The Impact of Personality and Religion on Attitudes toward Alcohol among 16–18 Year Olds in Northern Ireland

Background: Previous research demonstrates a negative relationship between attitude toward alcohol and religiosity. However, what is less apparent is if this relationship may, at least in part, be a function of individual differences in personality, as previous research has demonstrated a relationship between certain measures of personality and both attitude toward alcohol and attitude toward religiosity. The aim of the present study was to explore the impact of personality and the relative efficacy of different markers of religiosity in predicting attitude toward alcohol among a sample of 16–18 year olds in Northern Ireland. Method: The Francis Scale of Attitude toward Alcohol (Francis, 1992c. Drug and Alcohol Dependence, 31, 45–50) was administered alongside the Abbreviated Revised Eysenck Personality Questionnaire (Francis, Brown, & Philipchalk, 1992. Personality and Individual Differences, 13(4), 443–449), the Francis Scale of Attitude toward Christianity (Francis & Stubbs, 1987. Personality and Individual Differences, 8, 741–743) and measures of frequency of personal prayer and church attendance among a sample of 243 16- to 18-year-old sixth-form students in Northern Ireland. Results and conclusion: The data demonstrate that a more prohibitive attitude toward alcohol was correlated with lower psychoticism scores (tendermindedness) and a more positive attitude toward Christianity. Multiple-regression analyses confirm the importance of attitude toward religion in predicting individual differences in attitude toward alcohol.     

Detection of sound rise time by adults with dyslexia

Low sensitivity to amplitude modulated (AM) sounds is reported to be associated with dyslexia. An important aspect of amplitude modulation cycles are the rise and fall times within the sound. In this study, simplified stimuli equivalent to just one cycle were used and sensitivity to varying rise times was explored. Adult participants with dyslexia or compensated dyslexia and a control group performed a detection task with sound pairs of different rise times. Results showed that the participants with dyslexia differed from the control group in rise time detection and a correlation was found between rise time detection and reading and phonological skills. A subgroup of participants with lower sensitivity to rise time detection characterized by low accuracy in syllable-level phonological skills was found within the dyslexic group. Short stimuli containing only one rise time produced associations with phonological skills and reading, even in a language where the perception of rise time contrasts are not crucial for the signaling of phonemic contrast.     

The perception of second language sounds in early bilinguals: new evidence from an implicit measure

Previous studies have suggested that nonnative (L2) linguistic sounds are accommodated to native language (L1) phonemic categories. However, this conclusion may be compromised by the use of explicit discrimination tests. The present study provides an implicit measure of L2 phoneme discrimination in early bilinguals (Catalan and Spanish). Participants classified the 1st syllable of disyllabic stimuli embedded in lists where the 2nd, task-irrelevant, syllable could contain a Catalan contrastive variation (/epsilon/-/e/) or no variation. Catalan dominants responded more slowly in lists where the 2nd syllable could vary from trial to trial, suggesting an indirect effect of the /epsilon/-/e/ discrimination. Spanish dominants did not suffer this interference, performing indistinguishably from Spanish monolinguals. The present findings provide implicit evidence that even proficient bilinguals categorize L2 sounds according to their L1 representations.     

Finger gnosia: a predictor of numerical abilities in children?

This paper aimed to test the specificity of predicting power of finger gnosia on later numerical abilities in school-age children and to contribute to the understanding of this effect. Forty-one children were tested in the beginning of Grade 1 on finger gnosia, left-right orientation (another sign of the Gerstmann "syndrome"), and global development. Fifteen months later, numerical and reading abilities were assessed. Analyses of the results indicated that, contrary to the general measures of cognitive development, performance in the finger gnosia test was a good predictor of numerical skills 1 year later but not of reading skills, which proves the specificity of that predictor. The same conclusion was also true for the left-right orientation. However, finger gnosia could equally predict performance in numerical tasks that do or do not rely heavily on finger representation or on magnitude representation. Results are discussed in terms of the localizationist and the functional hypotheses.     

Effects of backward speech and speaker variability in language discrimination by rats

Human infants use prosodic cues present in speech to extract language regularities, and it has been suggested that this capacity is anchored in more general mechanisms that are shared across mammals. This study explores the extent to which rats can generalize prosodic cues that have been extracted from a training corpus to new sentences and how this discrimination process is affected by the normalization of the sentences when multiple speakers are introduced. Conditions 1 and 2 show rats' abilities to use prosodic cues present in speech, allowing them to discriminate between sentences not previously heard. But this discrimination is not possible when sentences are played backward. Conditions 3 and 4 show that language discrimination by rats is also taxed by the process of speaker normalization. These findings have remarkable parallels with data from human adults, human newborns, and cotton-top tamarins. Implications for speech perception by humans are discussed.     

