Parents Don’t (Always) Know Their Children Have Been Bullied: Child‐Parent Discrepancy on Bullying and Family‐Level Profile of Communication Standards

Discrepancy between bullied victims’ experience and their parents’ understanding indicates underutilization of family support system, and thus presents an important risk factor. An online survey (N = 300 child‐father‐mother triads) was conducted to establish a framework that helps distinguish families with different child‐parent discrepancy levels. This family‐level variability was modeled by profiling child‐father‐mother triad’s family communication standard (FCS) orientations. This “FCS profile” indeed distinguished families with different levels of discrepancies. Further, SEM analyses revealed that those discrepancies presented a distinct risk factor vis‐à‐vis effects of bullying reports per se. Finally, FCS profile had an indirect association with victims’ well‐being via mediation by child‐parent discrepancy. These findings are discussed with regard to the role of family communication in bullied individuals’ coping processes.     

Slowly walking down to the more food: relative quantity discrimination in African spurred tortoises (Centrochelys sulcata)

Animal Cognition - Quantity discrimination, is thought to be highly adaptive as it allows an organism to select greater amounts of food or larger social groups. In contrast to mammals, the...     

Perception of the motion trajectory of objects from moving cast shadows in infant Japanese macaques (Macaca fuscata)

The shadows cast by moving objects enable human adults and infants to infer the motion trajectories of objects. Nonhuman animals must also be able to discriminate between objects and their shadows and infer the spatial layout of objects from cast shadows. However, the evolutionary and comparative developmental origins of sensitivity to cast shadows have not been investigated. In this study, we used a familiarity/novelty preferential looking procedure to assess the ability of infant macaques, aged 7–24 weeks, to discriminate between a ‘depth’ display containing a ball and cast shadow moving diagonally and an ‘up’ display containing a ball with a diagonal trajectory and a shadow with a horizontal trajectory. The infant macaques could discriminate the trajectories of the balls based on the moving shadows. These findings suggest that the ability to perceive the motion trajectory of an object from the moving shadow is common to both humans and macaques.     

Impairment of perception by positive and negative affect

Abstract

This study examined the perceptibility of affectively charged words. It was hypothesised that the affect elicited via preattentive processing of an impinging word amplifies subsequent, attentive processing. According to this hypothesis, the affect should impair the veridical perception when the word is presented in an extremely impoverished manner and, as a consequence, attentive processing is likely to be misdirected to an irrelevant perceptual code. In Experiment 1, 52 subjects were shown an affectively positive, negative, or neutral target word (128 words in total) with an extremely diminished contrast for 100, 150, or 200msec. They then chose, from a pair of equivalently valenced words, the one presented. As predicted, choice accuracy was lower for both affectively positive and negative words than for neutral words in all the three exposure time conditions. In further support of the current analysis, Experiment 2 showed that once the stimulus contrast was increased, the accuracy was no worse for the affective words than for the neutral words.     

The Japanese Multidimensional Attitudes Scale Toward Persons With Autism Spectrum Disorders1

This study aimed to develop a Japanese Multidimensional Attitudes Scale (J-MAS) as a useful instrument to assess negative attitudes toward persons with autism spectrum disorder among typical Japanese persons. Five hundred and fifty-two Japanese participants completed the Japanese translation of the original version of the MAS, which was derived via the translation/back-translation method. An exploratory factor analysis revealed four factors (Cognitions, Negative Affects, Behaviors, and Calm) that corresponded to the factor model of the original version of the MAS. Nine items were statistically negligible, accordingly. A confirmatory factor analysis revealed that the factor model of the J-MAS is fairly good, and preferable to the factor models of the English, Spanish, French, Korean, and German versions for a sample of typical Japanese persons. These results indicate that the J-MAS provides a valid assessment of attitudes toward persons with autism spectrum disorder among typical Japanese persons.