Cognitive functioning,personality variables and academic achievement of hemophilic and normal children: A comparative study

The present study was conceptualized in the context of the psychosocial needs of Hemophilic children and adolescents of Kolkata. Twenty four Hemophilic children and adolescents were compared with a matched group of normal controls to find out any specific difference in terms of visuomotor gestalt functioning, intellectual level, academic achievement and personality dimensions. Academic achievement was assessed by averaging the results of the last three consecutive school examinations. Intellectual functioning was assessed by Progressive Matrices by Raven, and personality dimensions were assessed by Junior Eysenck Personality Questionnaire. Chi square tests and ANOVA were conducted to determine whether the Hemophilic children differed significantly from the normal controls across age levels. Findings revealed that there was little difference between the two groups in terms of intellectual level, and most dimensions of personality, although the Hemophilics fared worse than normals in neuropsychological, social and academic aspects. Implication for intervention is discussed.     

Prosocial implicit trait policies underlie performance on different situational judgment tests with interpersonal content

ABSTRACT

This study tests the hypothesis that situational judgment tests (SJTs) with interpersonal content reflect implicit beliefs about the utility of prosocial action for job effectiveness and that agreeable people are more likely to believe that prosocial action is effective. Two hundred ninety-four undergraduates completed four different SJTs with interpersonal content and a measure of Agreeableness. Results show that the effectiveness of response options in these SJTs is positively correlated with the level of prosociality they express and that because of their prosocial elements, scores on different SJTs are correlated with one another and with Agreeableness. These results shed light on the construct-related validity of SJTs with interpersonal content and point to the possibility that they can assess prosociality in job settings different from those described in their items.     

Transfer to intermediate forms following concept discrimination by pigeons: chimeras and morphs

Two experiments examined pigeons' generalization to intermediate forms following training of concept discriminations. In Experiment 1, the training stimuli were sets of images of dogs and cats, and the transfer stimuli were head/body chimeras, which humans tend to categorize more readily in terms of the head part rather than the body part. In Experiment 2, the training stimuli were sets of images of heads of dogs and cats, and the intermediate stimuli were computer-generated morphs. In both experiments, pigeons learned the concept discrimination quickly and generalized with some decrement to novel instances of the categories. In both experiments, transfer tests were carried out with intermediate forms generated from both familiar and novel exemplars of the training sets. In Experiment 1, the pigeons' transfer performance, unlike that of human infants exposed to similar stimuli, was best predicted by the body part of the stimulus when the chimeras were formed from familiar exemplars. Spatial frequency analysis of the stimuli showed that the body parts were richer in high spatial frequencies than the head parts, so these data are consistent with the hypothesis that categorization is more dependent on local stimulus features in pigeons than in humans. There was no corresponding trend when the chimeras were formed from novel exemplars. In Experiment 2, when morphs of training stimuli were used, response rates declined smoothly as the proportion of the morph contributed by the positive stimulus fell, although results with morphs of novel stimuli were again less orderly.     

Investigating Relationships Among Distress Tolerance,PTSD Symptom Severity,and Alcohol Use

Journal of Psychopathology and Behavioral Assessment - Exposure to trauma (particularly interpersonal trauma), post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms, and low distress tolerance (DT; the...     

Dreading the pain of others? Altruistic responses to others' pain underestimate dread

A dislike of waiting for pain, aptly termed ‘dread’, is so great that people will increase pain to avoid delaying it. However, despite many accounts of altruistic responses to pain in others, no previous studies have tested whether people take delay into account when attempting to ameliorate others' pain. We examined the impact of delay in 2 experiments where participants (total N = 130) specified the intensity and delay of pain either for themselves or another person. Participants were willing to increase the experimental pain of another participant to avoid delaying it, indicative of dread, though did so to a lesser extent than was the case for their own pain. We observed a similar attenuation in dread when participants chose the timing of a hypothetical painful medical treatment for a close friend or relative, but no such attenuation when participants chose for a more distant acquaintance. A model in which altruism is biased to privilege pain intensity over the dread of pain parsimoniously accounts for these findings. We refer to this underestimation of others' dread as a ‘Dread Empathy Gap’.     

