Singing more,singing harsher: occurrence of nonlinear phenomena in a primate’ song

Animal Cognition - Nonlinear phenomena (NLP) in animal vocalizations arise from irregularities in the oscillation of the vocal folds. Various non-mutually exclusive hypotheses have been put forward...     

Testing the factor structure of the Forgiveness Scale among Italian adolescent students

ABSTRACT

The aim of the present study was to analysis the factor structure of the Italian version of the Forgiveness Scale (FS) among 663 adolescent students in Italy. The FS involves of 15 items measuring forgiveness toward the wrongdoer. This scale comprises two subscales, Absence of Negative (AN) and Presence of Positive (PP). These subscales evaluate the absence of negative and the existence of positive emotions, thoughts, and behavioural inclinations. Results suggests that only 11 of the original items are valid in the Italian version of the FS. In contrast to the original study, the two dimensions of forgiveness (AN and PP) were independent of each other in the current analysis. Evidence for convergent validity was also found. The results provide some initial support for the bi-dimensionality and internal consistency of the Italian FS and offer a starting point for future research to be pursued in forgiveness.     

Old-fashioned responses in an updating memory task

Errors in a running memory task are analysed. Participants were presented with a variable-length list of items and were asked to report the last four items. It has been proposed (Morris & Jones, 1990) that this task requires two mechanisms: the temporal storage of the target set by the articulatory loop and its updating by the central executive. Two implicit assumptions in this proposal are (a) the preservation of serial order, and (b) participants' capacity to discard earlier items from the target subset as list presentation is running, and new items are appended. Order preservation within the updated target list and the inhibition of the outdated list items should imply a relatively higher rate of location errors for items from the medial positions of the target list and a lower rate of intrusion errors from the outdated and inhibited items from the pretarget positions. Contrary to these expectations, for both consonants (Experiment 1) and words (Experiment 2) we found recency effects and a relatively high rate of intrusions from the final pretarget positions, most of them from the very last. Similar effects were apparent with the embedded four-item lists for catch trials. These results are clearly at odds with the presumed updating by the central executive.