Changing minds: Children's inferences about third party belief revision

By the age of 5, children explicitly represent that agents can have both true and false beliefs based on epistemic access to information (e.g., Wellman, Cross, & Watson, 2001). Children also begin to understand that agents can view identical evidence and draw different inferences from it (e.g., Carpendale & Chandler, 1996). However, much less is known about when, and under what conditions, children expect other agents to change their minds. Here, inspired by formal ideal observer models of learning, we investigate children's expectations of the dynamics that underlie third parties’ belief revision. We introduce an agent who has prior beliefs about the location of a population of toys and then observes evidence that, from an ideal observer perspective, either does, or does not justify revising those beliefs. We show that children's inferences on behalf of third parties are consistent with the ideal observer perspective, but not with a number of alternative possibilities, including that children expect other agents to be influenced only by their prior beliefs, only by the sampling process, or only by the observed data. Rather, children integrate all three factors in determining how and when agents will update their beliefs from evidence.     

Chimpanzees demonstrate individual differences in social information use

Studies of transmission biases in social learning have greatly informed our understanding of how behaviour patterns may diffuse through animal populations, yet within-species inter-individual variation in social information use has received little attention and remains poorly understood. We have addressed this question by examining individual performances across multiple experiments with the same population of primates. We compiled a dataset spanning 16 social learning studies (26 experimental conditions) carried out at the same study site over a 12-year period, incorporating a total of 167 chimpanzees. We applied a binary scoring system to code each participant’s performance in each study according to whether they demonstrated evidence of using social information from conspecifics to solve the experimental task or not (Social Information Score—‘SIS’). Bayesian binomial mixed effects models were then used to estimate the extent to which individual differences influenced SIS, together with any effects of sex, rearing history, age, prior involvement in research and task type on SIS. An estimate of repeatability found that approximately half of the variance in SIS was accounted for by individual identity, indicating that individual differences play a critical role in the social learning behaviour of chimpanzees. According to the model that best fit the data, females were, depending on their rearing history, 15–24% more likely to use social information to solve experimental tasks than males. However, there was no strong evidence of an effect of age or research experience, and pedigree records indicated that SIS was not a strongly heritable trait. Our study offers a novel, transferable method for the study of individual differences in social learning.     

A Longitudinal Analysis of Gaming- and Non-Gaming-Related Friendships and Social Support among Social Online Game Players

Research examining online games often focuses on their potential to negatively impact players. One of the most common concerns is that playing online with others can displace offline relationships and, consequently, detrimentally affect one’s level of “offline” social support. However, there has been little empirical evidence supporting these causal claims. The current study addresses this by outlining a longitudinal analysis between gaming- and non-gaming-related friendships and social support among a representative sample of social online players (i.e., people who play online video games with others). The results indicate that social online video game play with online or offline friends is not related to perceived social support, positively or negatively, cross-sectionally or longitudinally. Taken together, these results dispute the long-held claims of the social displacement hypothesis and instead suggest that social online video game play does not have negative real-world consequences on players’ offline friendships or levels of offline social support.     

Primary Biological Motivators in Music Media: Motivated Processing of Sex and Violence

This study examined the processing of primary biologically motivating content commonly found in popular music videos—sex and violence—from a motivated cognition perspective (Lang, 2006, 2009). Participants (N = 68) were presented with music videos containing different combinations of primary biologically motivating content (i.e., sex, violence, both, neither). Secondary task reaction times were used to index resources available for encoding and a visual recognition task was applied to measure memory. The results indicate that music videos that contained both sex and violence provided the most engaging and memorable experiences, potentially even flow experiences. Implications for processing these types of information in these ways are discussed and future research is suggested.     

