The Effect of Interpersonal Touch During Childhood on Adult Attachment and Depression: A Neglected Area of Family and Developmental Psychology?

Interpersonal touch has been little studied empirically as an indicator of parent- and peer-child intimacy. Undergraduate students (n = 390) were studied using a questionnaire survey regarding the frequencies of interpersonal touch by father, mother, same-sex peers, and opposite-sex peers during preschool ages, grades 1–3, grades 4–6, and grades 7–9, as well as their current attachment style to a romantic partner and current depression. A path model indicated that current depression was influenced significantly by poorer self- and other-images as well as by fewer parental interpersonal touches throughout childhood. Other-image was influenced by early (up to grade 3) parental interpersonal touch. Our findings suggest that a lower frequency of parental touching during childhood influences the development of depression and contributes to a poorer image of an individual’s romantic partner during later adolescence and early adulthood.     

Respecting autonomy in difficult medical settings: a questionnaire study in Japan

Some people in Japan are still comfortable with the paternalistic role of doctors, but others wish that their own decisions would receive a greater amount of respect. A total of 747 students of universities and colleges and 114 parents of these students participated in a questionnaire survey. Most of the participants thought that autonomy should be respected in situations involving death with dignity and euthanasia, whereas it should not be respected in attempted suicide and involuntary admission of individuals with mental illness. A cluster analysis revealed that the participants could be divided into the following groups: aid in dying advocates (n=577), complete libertarians (n=109), protectors of the mentally ill (n=90), complete paternalists (n=29), and questionables (n=27). The assertion of independence score of the Scale for Independent and Interdependent Construal of the Self showed a significant difference among the 5 clusters. These findings suggest that the traditional paternalistic relationship between doctor and patient is undergoing a gradual transformation in Japan.     

Temporal cortex activation during speech recognition: an optical topography study

Cortical activity during speech recognition was examined using optical topography (OT), a recently developed non-invasive technique. To assess relative changes in hemoglobin oxygenation, local changes in near-infrared light absorption were measured simultaneously from 44 points in both hemispheres. A dichotic listening paradigm was used in this experiment, in which target stimuli and non-target stimuli were presented to different ears. Subjects were asked to track targets and to press a button when targets shifted from one ear to the other. We compared three tasks: (i) a control task, in which a tone was used as the target; (ii) a repeat task, in which the target was one repeated sentence; (iii) a story task, in which the targets were continuous sentences of a story. The activity for the story task, compared with the repeat task, was localized in the left superior temporal cortex. Relative to the control task, we observed in this region a larger increase in oxyhemoglobin concentration and a decrease in deoxyhemoglobin concentration in the story task than those in the repeat task. These results suggest that the activity in the left temporal association area reflects the load of auditory, memory, and language information processing.     

The left-to-right nature of the masked onset priming effect in naming

Two experiments were performed to investigate the nature of the masked onset priming effect in naming, that is, the facilitation in naming latency that is observed when a target shares the initial grapheme/phoneme with a masked prime. Experiment 1 showed that the effect is not due to position-independent letter priming, since the naming of nonword targets preceded by masked primes was facilitated only if the prime shared the initial letter with the target (e.g., suf-SIB) and not if the prime shared the final letter (e.g., mub-SIB). Experiment 2 showed that the effect reflects the sharing of onsets rather than the initial letter, since facilitation due to an overlap of the initial letter was observed only for the simple onset target (e.g., penny-PASTE) for which the letter corresponded to the onset, and not for complex onset targets (e.g., bingo-BLISS). It is argued that the serial nature of the masked onset priming effect is best interpreted as the planning of articulation, rather than as the computation of phonology from orthography.     

Effects of combining disparate groups in the analysis of ethnic differences: Variations among asian american mental health service consumers in level of community functioning

The Asian American population comprises historically, socially, and culturally diverse ethnic groups. Given this diversity, investigators caution that combining disparate ethnic groups together may lead to erroneous conclusions. Whether by choice or necessity, however, mental health studies still typically consider Asian Americans as a single ethnic category rather than as separate ethnic groups. Few investigations have addressed the consequences of this practice. This paper examines the implications of conceptualizing Asian Americans as an ethnic category versus ethnic groups, in an investigation of the community functioning status of clients in publicly funded mental health programs in King County, Washington. When treated as a single ethnic category in a multivariate linear regression model, Asian Americans are found to have a lower level of functioning difficulty than their white counterparts. However, when treated as separate ethnic groups (e.g., Vietnamese, Japanese), only one of five Asian ethnic groups has a significantly lower level of difficulty. In a separate analysis of the Asian American subsample, groups are found to differ significantly from one another with respect to functional status. Several factors, including refugee status, account for this difference.     