Examination of the Association Among Personality Traits,Anxiety Sensitivity,and Cannabis Use Motives in a Community Sample

Personality factors, such as neuroticism, are important for understanding motives for cannabis use; however, few studies have examined the role of neuroticism in the context of other personality factors, or possible mechanisms accounting for an association between neuroticism and motives for use. The present study examined concurrent associations between personality traits (i.e., conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism) and cannabis use motives, and the role of anxiety sensitivity (AS) in the association between neuroticism and coping cannabis use motives. Seventy young adults endorsing past-month cannabis use (58.6 % female, M _age = 20.91) completed self-report measures. Linear regressions were conducted to examine the concurrent associations between personality factors and cannabis use motives. Higher levels of neuroticism, but no other personality traits, were significantly associated with greater coping (β = 45, p < .01) and expansion (β = 0.29, p = <.05) motives. Bootstrap analysis (10,000 re-samples) revealed that a significant portion of the relationship between neuroticism and coping motives was explained by AS (point estimate = 0.029, PB 95 % CI: 0.0089 to 0.0615). Greater neuroticism may result in heightened sensitivity to arousal, which may then increase motivation to use cannabis to alleviate such arousal.     

Development of Bengali Audio–Visual Test Battery for Assessment of Pragmatic Skills: Preliminary Normative Data Based on Educational Level

Pragmatic competence may be disrupted due to psychological and neurological causes. For appropriate remedy and rehabilitation, a precise assessment of pragmatic skills is important. However, there is no test battery in the Bengali language, and consequently, there is no published data on pragmatic ability of Bengali speakers. Due to the vast diversity of the population, it becomes increasingly difficult to assess pragmatic ability of an individual without a proper knowledge of the normal variations. To address this problem we have developed a test battery in Bengali, and to begin with, we have administered it to one hundred and five (105) normal healthy persons having different levels of education. The four groups having 17 years and above, 15 to < 17 years, 12 to < 15 years and 10 to < 12 years of education yielded a normative score of 193, 189, 171 and 150, respectively. These normative scores will allow clinicians to make a proper assessment of patients suffering from pragmatic deficits and help avoid interpreting social differences as neurological deficits.     

Is What You Feel What They See? Prominent and Subtle Identity Signaling in Intergroup Interactions

Individuals often signal group affiliations to others, and the display of such identity signals is frequently rather subtle. While prior work has focused on understanding an individual's choices of subtle versus prominent signals, in this work, we look at the downstream consequences of such choices. Specifically, we explore how the prominence of identity signals may affect one's behavior in intergroup interactions. Drawing from literature on processing fluency, we propose that the use of difficult to process (subtle) identity signals in intergroup interactions leads signalers to experience identity threat, lowering confidence in their identity and leading them to engage in behaviors to recover from this experience. Across three different identity domains (college affiliation, political affiliation, and brand loyalty), we show that when individuals use difficult to process identity signals, they derogate out‐group members in communication and behave less cooperatively in intergroup interactions. We find that these effects depend upon the observability of the signals by out‐group members and only occur for individuals who are highly identified with the in‐group. We also find that the effects are attenuated when behavior towards members of the out‐group is made public. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Modelling simultaneous games in dynamic logic

We make a proposal for formalizing simultaneous games at the abstraction level of player’s powers, combining ideas from dynamic logic of sequential games and concurrent dynamic logic. We prove completeness for a new system of ‘concurrent game logic’ CDGL with respect to finite non-determined games. We also show how this system raises new mathematical issues, and throws light on branching quantifiers and independence-friendly evaluation games for first-order logic.     

Similarity based approximate reasoning: fuzzy control

This paper presents an approach to similarity based approximate reasoning that elucidates the connection between similarity and existing approaches to inference in approximate reasoning methodology. A set of axioms is proposed to get a reasonable measure of similarity between two fuzzy sets. The similarity between the fact(s) and the antecedent of a rule is used to modify the relation between the antecedent and the consequent of the rule. An inference is drawn using the well-known projection operation on the domain of the consequent. Zadeh's compositional rule of inference and existing similarity based reasoning techniques are considered for a new similarity based approximate reasoning technique. The proposed mechanism is used to develop a modified fuzzy control system. A new defuzzification scheme is proposed. Simulation results are presented for the well-known inverted pendulum problem.