Carers’ beliefs about counselling: a community participatory study in Wales

This interpretivist community participatory study explores carers’ beliefs about the potential usefulness of counselling in relation to the caring role. Twenty semi-structured interviews with carers were transcribed and analysed thematically. All participants thought counselling could potentially be helpful to carers, but their ideas about the ways in which it would help varied according to whether or not they had personal experience of counselling. Only carers with counselling experience had an awareness of counselling as focussing on changing feelings, thoughts, attitudes and behaviours. The implications of the findings for the provision of counselling services are discussed.     

Support for a Modified Tripartite Dual Pathway Model of Body Image Concerns and Risky Body Change Behaviors in French Young Men

The aim of the present study was to extend the extant literature by testing a modified Tripartite Dual Pathway Model of the development of male body image and eating concerns among French young men. A sample of 147 French male college students (M _age = 22.09 years-old, range = 18–30) completed a questionnaire assessing sociocultural influences, internalization of the lean/low body fat ideal and the muscular/athletic ideal, appearance comparison, body fat and muscularity dissatisfaction, muscularity enhancement behaviors, drive for thinness, and bulimic symptoms. The revised and final model was an adequate fit to the data, and included separate pathways for muscularity- and leanness-related concerns. This model shows that sociocultural pressures perceived from the media, family members, and peers were associated, through appearance comparison and internalization of the lean and muscular ideal, with body image concerns, disordered eating, and muscularity enhancement behaviors. Results reveal a strong and direct relationship between the internalization of the muscular/athletic ideal and muscularity enhancement behaviors. These findings contribute to the refinement of sociocultural models of the development of body image concerns and unhealthy body change behaviors including disordered eating among men, provide additional support for the usefulness of these models, and extend them to non-English speaking Western contexts.     

Sympathetic Under-Arousal and Externalizing Behavior Problems in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) commonly exhibit co-occurring externalizing behavior problems, which can impede learning opportunities and contribute significantly to caregiver stress. Substantial theory and research has linked under-arousal of the sympathetic nervous system to increased externalizing problems in children without ASD, but under-arousal has not been considered as an explanatory mechanism for individual differences among children with ASD. We tested the notion that lower electrodermal activity (EDA) would predict more externalizing problems in children with ASD, and considered the degree to which parent co-regulatory support could buffer this risk. Forty children with ASD between the ages of 4 and 11 years and their primary caregivers participated in a laboratory visit that included various play, compliance, and problem-solving regulatory tasks. EDA was measured through wireless wrist sensors, parental scaffolding was observed during a dyadic problem-solving task, and parents rated their children’s externalizing behavior problems. As predicted, low EDA during the compliance-oriented tasks directly predicted higher child externalizing problems. Parental scaffolding moderated the link between under-arousal during the problem-solving regulatory tasks and externalizing problems such that the relation was observed in the context of low, but not high, support. Implications for relevant theories (e.g., fearlessness theory, stimulation-seeking theory) are discussed, and the potential for psychophysiological patterns to inform intervention with these children is considered.     

The Hopkins Verbal Learning Test: an in-depth analysis of recall patterns

One of the earliest signs of dementia is memory issues and verbal word lists, such as the Hopkins Verbal Learning Test (HVLT), are successfully used for screening. To gain insight in how memory is affected in dementia, and to further improve the efficacy of the HVLT, in-depth analysis of the recall patterns of dementia cases and controls was conducted. Dementia cases and controls were matched for factors that can affect performance, such as age, gender and education level. Word frequency, syllable length, and orthographic neighbourhood size did not differ in the Indonesian version of the HVLT, nor did these characteristics affect recall. However dementia cases showed consistent and poor recall across the three trials; with the worst recall for the “human shelter” category and best recall for the “animals” category. Dementia cases also showed impaired accessibility of all categories with reduced subsequent recall from accessed categories and reduced primacy and recency levels. Finally, dementia cases exhibited lower levels of re-remembering and recalling new words, and higher levels of immediate forgetting and never recalling words. It was concluded that utilising the extra information provided by the in-depth analyses of the recall patterns could be beneficial to improve dementia screening.