Advancing our understanding of intergenerational continuity in antisocial behavior

This commentary reviews the major findings of this set of 4 papers on intergenerational continuity in antisocial behavior; it identifies strengths and remaining challenges, and discusses potential policy implications of the research. As a group, these researchers have raised the methodological bar for future work in this area, using prospective designs with multiple informants and methods to test the influences of G2 parenting and adolescent antisocial behavior in mediating continuity between G1 parenting and G3 early disruptive behavior. The pattern of findings is discussed with respect to gender of G2 and social context. The inherent challenges of conducting intergenerational research are also highlighted, within the context of offering recommendations for improving future intergenerational investigations and their feasibility.     

In the privacy of their own homes: using the internet to assess racial bias

Recent studies suggest that research participants show reduced distortion of their taboo attitudes and behaviors when they take part in Internet-based procedures from outside the laboratory. We explored whether such procedures would reduce distortion in the assessment of racial bias. In Study 1, White participants who completed the study in the laboratory evaluated Black targets more favorably than White targets. This unexpected "outgroup-favoring" pattern occurred in both pencil-and-paper and Internet versions of the study, showing that modality did not produce it; but when participants worked outside the laboratory via the Internet, this pattern disappeared. Study 2 replicated the above findings and further indicated that the reduced distortion in Internet-based studies was due to the removal of the experimenter rather than removing the participants from the laboratory environment. The implications of these findings for the study of controlled processes of prejudice and the nature of Internet-based social communication are discussed.     

Location, location, location: the misprediction of satisfaction in housing lotteries

People tend to overestimate the emotional consequences of future life events, exhibiting an impact bias. The authors replicated the impact bias in a real-life context in which undergraduates were randomly assigned to dormitories (or "houses"). Participants appeared to focus on the wrong factors when imagining their future happiness in the houses. They placed far greater weight on highly variable physical features than on less variable social features in predicting their future happiness in each house, despite accurately recognizing that social features were more important than physical features when asked explicitly about the determinants of happiness. In Experiment 2, we found that this discrepancy emerged in part because participants exhibited an isolation effect, focusing too much on factors that distinguished between houses and not enough on factors that varied only slightly, such as social features.     

Dissociable neural systems for recognizing emotions

This study tested the hypothesis that the recognition of emotions would draw upon anatomically separable brain regions, depending on whether the stimuli were static or explicitly conveyed information regarding actions. We investigated the hypothesis in a rare subject with extensive bilateral brain lesions, patient B., by administering tasks that assessed recognition and naming of emotions from visual and verbal stimuli, some of which depicted actions and some of which did not. B. could not recognize any primary emotion other than happiness, when emotions were shown as static images or given as single verbal labels. By contrast, with the notable exception of disgust, he correctly recognized primary emotions from dynamic displays of facial expressions as well as from stories that described actions. Our findings are consistent with the idea that information about actions is processed in occipitoparietal and dorsal frontal cortices, all of which are intact in B.'s brain. Such information subsequently would be linked to knowledge about emotions that depends on structures mapping somatic states, many of which are also intact in B.'s brain. However, one of these somatosensory structures, the insula, is bilaterally damaged, perhaps accounting for B.'s uniformly impaired recognition of disgust (from both static and action stimuli). Other structures that are damaged in B.'s brain, including bilateral inferior and anterior temporal lobe and medial frontal cortices, appear to be critical for linking perception of static stimuli to recognition of emotions. Thus the retrieval of knowledge regarding emotions draws upon widely distributed and partly distinct sets of neural structures, depending on the attributes of the stimulus.     

Developmental prosopagnosia: a study of three patients

We studied perception in three patients with prosopagnosia of childhood onset. All had trouble with other 'within-category' judgments. All were deficient on face matching tests and severely impaired on tests of perception of the spatial relations of facial features and abstract designs, indicating a deficit in the encoding of coordinate relationships, similar to adult-onset prosopagnosia with lesions of the fusiform face area. Two had difficulty perceiving feature colour, which correlated with reduced luminance sensitivity. In contrast to adult-onset patients, saturation discrimination was spared in two and spatial resolution impaired in two. Curvature discrimination was relatively spared. Contrast sensitivity showed variable reductions at different spatial frequencies. We conclude that developmental prosopagnosia is similar to the adult-onset form in encoding deficits for the spatial arrangement of facial elements. Deficits in luminance perception and spatial resolution are more associated with defective encoding for basic object-level recognition, as shown on tests of object and spatial perception.     

