Sentence-final word completion norms for European Portuguese children and adolescents

This study presents a set of sentence contexts and their cloze probabilities for European Portuguese children and adolescents. Seventy-three sentence contexts (35 low- and 38 high-constraint sentence stems) were presented to 90 children and 102 adolescents. Participants were asked to complete the sentence contexts with the first word that came to mind. For each sentence context, responses were listed and cloze probabilities of the words that were chosen to complete the sentence context were computed. Additionally, idiosyncratic and invalid responses (structural and semantic errors) were analyzed. A high degree of consistency in responses among the two age samples (children and adolescents) was found, along with a decrease of idiosyncratic and invalid responses in older participants. These results shed light on age-related changes in the effects of linguistic context on word production, and also in knowledge’s representation. The full set of norms may be downloaded from http://brm.psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental.     

Affective auditory stimuli: Adaptation of the International Affective Digitized Sounds (IADS-2) for European Portuguese

In this study, we present the normative values of the adaptation of the International Affective Digitized Sounds (IADS-2; Bradley & Lang, 2007a) for European Portuguese (EP). The IADS-2 is a standardized database of 167 naturally occurring sounds that is widely used in the study of emotions. The sounds were rated by 300 college students who were native speakers of EP, in the three affective dimensions of valence, arousal, and dominance, by using the Self-Assessment Manikin (SAM). The aims of this adaptation were threefold: (1)?to provide researchers with standardized and normatively rated affective sounds to be used with an EP population; (2)?to investigate sex and cultural differences in the ratings of affective dimensions of auditory stimuli between EP and the American (Bradley & Lang, 2007a) and Spanish (Fernández-Abascal et al., Psicothema 20:104–113 2008; Redondo, Fraga, Padrón, & Piñeiro, Behavior Research Methods 40:784–790 2008) standardizations; and (3)?to promote research on auditory affective processing in Portugal. Our results indicated that the IADS-2 is a valid and useful database of digitized sounds for the study of emotions in a Portuguese context, allowing for comparisons of its results with those of other international studies that have used the same database for stimulus selection. The normative values of the EP adaptation of the IADS-2 database can be downloaded along with the online version of this article.     

Grammatical category-specific deficits in bilingual aphasia

We report the naming performance of an early and highly proficient Spanish-Catalan bilingual (JPG) suffering from Primary Progressive Aphasia (PPA). JPG's performance revealed a grammatical category-specific deficit, with worse performance in naming verbs than nouns. This dissociation was present in oral and written naming and in his two languages, and it seems to stem from damage to, at least, the lexical level. Despite the fact that JPG's performance was qualitatively very similar across languages, his second language seemed to be more affected than his first language. These results indicate that the cortical organization of the two languages of highly proficient bilinguals follow similar organizational principles, one of this principles being grammatical class.     

Engaging in upward and downward comparisons as a determinant of relative deprivation at work: A longitudinal study

A longitudinal study was conducted among 93 nurses to determine the role of comparing one’s performance with that of one’s colleagues in the increase versus decrease of perceived relative deprivation at work over a period of one year. Relative deprivation at T2 had increased particularly among those high in social comparison orientation (Gibbons & Buunk, 1999) who at T1 (1) more frequently engaged in upward comparisons; (2) more frequently derived positive as well as negative feelings from such comparisons; and (3) more frequently derived negative feelings from downward comparison. Moreover, engaging in downward comparison also led to an increase in perceived relative deprivation at T2. This study is one of the few to find evidence for longitudinal effects of social comparison activity, and the first to find that such effects occur only for those high in social comparison orientation.     

