Bicultural adolescents' anger regulation: in between two cultures?

This study explored the anger-regulation strategies of bicultural individuals who are brought up with two distinct cultures that might carry contradictory demands about how to regulate emotions. With a sample of 525 adolescents in the Netherlands and Morocco, we found that bicultural Moroccan-Dutch adolescents' anger regulation in response to hypothetical peer conflict were largely similar to those of their Dutch peers. In fact, both the Dutch and the Moroccan-Dutch adolescents' anger regulation differed in the same ways from the Moroccan group, with greater acting out and less calm verbalisation, reflection, and diversion in the former than in the latter. Additionally, our findings indicate that Moroccan-Dutch adolescents' identification with the Dutch as well as with the Moroccan culture is related to more anger verbalisation and less externalising anger regulation. These results are interpreted in light of the complex cultural position faced by bicultural adolescents.     

Longitudinal effects of theory of mind on later peer relations: the role of prosocial behavior

Children's peer relations represent a key aspect of school adjustment. However, little is known about their social-cognitive precursors. To address this gap, the authors followed 70 children across the transition to primary school. At Time 1 (age 5), Time 2 (age 6), and Time 3 (age 7), children were assessed on their theory of mind, prosocial behavior, and verbal ability. In addition, at Time 2 and at Time 3, the authors gathered peer nominations. Results supported the authors' mediational hypothesis of indirect paths from early theory of mind to subsequently lower peer rejection and higher peer acceptance, via improvements in prosocial behavior. The authors discuss implications of these longitudinal effects for the understanding of the impact of social-cognitive achievements for children's developing social relations.     

Practice makes transfer of motor skills imperfect

We investigated the practice-effects on motor skill transfer and the associated representational memory changes that occur during the within-practice and between-practice phases. In two experiments, participants produced extension–flexion movements with their dominant right arm for a limited or prolonged practice session arranged in either a single- or multi-session format. We tested the ability of participants to transfer the original pattern (extrinsic transformation) or the mirrored one (intrinsic transformation) to the non-dominant left arm, 10?min and 24?h after the practice sessions. Results showed that practice induces rapid motor skill improvements that are non-transferable irrespective of the amount of acquisition trials. Furthermore, the extrinsic component of the skill develops early and remains the dominant coding system during practice. Conversely, we found distinct between-practice memory changes: a limited practice induces an off-line development of the extrinsic component, whereas a prolonged practice session subserves the off-line development of the intrinsic component (Experiment 2). We provided further evidence that the long-term representation of the motor skill also depends on the nature of the practice session itself: the parsing of practice into multiple sessions narrows the effector-transfer capacities in comparison to a single session (Experiment 1). These findings yield theoretical and practical implications that are discussed in the context of recent motor skill learning models.     

Miller (1944) revisited: Movement times in relation to approach and avoidance conflicts

Three experiments (total N = 291) sought to provide support for the idea that avoidance conflicts, relative to approach conflicts, are more difficult to motorically resolve. Conflicts were instantiated by asking individuals to approach desirable stimuli and avoid undesirable stimuli under conditions in which there was no objectively-correct direction of movement. To control for baseline movement speeds, non-conflict trials presented desirable (e.g., reward) and undesirable (e.g., threat) stimuli in the absence of any spatial conflict. In addition, movement times were isolated through the use of a joystick movement paradigm in which movement speeds were quantified subsequent to some initial tendency to move in one direction or the other. Consistent with hypotheses, all experiments found that movement times were slowed in the context of avoidance conflicts relative to approach conflicts. Results are discussed in terms of theories of motivation, affective processing, conflict, and anxiety.     