Seeing double: the role of meaning in alphanumeric-colour synaesthesia

When PD, an alphanumeric-colour synaesthete, is shown black digits or letters, each grapheme elicits a highly specific colour, called a "photism" (e.g., a 2 induces green, a Z induces brown). Previous experiments showed that photisms interfere with video-colour naming when the photism colour and the video colour are incongruent. Here we used coloured ambiguous graphemes that could be interpreted as either digits or letters depending on context (e.g., an ambiguous grapheme was interpreted as a 2 if presented within a block of digit trials, but as a Z if presented within a block of letter trials). Ambiguous graphemes were presented in video colours that were either congruent or incongruent with PD's photisms. Crucially, what was a congruent trial in one context was an incongruent trial in the other context. PD's pattern of response times indicated that identical graphemes could induce differently coloured photisms depending on their interpretation. This suggests that the meaning of graphemes ultimately determines their synaesthetic colour.     

Synaesthetic photisms guide attention

We evaluated whether synaesthetic colour experiences (i.e., photisms) guide or attract attention. An alphanumeric-colour synaesthete, J, and seven non-synaesthetes searched for target digits presented against backgrounds that were either congruent or incongruent with the colours of J's photisms for the target digits. For J, the slope of the search function for detecting the target digits on incongruent trials was shallower than the slope of the search function for detecting the target digits on congruent trials. In contrast, for the seven non-synaesthetes, the slopes of the search functions for detecting the target digits on congruent and incongruent trials were equivalent. These findings suggest that synaesthetic colour experiences influence the efficiency of visual search by guiding or attracting attention.     

Environmental support promotes expertise-based mitigation of age differences on pilot communication tasks

The authors investigated whether expertise is more likely to mitigate age declines when experts rely on environmental support in a pilot/Air Traffic Control (ATC) communication task. Pilots and nonpilots listened to ATC messages that described a route through an airspace, while they referred to a chart of the airspace. They read back (repeated) each message and then answered a probe question about the route. In a preliminary study, participants could take notes while listening to the messages and performing the read-back and probe tasks. In Experiment 1, opportunity to take notes was manipulated. Note taking determined when expertise mitigated age differences on the read-back task. With note taking, read-back accuracy declined with age for nonpilots but not for pilots. Without note taking, similar age-related declines occurred for pilots and nonpilots. Benefits of expertise, younger age, and note taking occurred for probe accuracy, but mitigation did not occur. The findings suggest that older adults take advantage of a domain-relevant form of environmental support (note taking) to maintain performance on some complex tasks despite typical age-related declines in cognitive ability.     

Patients' versus informants' reports of personality disorders in predicting 7 1/2-year outcome in outpatients with depressive disorders

Concordance between patients' and informants' reports of personality disorders (PDs) is low, raising the questions of which source provides more valid data and whether both contribute unique information. This study compared patients' and informants' reports of PDs in predicting outcome in a 7 1/2-year follow-up of 85 depressed outpatients. Patients and informants were independently evaluated using structured interviews; outcome was assessed using structured interviews with patients. Both patients' and informants' reports of PD diagnoses and dimensional scores independently predicted depression symptoms and global functioning at follow-up. However, only informants' reports made a unique contribution to predicting social adjustment. This finding indicates that both patients and informants provide unique information on Axis II psychopathology and argues for the use of both sources in the assessment of PDs.     

Modeling unipolar depression as a chaotic process

This study inspected the deterministic structure of unipolar depression. Two women self-monitored sadness hourly 10 times a day for 6 months. One woman had a recurrent history of unipolar depression, and the other did not. Data were analyzed by visual inspection, examination of the Fourier transforms of the time plots, and the correlation dimension. Results suggested that in addition to a strong periodic component that existed only within the depressed subject's mood time series, a low-dimensional chaotic process might have been operating. In the nondepressed control subject, no such periodicity or process could be identified. The findings support maladaptive deterministic theories of mood disorders and have implications for the assessment of unipolar depression.