The Minho Word Pool: Norms for imageability,concreteness, and subjective frequency for 3,800 Portuguese words

Words are widely used as stimuli in cognitive research. Because of their complexity, using words requires strict control of their objective (lexical and sublexical) and subjective properties. In this work, we present the Minho Word Pool (MWP), a dataset that provides normative values of imageability, concreteness, and subjective frequency for 3,800 (European) Portuguese words—three subjective measures that, in spite of being used extensively in research, have been scarce for Portuguese. Data were collected with 2,357 college students who were native speakers of European Portuguese. The participants rated 100 words drawn randomly from the full set for each of the three subjective indices, using a Web survey procedure (via a URL link). Analyses comparing the MWP ratings with those obtained for the same words from other national and international databases showed that the MWP norms are reliable and valid, thus providing researchers with a useful tool to support research in all neuroscientific areas using verbal stimuli. The MWP norms can be downloaded along with this article or from http://p-pal.di.uminho.pt/about/databases.     

General cognitive functioning and psycholinguistic abilities in children with Smith-Magenis Syndrome

This study is a neuropsycholinguistic research of a rare genetic syndrome with microdeletion that co-occurs with intellectual disabilities and relatively good language abilities, the Smith-Magenis Syndrome (SMS). Nevertheless, there are no cognitive and psycholinguistic profile analyses performed with Spanish population. In this sense, we characterized the cognitive and psycholinguistic profile of a sample with 9 participants with SMS (7 to 11 years of age). The cognitive and psychological profile was assessed with diverse standardized tests: Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children - IV version, Illinois Test of Psycholinguistic Abilities and Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test. Results suggest a specific cognitive and psychological profile characterized by a low IQ and relative good abilities in integrating information, whereas attention problems and hyperactive behaviors were displayed when interacting with the child during the assessment. This work is the first evidence of the cognitive and psycholinguistic profile characterization in patients with SMS in Spain, and will help to guide a more accurate diagnosis and differential intervention in rare genetic diseases with similar cognitive and psycholinguistic profiles.     

Intergenerational Transmission of Conflict-Related Trauma in Northern Ireland: A Behavior Analytic Approach

Intergenerational transmission of trauma describes the impact that traumatic events experienced by one generation have for the subsequent generation. In Northern Ireland, violent conflict raged between 1969 and 1998, when a peace process begun. This study explored to what extent (if any) parents’ experiences of the conflict influenced how children perceived life in this society. Parents completed a questionnaire, and their children drew 2 pictures, depicting Northern Ireland now and before they were born. Children’s behaviors and awareness of the conflict were influenced by their parents’ experiences and narratives, their age, gender, and school. Parental narrative about the violence was influenced by individual learning history, the child’s age and gender, and present circumstances. A behavior analytic approach is offered.     

Grammatical gender processing in bilinguals: An analytic review

Psychonomic Bulletin & Review - In this review article, we analyze how grammatical gender is represented and processed in the bilingual mind. To that end, we review the data from 13 existing...     

Lifeguards and Physically Risky Prosocial Groups: A comparison based on personality theory

The goal of this study is to explore the personality of experienced professional lifeguards in terms of Eysenck and Eysenck's PEN model of personality and Zuckerman's sensation seeking trait. A sample of 144 male professional lifeguards were contrasted with three different samples: (1) a general population sample; (2) a sample of individuals engaged in physically risky sports; and (3) a sample of prosocial physically risky professionals. It was found that lifeguards resembled most closely the prosocials followed by the sportsmen and finally the general population. The most frequent and largest differences between lifeguards and the comparison groups were found on extraversion, experience seeking, and neuroticism. The implications for lifeguard selection procedures and future research are discussed.     

Psychometric properties of the Spanish Human System Audit Short-Scale of transformational leadership

The aim of this research is to examine the psychometric properties of a Spanish version of the Human System Audit transformational leadership short-scale (HSA-TFL-ES). It is based on the concept of Bass developed in 1985. The HSA-TFL is a part of the wider Human System Audit frame. We analyzed the HSA-TFL-ES in five different samples with a total number of 1,718 workers at five sectors. Exploratory Factor Analysis corroborated a single factor in all samples that accounted for 66% to 73% of variance. The internal consistency in all samples was good (alpha = .92 - .95). Evidence was found for the convergent validity of the HSA-TFL-ES and the Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire. These results suggested that the HSA-TFL short-scale is a psychometrically sound measure of this construct and can be used for a combined and first overall measurement.