Gratitude in intermediate affective terrain: links of grateful moods to individual differences and daily emotional experience

Two studies were conducted to explore gratitude in daily mood and the relationships among various affective manifestations of gratitude. In Study 1, spiritual transcendence and a variety of positive affective traits were related to higher mean levels of gratitude across 21 days. Study 2 replicated these findings and revealed that on days when people had more grateful moods than was typical for them, they also reported more frequent daily episodes of grateful emotions, more intense gratitude per episode, and more people to whom they were grateful than was typical for them. In addition, gratitude as an affective trait appeared to render participants' grateful moods somewhat resistant to the effects of discrete emotional episodes of gratitude.     

Intelligence: genetics, genes, and genomics

More is known about the genetics of intelligence than about any other trait, behavioral or biological, which is selectively reviewed in this article. Two of the most interesting genetic findings are that heritability of intelligence increases throughout the life span and that the same genes affect diverse cognitive abilities. The most exciting direction for genetic research on intelligence is to harness the power of the Human Genome Project to identify some of the specific genes responsible for the heritability of intelligence. The next research direction will be functional genomics--for example, understanding the brain pathways between genes and intelligence. Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) will integrate life sciences research on intelligence; bottom-up molecular biological research will meet top-down psychological research in the brain.     

Processing reduced word forms: the suffix restoration effect

Listeners cannot recognize highly reduced word forms in isolation, but they can do so when these forms are presented in context (Ernestus, Baayen, & Schreuder, 2002). This suggests that not all possible surface forms of words have equal status in the mental lexicon. The present study shows that the reduced forms are linked to the canonical representations in the mental lexicon, and that these latter representations induce reconstruction processes. Listeners restore suffixes that are partly or completely missing in reduced word forms. A series of phoneme-monitoring experiments reveals the nature of this restoration: the basis for suffix restoration is mainly phonological in nature, but orthography has an influence as well.     

Morphological family size in a morphologically rich language: the case of Finnish compared with Dutch and Hebrew

Finnish has a very productive morphology in which a stem can give rise to several thousand words. This study presents a visual lexical decision experiment addressing the processing consequences of the huge productivity of Finnish morphology. The authors observed that in Finnish words with larger morphological families elicited shorter response latencies. However, in contrast to Dutch and Hebrew, it is not the complete morphological family of a complex Finnish word that codetermines response latencies but only the subset of words directly derived from the complex word itself. Comparisons with parallel experiments using translation equivalents in Dutch and Hebrew showed substantial cross-language predictivity of family size between Finnish and Dutch but not between Finnish and Hebrew, reflecting the different ways in which the Hebrew and Finnish morphological systems contribute to the semantic organization of concepts in the mental lexicon.     

ERP study of pre-attentive auditory processing in treatment-refractory schizophrenia

Event-related potential (ERP) studies have demonstrated impaired auditory sensory processing in patients with schizophrenia, as reflected in abnormal mismatch negativity (MMN). We sought to extend this finding by evaluating MMN in 13 treatment-refractory patients with schizophrenia, and 14 age- and gender-matched healthy controls. Subjects responded to infrequent visual stimulation while ignoring binaurally presented auditory tones. The amplitude and topographical pattern of the MMN were analyzed. The control group presented the expected reduction in the amplitude of the MMN from frontal to central and parietal locations. In comparison, the MMN amplitude was not reduced in the treatment-refractory patients, and was largest at the central-posterior electrode location. In addition, patients displayed larger negativities at left frontal, and left- and right-temporal electrode locations than the control subjects. These findings are consistent with pre-attentive abnormalities in treatment-refractory patients with schizophrenia.     

Touchscreen-enhanced visual learning in rats

The efficiency of traditional levers and of modern touchscreen technology for training rats on a computerized visual discrimination was studied in a series of observations. When compared with a lever-based discrimination procedure, the use of touchscreens supported the faster development of signal tracking behavior and acquisition of a two-stimulus simultaneous visual discrimination. It did not affect the final level of accuracy. Factors related to spatial proximity of the responses with the stimuli, sign-tracking, and increased ease of touchscreen motor responses were suggested as possible reasons for the touchscreen training advantage. This increased efficiency allows large numbers of animals to be tested quickly, a necessary requirement for studies involving genetic and physiological interventions.     

The success of Caucasian mothers in guiding adolescents

The purpose of this study was to determine how 391 Caucasian American mothers of 10- to 14-year-olds viewed their assets and limitations as parents and to find out how 352 adolescents perceived the parenting performance of their mothers. Both generations completed the Parent Success Indicator. It was found that the amount of time mothers spent talking to, and doing things with, their adolescent children had the greatest impact on how both generations rated mother success.     

Working memory for visual features and conjunctions in schizophrenia

The visual working memory (WM) storage capacity of patients with schizophrenia was investigated using a change detection paradigm. Participants were presented with 2, 3, 4, or 6 colored bars with testing of both single feature (color, orientation) and feature conjunction conditions. Patients performed significantly worse than controls at all set sizes but demonstrated normal feature binding. Unlike controls, patient WM capacity declined at set size 6 relative to set size 4. Impairments with subcapacity arrays suggest a deficit in task set maintenance: Greater impairment for supercapacity set sizes suggests a deficit in the ability to selectively encode information for WM storage. Thus, the WM impairment in schizophrenia appears to be a consequence of attentional deficits rather than a reduction in storage capacity.     

Delayed matching to two-picture samples by individuals with and without disabilities: an analysis of the role of naming

Delayed matching to complex, two-picture samples (e.g., cat-dog) may be improved when the samples occasion differential verbal behavior. In Experiment 1, individuals with mental retardation matched picture comparisons to identical single-picture samples or to two-picture samples, one of which was identical to a comparison. Accuracy scores were typically high on single-picture trials under both simultaneous and delayed matching conditions. Scores on two-picture trials were also high during the simultaneous condition but were lower during the delay condition. However, scores improved on delayed two-picture trials when each of the sample pictures was named aloud before comparison responding. Experiment 2 replicated these results with preschoolers with typical development and a youth with mental retardation. Sample naming also improved the preschoolers' matching when the samples were pairs of spoken names and the correct comparison picture matched one of the names. Collectively, the participants could produce the verbal behavior that might have improved performance, but typically did not do so unless the procedure required it. The success of the naming intervention recommends it for improving the observing and remembering of multiple elements of complex instructional stimuli.