Evidence accumulation in the integrated and primed Stroop tasks

We report distributional analyses of response times (RT) in two variants of the color-word Stroop task using manual keypress responses. In the classic Stroop task, in which the color and word dimensions are integrated into a single stimulus, the Stroop congruence effect increased across the quantiles. In contrast, in the primed Stroop task, in which the distractor word is presented ahead of colored symbols, the Stroop congruence effect was manifested solely as a distributional shift, remaining constant across the quantiles. The distributional-shift pattern mirrors the semantic-priming effect that has been reported in semantic categorization tasks. The results are interpreted within the framework of evidence accumulation, and implications for the roles of task conflict and informational conflict are discussed.     

Modulation of regularity and lexicality effects in reading aloud

We examined the question of whether the sizes of the regularity and lexicality effects in naming can be modulated as a function of filler type (nonwords or low-frequency exception words). The lexicality effect was larger in the exception word filler condition than in the nonword filler condition, but the size of the regularity effect was essentially unaffected by filler type. This pattern is at odds with what is generally assumed to be the predictions from dual-route theories of reading aloud. An attempt was next made to determine whether the dual-route cascaded model of Coltheart, Rastle, Perry, Langdon, and Ziegler (2001) could possibly simulate this pattern when changes were introduced to each of the three parameters that affect the contribution of the nonlexical route. We discuss the implications of these results for the idea that reliance on the lexical and nonlexical routes is under strategic control.     

Cross-task strategic effects

When easy and difficult items are mixed together, their reading aloud latencies become more homogeneous relative to their presentation in unmixed ("pure") conditions (Lupker, Brown, & Colombo, 1997). We report two experiments designed to investigate the nature of the mechanism that underlies this list composition, or blocking, effect. In Experiment 1, we replicated Lupker et al.'s (1997) blocking effect in the reading aloud task and extended these findings to the visual lexical decision task. In Experiment 2, we found that blocking effects generalized across tasks: The characteristics of stimuli in a visual lexical decision task influenced reading aloud latencies, and vice versa, when visual lexical decision and reading aloud trials were presented alternately in the same experiment. We discuss implications of these results within time-criterion (Lupker et al., 1997) and strength-of-processing (Kello & Plaut, 2000, 2003) theories of strategic processing in reading.     

Priming and attentional control of lexical and sublexical pathways in naming: a reevaluation

The authors report 3 naming experiments using J. D. Zevin and D. A. Balota's (2000) multiple prime manipulation. They used 2 sets of nonword primes (fast and slow) and low-frequency exception word primes to separate the effects of prime speed from those of prime type. The size of the regularity effect was unaffected by prime type. Relative to the low-frequency exception word prime condition, the frequency effect was reduced in the fast, but not in the slow, nonword prime condition. Lexicality effect size was reduced in both nonword prime conditions, a result consistent with the lexical checking strategy described by S. J. Lupker, P. Brown, and L. Colombo (1997). The authors suggest that these results are better explained in terms of S. J. Lupker et al.'s time-criterion account than J. D. Zevin and D. A. Balota's pathway control hypothesis.     

Two bases of the compatibility effect in the Implicit Association Test (IAT)

Four experiments are reported, investigating the mechanisms underlying the compatibility effect in the Implicit Association Test (IAT; Greenwald, McGhee, & Schwartz, 1998). All experiments involved two IATs: flower IAT, in which the target categories were flowers and insects, and number IAT, involving even and odd numbers as target categories. In Experiment 1, using the standard IAT procedure, the two IATs produced equal IAT effects, despite large differences in rated valence contrast between flowers and insects and between even and odd numbers. Experiment 2 used a procedure developed by Klauer and Mierke (2005) and produced results consistent with the view that valence plays a role in the flower IAT but not in the number IAT. Experiments 3 and 4 used manipulations similar to those developed by Rothermund and Wentura (2004) and showed that these manipulations affected the flower IAT and number IAT differently. The results provide converging evidence that the two types of IAT effects-one based on valence and one based on familiarity-are empirically dissociable.Experiments 1and 2 reported in this paper were conducted as an honours project by Marie Peek-O'Leary under the supervision of Sachiko Kinoshita. Parts of this paper were presented at the 44th Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society held in Vancouver, Canada, in November, 2003.