitive load.     

Does Occupational Stereotyping Still Exist?

We surveyed 113 college students regarding their views of certain occupational stereotypes. Our results indicated that in this population gender was related to the subjects' views of occupations as either male, female, or neutral, and that the father's primary occupation significantly affected the subjects' views of only one occupation—clinical sociologist. The mother's occupation seemed to have no effect.     

Couples in Therapy: Actor-Partner Analyses of the Relationships Between Adult Romantic Attachment and Marital Satisfaction

This study was the first to investigate the relationship between adult romantic attachment and marital satisfaction in a clinical sample of 172 distressed couples seeking therapy. Fifty-six therapy-seeking nondistressed couples were also assessed for comparison. Analyses of variance showed that attachment avoidance was a distinctive characteristic of distressed couples. Actor-partner analyses revealed that attachment avoidance (for men and women) and attachment anxiety (for women only) were predictive of marital dissatisfaction for distressed couples. Gender-stereotype discordant partner effects were also found. Results suggest that attachment orientations (especially avoidance) are relevant predictors of marital dissatisfaction in distressed couples seeking therapy, and that couple therapists can gain important information by assessing partners’ attachment orientations.     

Evidence for knowledge of the syntax of large numbers in preschoolers

The aim of this study was to provide evidence for knowledge of the syntax governing the verbal form of large numbers in preschoolers long before they are able to count up to these numbers. We reasoned that if such knowledge exists, it should facilitate the maintenance in short-term memory of lists of lexical primitives that constitute a number (e.g., three hundred forty five) compared with lists containing the same primitives but in a scrambled order (e.g., five three forty hundred). The two types of lists were given to 5-year-olds in an immediate serial recall task. As we predicted, the lists in syntactic order were easier to recall, suggesting that they match some knowledge of the way lexical primitives must be ordered to express large numerosities.     

Behavioral and Socio-emotional Functioning in Children with Selective Mutism: A Comparison with Anxious and Typically Developing Children Across Multiple Informants

We examined differences among 158 children, 44 with selective mutism (SM; M = 8.2 years, SD = 3.4 years), 65 with mixed anxiety (MA; M = 8.9 years, SD = 3.2 years), and 49 community controls (M = 7.7 years, SD = 2.6 years) on primary caregiver, teacher, and child reports of behavioral and socio-emotional functioning. Children with SM were rated lower than controls on a range of social skills, but the SM and MA groups did not significantly differ on many of the social skills and anxiety measures. However, children with SM were rated higher than children with MA and controls on social anxiety. Findings suggest that SM may be conceptualized as an anxiety disorder, with primary deficits in social functioning and social anxiety. This interpretation supports a more specific classification of SM as an anxiety disorder for future diagnostic manuals than is currently described in the literature. The present findings also have implications for clinical practice, whereby social skills training merits inclusion in intervention for children with anxiety disorders as well as children with SM.     

Are Proper Names Rigid Designators?

A widely accepted thesis in the philosophy of language is that natural language proper names are rigid designators, and that they are so de jure, or as a matter of the “semantic rules of the language.” This paper questions this claim, arguing that rigidity cannot be plausibly construed as a property of name types and that the alternative, rigidity construed as a property of tokens, means that they cannot be considered rigid de jure; rigidity in this case must be viewed as a pragmatic and not a semantic property.     

New evidence for chunk-based models in word segmentation

There is large evidence that infants are able to exploit statistical cues to discover the words of their language. However, how they proceed to do so is the object of enduring debates. The prevalent position is that words are extracted from the prior computation of statistics, in particular the transitional probabilities between syllables. As an alternative, chunk-based models posit that the sensitivity to statistics results from other processes, whereby many potential chunks are considered as candidate words, then selected as a function of their relevance. These two classes of models have proven to be difficult to dissociate. We propose here a procedure, which leads to contrasted predictions regarding the influence of a first language, L1, on the segmentation of a second language, L2. Simulations run with PARSER (Perruchet & Vinter, 1998), a chunk-based model, predict that when the words of L1 become word-external transitions of L2, learning of L2 should be depleted until reaching below chance level, at least before extensive exposure to L2 reverses the effect. In the same condition, a transitional-probability based model predicts above-chance performance whatever the duration of exposure to L2. PARSER's predictions were confirmed by experimental data: Performance on a two-alternative forced choice test between words and part-words from L2 was significantly below chance even though part-words were less cohesive in terms of transitional probabilities than words.     

Does a yellow filter improve visual object categorization in normal aging?

Previous studies have shown that a yellow filter (CPF450) can increase contrast, motion sensitivity, vergence, and accommodation. We investigated whether a yellow filter can reduce age-related visual deficits. We tested two groups of 60 observers (mean age 24 vs. 72) in an object categorization task. Grayscale photographs of natural objects and artifacts were displayed either centrally or peripherally (21°) at low (8%) or medium (30%) contrast. There were three filter conditions (no filter, placebo filter, and yellow filter). Both groups of observers performed similarly on central and medium-contrast pictures. The deleterious effects of reduced contrast and eccentricity were stronger in elderly individuals. Moreover, the yellow filter globally improved the speed of categorization for the elderly participants. The decrease in response time in the yellow filter condition was larger when the stimuli were displayed peripherally in both groups. A yellow filter should be considered as a potential means for visual improvement in normal aging.