Personality Traits Elucidate Sex Differences in Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder Comorbidity During Early Childhood

Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is highly comorbid with other childhood disorders, and there are striking sex differences in this comorbidity, particularly during early childhood. For example, boys with ADHD are more likely to exhibit comorbid disruptive behavior and neurodevelopmental disorders, compared to girls, during early childhood. Yet, explanations for these well-established sex differences remain in short supply. The current study evaluated the novel hypothesis that personality traits may serve as intermediate phenotypes that help explain sex differences in common ADHD comorbidity profiles during early childhood. Study participants were 109 children between the ages of 3 and 6 and their primary caregivers and teachers/daycare providers, recruited from the community and over-recruited for ADHD-related problems. Primary caregivers completed the Child Behavior Checklist, and teachers/daycare providers completed the Teacher Report Form as a measure of child behavior problems. Examiners completed the California Q-Sort as a measure of child personality traits. Moderated mediation analyses suggested that personality traits explain associations between ADHD and oppositional-defiance, aggression, and language problems in a sex-specific manner. While high neuroticism mediated associations between ADHD and oppositional-defiance in girls, disagreeableness mediated associations between ADHD and aggression and low conscientiousness mediated associations between ADHD and neurodevelopmental language problems in boys. Sex differences in trait-psychopathology associations may help explain sex differences in comorbidity profiles with possible implications for child assessment and personalized early intervention.     

The Generalized Quantum Episodic Memory Model

Recent evidence suggests that experienced events are often mapped to too many episodic states, including those that are logically or experimentally incompatible with one another. For example, episodic over‐distribution patterns show that the probability of accepting an item under different mutually exclusive conditions violates the disjunction rule. A related example, called subadditivity, occurs when the probability of accepting an item under mutually exclusive and exhaustive instruction conditions sums to a number >1. Both the over‐distribution effect and subadditivity have been widely observed in item and source‐memory paradigms. These phenomena are difficult to explain using standard memory frameworks, such as signal‐detection theory. A dual‐trace model called the over‐distribution (OD) model (Brainerd & Reyna, 2008) can explain the episodic over‐distribution effect, but not subadditivity. Our goal is to develop a model that can explain both effects. In this paper, we propose the Generalized Quantum Episodic Memory (GQEM) model, which extends the Quantum Episodic Memory (QEM) model developed by Brainerd, Wang, and Reyna (2013). We test GQEM by comparing it to the OD model using data from a novel item‐memory experiment and a previously published source‐memory experiment (Kellen, Singmann, & Klauer, 2014) examining the over‐distribution effect. Using the best‐fit parameters from the over‐distribution experiments, we conclude by showing that the GQEM model can also account for subadditivity. Overall these results add to a growing body of evidence suggesting that quantum probability theory is a valuable tool in modeling recognition memory.     

To trust or not to trust: social decision‐making in post‐institutionalized,internationally adopted youth

Chronic parental maltreatment has been associated with lower levels of interpersonal trust, and depriving environments have been shown to predict short‐sighted, risk‐averse decision‐making. The present study examined whether a circumscribed period of adverse care occurring only early in life was associated with biases in trust behavior. Fifty‐three post‐institutionalized (PI) youth, adopted internationally on average by 1 year of age, and 33 never‐institutionalized, non‐adopted youth (M_age = 12.9 years) played a trust game. Participants decided whether or not to share coins with a different anonymous peer in each trial with the potential to receive a larger number of coins in return. Trials were presented in blocks that varied in the degree to which the peers behaved in a trustworthy (reciprocal) or untrustworthy (non‐reciprocal) manner. A comparison condition consisted of a computerized lottery with the same choices and probabilistic risk as the peer trials. Non‐adopted comparison youth showed a tendency to share more with peers than to invest in the lottery and tended to maintain their level of sharing across trials despite experiencing trials in which peers failed to reciprocate. In contrast, PI children, particularly those who were adopted over 1 year of age, shared less with peers than they invested in the lottery and quickly adapted their sharing behavior to peers’ responses. These results suggest that PI youth were more mistrusting, more sensitive to both defection and reciprocation, and potentially more accurate in their trusting decisions than comparison youth. Results support the presence of a sensitive period for the development of trust in others, whereby conditions early in life may set long‐term biases in decision‐making.     