Classification of Antisocial Behaviors Along Severity and Frequency Parameters

Antisocial behaviors were systematically classified along a hierarchy of seriousness or severity that also accounted for frequency of occurrence and heterogeneity of behaviors. Items from the CD and ODD schedules of the NIMH DISC-IV and from the Elliot Delinquency Scales were listed at specified frequencies. Nine mental health clinicians rated the level of seriousness of each alternative on a scale from 0 (trivial) to 5 (very serious). Reliability of the ratings was assessed. Over two thirds of the items showed excellent agreement among the raters, 8% showed poor agreement and 21% showed fair to moderate agreement. The overall reliability of a single rater’s score was 0.56 and the reliability of the average was 0.84. The classification meets high psychometric standards for reliability and has face validity. The final output provides a classification along a spectrum that takes into account severity, frequency of occurrence during the previous year, and presence of multiple behaviors. It is useful for classification purposes and for longitudinal tracking of antisocial behavior.     

Transient hippocampal down-regulation of Kv1.1 subunit mRNA during associative learning in rats

Voltage-gated potassium channels (Kv) are critically involved in learning and memory processes. It is not known, however, whether the expression of the Kv1.1 subunit, constituting Kv1 channels, can be specifically regulated in brain areas important for learning and memory processing. Radioactive in situ hybridization was used to evaluate the content of Kv1.1 α-subunit mRNA in the olfactory bulb, ventral, and dorsal hippocampus at different stages of an odor-discrimination associative task in rats. Naive, conditioned, and pseudoconditioned animals were sacrificed at different times either prior to a two-odor significance learning or after odor discrimination was established. Important decreases of Kv1.1 mRNA levels were transiently observed in the ventral hippocampus before successful learning when compared with the pseudoconditioned group. Moreover, temporal group analysis showed significant labeling alterations in the hippocampus of conditioned and pseudoconditioned groups throughout the training. Finally, Kv1.1 mRNA levels in the hippocampus were positively correlated with odor-reward association learning in rats that were beginning to discriminate between odors. These findings indicate that the Kv1.1 subunit is transiently down-regulated in the early stages of learning and suggest that Kv1 channel expression regulation is critical for the modification of neuronal substrates underlying new information acquisition.     

AIDS and social exclusion: personality features or adaptive behaviors?

The purpose of this survey is to detect common personality features in people infected with AIDS who have a case history of drug addiction and who live in a situation of social exclusion. The sample comprised 105 male participants from the Autonomous Community of Andalusia, divided into 4 groups: (a) 30 men with AIDS, having an intravenous drug addiction case history and who live in a condition of social exclusion; (b) 30 men with IVDA case history, also living in a situation of social exclusion; (c) 15 men in a social exclusion condition; and (d) 30 men in a condition of social adaptation. The evaluation instruments were an author-designed semi-structured interview and the Multiaxial Clinical Inventory (MCMI-II; Millon, 1987). Although some differences were found, the results indicate that there is no specific personality profile in the "social exclusion" population. People in a condition of social exclusion (AIDS, drug addicts, and poor people) may obtain similar scores in the variables studied, but there is no clear specific personality profile in the excluded population, although there may be certain situations in which the segregated groups present similar behaviors. Furthermore, these behaviors do not always correspond to personality features but are adaptive responses to a harsh and complex reality.     

Social dominance orientation,prejudice, and discrimination: A new computer-based method for studying discriminatory behaviors

A number of studies have shown that the scale of social dominance orientation (SDO), used to measure the degree of preference for inequality among social groups, is a predictive measure of social and political attitudes toward stigmatized outgroups. However, the relationship between SDO and discrimination has received little attention. The main goal of this study was to assess the validity of a new computer-based method used to measure discriminatory behaviors in a laboratory setting. An additional goal was to test the mediating role of prejudice in the relation between SDO and discrimination. The results provide a first validation of this new method and demonstrate that the effect of SDO on discrimination is mediated by prejudice.     

A study of 60- to 89-mo.-old children's skill at writing numerals

The skill of writing numerals necessitates a certain developmental maturity. Studying the age at which children start to develop this skill and assessing problems they encounter while writing numerals should give direction to their training. From 8 schools a total of 267 children, ages 60 to 89 mo., were asked to write the numerals 1 to 9. Analysis showed that 80% of the children wrote most of the numerals correctly, 15% wrote inverted numerals, 2.0% wrote some numerals as letters, and 4% did not write certain numerals at all. In addition, 64% of children ages 60 to 65 mo. gave correct responses, and the perception of correct responses increased across age groups until 95% were correct in the group who were 84 to 89 mo. There was no significant difference between girls and boys in these writing skills.