VALUES MOTHERS HOLD FOR HANDICAPPED AND NONHANDICAPPED PRESCHOOL CHILDREN IN JAPAN,PUERTO RICO,AND THE UNITED STATES MAINLAND*

This study examines the values held by mothers in Japan, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Mainland for their handicapped and nonhandicapped preschoolers in the contexts of home and school. In order to study values, mothers from the three cultures were asked to rank twelve value items relating to four value areas: physical, intrapersonal, interpersonal, and sociocultural. The value rankings were different in the three cultures and depended upon the home and school contexts. The presence of a diagnosed orthopedic and/or neurological impairment in the child had no overall effect on value ratings but did interact with culture and context to influence mothers' values.     

Impaired Learning and Motor Behavior in Heterozygous Pafah1b1 (Lis1) Mutant Mice

Heterozygous mutation or deletion of Pafah1b1 (LIS1) in humans is associated with syndromes with type 1 lissencephaly, a severe brain developmental disorder resulting from abnormal neuronal migration. We have created Lis1 heterozygous mutant mice by gene targeting. Heterozygous mutant mice are viable and fertile, but display global organizational brain defects as a result of impaired neuronal migration. To assess the functional impact of the mutation, Lis1 heterozygous mice and their wild-type littermates were evaluated on a wide variety of behavioral tests. Lis1 mutant mice displayed abnormal hindpaw clutching responses and were impaired on a rotarod test. Lis1 heterozygous mice were also impaired in the spatial learning version of the Morris water task. Impaired motor behavior and spatial learning and memory in Lis1 mutant mice indicates that impaired neuronal migration can have functional effects on complex behavioral responses. The behavioral findings also support the use of the Lis1 mutant mice as a model from human type 1 lissencephaly.     

Substance and artifact in the higher-order factors of the Big Five

J. M. Digman (1997) proposed that the Big Five personality traits showed a higher-order structure with 2 factors he labeled alpha and beta. These factors have been alternatively interpreted as heritable components of personality or as artifacts of evaluative bias. Using structural equation modeling, the authors reanalyzed data from a cross-national twin study and from American cross-observer studies and analyzed new multimethod data from a German twin study. In all analyses, artifact models outperformed substance models by root-mean-square error of approximation criteria, but models combining both artifact and substance were slightly better. These findings suggest that the search for the biological basis of personality traits may be more profitably focused on the 5 factors themselves and their specific facets, especially in monomethod studies.     

Computational models of inductive reasoning using a statistical analysis of a Japanese corpus

Existing computational models of human inductive reasoning have been constructed based on psychological evaluations concerning the similarities or relationships between entities. However, the costs involved in collecting psychological evaluations for the sheer number of entities that exist mean that they are prohibitively impractical. In order to avoid this problem, the present article examines three types of models: a category-based neural network model, a category-based Bayesian model, and a feature-based neural network model. These models utilize the results of a statistical analysis of a Japanese corpus computing co-occurrence probabilities for word pairs, rather than using psychological evaluations. Argument strength ratings collected by a psychological experiment were found to correlate well with simulations for the category-based neural network model.     

Is self-positive information more appealing than money? Individual differences in positivity bias according to depressive symptoms

The self-positivity bias, which is inherent to healthy people, is known to be blunted in depression. The lack of positive or excessive negative self-reference is considered to be a potential mechanism underlying depressive rumination. However, the motivational factors that drive people to approach and avoid emotional self-related materials are still unclear. Therefore, we measured intrinsic motivation that is associated with emotional self-references by using a reward-based decision-making task (pay-per-view paradigm). Forty-nine undergraduates completed two tasks in which they were asked to choose between negative vs. positive references (Task 1) and self vs. other references (Task 2) for variable monetary rewards. Participants with lower levels of depressive symptoms showed a self-positivity bias, sacrificing rewards for the opportunity to engage in positive self-reference, whereas those with higher levels of depressive symptoms had no specific preference for either negative or positive self-reference (Task 1). However, all participants sacrificed monetary rewards for the opportunity for self-reference versus other reference, regardless of the symptom level or the primed valence (Task 2). Together, these findings suggest that depressive cognition could be characterised by the lack of intrinsic motivation for positive self-reference, which is attributable to the biased valence selection, but not to self–other preferences.     

The perception of self-motion induced by central and peripheral visual stimuli moving in opposite directions

The effects of the size of a stimulus and its eccentricity (central or peripheral) on the visually induced perception of horizontal translational self-motion (vection) were investigated. The central and peripheral areas of the observers' visual field were simultaneously stimulated by random dot patterns that moved in opposite directions. The results of two experiments indicated that the effects of central and peripheral presentations of the moving visual pattern are equivalent, and that vection strength is determined by the stimulus size and speed but not by its eccentricity. These results are consistent with the findings of previous studies that suggested that there are no qualitative differences in the vection-inducing potentials of the central and peripheral areas of the visual field, and are counter to the more traditional hypothesis, which has assumed that the perception of self-motion is specifically assigned to peripheral vision.     

Self-focusing situations and depression

The author examined the situations in which people turn their attention to the self and investigated differences between depressed and nondepressed persons in self-focusing situations. He developed a Self-Focusing Situation List containing 58 items and administered the list to 436 Japanese undergraduates. He also administered a depression scale to part of the sample (n = 365). A factor analysis extracted 6 factors, and cluster analyses of these 6 factors scores yielded 5 clusters. The participants who preferred self-focusing when alone and avoided self-focusing after positive events (Cluster 5) scored higher on the depression scale than did the participants in Clusters 1, 2, 3, and 4.     

Video Game Use and The Development of Sociocognitive Abilities in Children: Three Surveys of Elementary School Students1

The purpose of the present study was to examine the validity of the popular hypothesis that video game use will prevent children from socially adjusting. Three surveys of elementary school children were reported. The primary results were as follows: (a) The frequency of video game use had no correlation with children's popularity among classmates. (b) The frequency of video game use had slightly negative correlations with boys' sociocognitive abilities such as empathy, cognitive complexity, and cognitive abstractness. (c) However, it was likely that the negative correlations were not due to the causal relation that video game use affected boys' sociocognitive abilities, which supported the hypothesis, but rather the causal relation that video game use was affected by their abilities; and (d) In the case of computer use, such as word processing or programming, the frequency of use had few correlations with sociocognitive abilities.     

Fos expression in CRF-containing neurons in the rat paraventricular nucleus after central administration of neuromedin U

We examined the effects of centrally administered neuromedin U (NMU) on corticotrophin-releasing factor (CRF)-containing neurons in the hypothalamic paraventricular nucleus (PVN) of rats, using double immunohistochemistry for CRF and Fos. Almost all CRF-containing neurons in the parvocellular divisions of the PVN expressed Fos-like immunoreactivity 90 min after intracerebroventricular administration of NMU (3 nmol/rat). This results suggest the possibility that central NMU may be involved in stress-induced activation of CRF-containing neurons in the PVN.