Auditory-phonetic projection and lexical structure in the recognition of sine-wave words

Speech remains intelligible despite the elimination of canonical acoustic correlates of phonemes from the spectrum. A portion of this perceptual flexibility can be attributed to modulation sensitivity in the auditory-to-phonetic projection, although signal-independent properties of lexical neighborhoods also affect intelligibility in utterances composed of words. Three tests were conducted to estimate the effects of exposure to natural and sine-wave samples of speech in this kind of perceptual versatility. First, sine-wave versions of the easy and hard word sets were created, modeled on the speech samples of a single talker. The performance difference in recognition of easy and hard words was used to index the perceptual reliance on signal-independent properties of lexical contrasts. Second, several kinds of exposure produced familiarity with an aspect of sine-wave speech: (a) sine-wave sentences modeled on the same talker; (b) sine-wave sentences modeled on a different talker, to create familiarity with a sine-wave carrier; and (c) natural sentences spoken by the same talker, to create familiarity with the idiolect expressed in the sine-wave words. Recognition performance with both easy and hard sine-wave words improved after exposure only to sine-wave sentences modeled on the same talker. Third, a control test showed that signal-independent uncertainty is a plausible cause of differences in recognition of easy and hard sine-wave words. The conditions of beneficial exposure reveal the specificity of attention underlying versatility in speech perception.     

Emerging effortful control in toddlerhood: the role of infant orienting/regulation, maternal effortful control, and maternal time spent in caregiving activities

Latent growth modeling (LGM) was used to examine the contribution of changes in infant orienting/regulation (O/R) to the emergence of toddler effortful control (EC), the contributions of maternal EC to the development of infant O/R and the emergence of toddler EC, the influence of maternal time spent in caregiving activities on toddler EC and the slope of infant O/R, and the contribution of maternal EC to subsequent maternal time spent in caregiving activities. Mothers from 158 families completed a self-report measure of EC when their infants were 4 months of age, a measure of infant O/R when their infants were 4, 6, 8, 10, and 12 months of age, and a measure of toddler EC when their children reached 18 months of age. Information concerning maternal time spent in various interactive caregiving activities was collected when infants were 6 months old. Results indicated higher maternal EC predicted interindividual differences in the intercept (i.e., higher intercepts), but not slope, of infant O/R and that higher maternal EC, higher infant O/R intercept, and higher infant O/R slope contributed to higher toddler EC. Furthermore, higher maternal EC predicted greater maternal time spent in interactive caregiving activities with their infants and greater maternal time in interactive caregiving with infants also contributed to higher toddler EC after controlling for maternal EC. These findings contribute to the understanding of the influence of maternal EC, directly and through caregiving, on toddler EC. Additional implications as they are related to early developing regulatory aspects of temperament are discussed.     

Therapeutic alliance and progress in couple therapy: multiple perspectives

Therapeutic alliance research in couple therapy using multiple perspectives and longitudinal data has been sparse. This study used structural equation modelling to explore relationships between changes in alliance and in progress from clients' and therapists' perspective in a fairly large sample of couples (N=195) during the initial stage of therapy at an on‐campus training clinic. Self‐rated alliance was measured after sessions 2 through 4 with the Working Alliance Inventory. There was very little change in alliance over the early sessions of therapy, and changes in alliance did not always account for changes in relationship satisfaction. Husbands' perceptions of satisfaction and alliance seem to play an important role in the dynamics of the therapeutic process. Findings suggest a reciprocal relationship between perceptions of alliance and progress in therapy when combining perceptions of therapists and couple clients. Clinical implications and future research are discussed.     

Visual search for schematic emotional faces risks perceptual confound

Several studies have used a visual search task to demonstrate that schematic negative-face targets are found faster and/or more efficiently than positive ones, with these findings taken as evidence that negative emotional expression is capable of guiding attentional allocation in visual search. A common hypothesis is that these effects should be disrupted by face inversion; however, this has not been consistently demonstrated, and raises the possibility of a perceptual confound. One candidate confound is the feature of "closure" (see Wolfe & Horowitz, 2004) caused by the down-turned mouth adjacent to edge of the face. This was investigated in the present series of experiments. In Experiment 1, the speed advantage for upright negative faces was replicated. In Experiment 2, the effect was not disrupted with inversion, and an efficiency advantage emerged, suggesting that perceptual features could be causing the advantage. In Experiment 3, speed and efficiency effects were seen when this perceptual characteristic remained but face features were scrambled. Taken together, these findings suggest that visual search using schematic faces containing a curved-line mouth feature cannot provide a valid test of guided search by negative facial emotion unless this confound is controlled.