A Sustainable Medicine: Lessons from the Old Order Amish

Daniel Callahan's concept of a sustainable medicine is examined by looking at experiences Old Order Amish communities have had with organ and bone marrow transplantation. The Amish possess many characteristics that might make them embrace limits on the use of expensive, life-prolonging medical treatments: they believe that the good of the individual should be subordinated to the good of the community, they are suspicious of progress as a goal, and they are more comfortable with dying than many other modern Americans. However, the Amish actively pursue these treatments without the benefit of private or government insurance. Although the Amish affective response to sick individuals is worthy of emulating, their commitment to help individuals obtain and pay for transplants has had negative financial and cultural effects on some Amish communities. The Amish experience can thus teach us lessons about how to care for one another when we are sick and dying, but it can also teach us how difficult but important it is to limit some forms of expensive care for the good of our communities.     

Relational categories are more mutable than entity categories

Across three experiments, we explore differences between relational categories—whose members share common relational patterns—and entity categories, whose members share common intrinsic properties. Specifically, we test the claim that relational concepts are more semantically mutable in context, and therefore less stable in memory, than entity concepts. We compared memory for entity nouns and relational nouns, tested either in the same context as at encoding or in a different context. We found that (a) participants show better recognition accuracy for entity nouns than for relational nouns, and (b) recognition of relational nouns is more impaired by a change in context than is recognition of entity nouns. We replicated these findings even when controlling for factors highly correlated with relationality, such as abstractness–concreteness. This suggests that the contextual mutability of relational concepts is due to the core semantic property of conveying relational structure and not simply to accompanying characteristics such as abstractness. We note parallels with the distinction between nouns and verbs and suggest implications for lexical and conceptual structure. Finally, we relate these patterns to proposals that a deep distinction exists between words with an essentially referential function and those with a predicate function.     

The associations of cultural worldviews,political orientation,and trust with COVID-19 risk beliefs in the U.S.

Given that risk beliefs predict engagement in behaviors to prevent disease, it is important to understand the factors associated with risk beliefs. In the present paper, we conducted path analyses to investigate the associations of belief systems (political orientation and cultural worldviews of individualism and hierarchy) with COVID-19 risk beliefs (i.e., perceived likelihood, perceived severity, and worry about disease; Studies 1 and 2), and the indirect effect through trust in information sources in these relationships (Study 1). Two online panels of U.S. adults were surveyed at three timepoints during the COVID-19 pandemic (Study 1: baseline n = 1,667, 1-year follow-up n = 551; Study 2: n = 404). Results of path analyses indicated that, across studies and timepoints, when controlling for political orientation, trust, and demographic factors, greater individualism had consistent significant direct effects on lower perceived severity and worry about COVID-19, whereas greater hierarchy had consistent significant direct effects on lower perceived severity. However, after accounting for cultural worldviews of individualism and hierarchy (and trust and demographic factors), none of the associations among political orientation and any of the three COVID-19 risk beliefs were significant. The test of indirect effects indicated that individualism and hierarchy were indirectly associated with lower perceived severity of and worry about COVID-19 through less trust. The findings suggest that cultural worldviews of individualism and hierarchy play a role in shaping people's risk beliefs.     

Moral Luck and the Possibility of Agential Disjunctivism

Most presentations of the problem of moral luck invoke the notion of control, but little has been said about what control amounts to. We propose a necessary condition on an agent's having been in control of performing an action: that the agent's effort to perform the action ensured that the agent performed the action. The difficulty of satisfying this condition (or one like it) leads many on both sides of the moral luck debate to conclude that much of what we do is not within our control, and, at the limit, underpins agential skepticism, the view that no one has ever been in control of having performed an action in the external world. We propose a response to the agential skeptic modeled on the epistemological disjunctivist's response to the skeptic about perceptual experience. According to agential disjunctivism, the necessary condition on control can be met, thus undermining agential skepticism and one motivation for the problem of moral luck. Our view can be understood as resisting moral luck not by shrinking the domain of robust moral evaluation but by refusing to contract the realm of robust control.