Do Feelings of Loneliness Mediate the Relationship between Sociocognitive Understanding and Depressive Symptoms During Late Childhood and Early Adolescence?

An interesting association between sociocognitive understanding and depression has been documented in clinical populations, with high levels of depression apparently related to theory-of-mind deficits. Yet no research has so far investigated this relationship among typically developing preadolescents. Therefore, the authors' main aim was to extend previous findings to the general population and to a younger age group. A secondary aim was to explore the role of feelings of loneliness referring to the previous link. A sociocognitive understanding task followed by self-report questionnaires on depressive symptoms and perceived loneliness were administered to a sample of 326 students attending primary and middle schools. Mediation analyses revealed that feelings of loneliness mediated the effect of sociocognitive understanding on depressive symptoms, but only among girls. In boys, depressive symptoms were directly linked to sociocognitive skills. In girls, on the contrary, the relationship between sociocognitive skills and depressive symptoms was significantly mediated by feelings of loneliness. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.     

A Standardized Set of 380 Pictures for Lebanese Arabic: Norms for Name Agreement,Conceptual Familiarity,Imageability, and Subjective Frequency

Journal of Psycholinguistic Research - Research on language processing requires language-specific norms of pictorial and linguistic experimental stimuli across different psycholinguistic variables....     

Gender and lexical access in Bulgarian

Two procedures were used to explore the effects of semantic and grammatical gender on the recognition and processing of Bulgarian nouns, in relation to other factors that are known to affect lexical access. This study in a three-gender language was modeled on previous work in Italian, a two-gender language (Bates, Devescovi, Pizzamiglio, D'Amico, & Hernandez, 1995). Words were presented auditorily in randomized lists in two tasks: (1) repeat the word as quickly as possible and (2) determine the grammatical gender of the noun as soon as possible and indicate the decision by pressing a button. Reaction times in both tasks were influenced by phonological factors, word frequency, and irregularity of gender marking, but semantic and grammatical gender affected only gender monitoring. The significant contribution of semantic gender to processing in Bulgarian contrasts with previous findings for Italian. Also, we obtained an interaction between sex of the subject and noun gender, reflecting a bias toward one's own grammatical gender "counterpart" (especially for females). Reanalysis of the prior study in Italian showed a similar interaction but confirmed no effects of the semantic gender of the noun, suggesting that these two natural gender effects can dissociate. Possible reasons for cross-linguistic differences are discussed, with implications for comparative studies of gender and lexical access.     

Selective improvement of strain-dependent performances of cognitive tasks by food restriction

Temporary food restriction affects strain differences for behavioral phenotypes in the inbred strains of mice C57BL/6 (C57) and DBA/2 (DBA). Since food restriction is a routine procedure to motivate learning, we evaluated its influence on differences for spatial and non-spatial discrimination between these strains of mice by using two non-associative tasks: the Spatial Novelty Test (SNT) and the Spontaneous Object Recognition Test (SORT). The results confirmed the poor performance of the DBA mice in SNT. Nonetheless, DBA mice were perfectly able to recognize the novel object in SORT. By contrast, C57 mice were good performers in SNT but failed to recognize a novel object in SORT. Finally, food restriction selectively improved C57 performance in SNT and DBA performance in SORT. These results support the view that a food restricting procedure enhances strain differences for discrimination of configurational information.     

The Effect of Comparative Advertising on Consumer Perceptions: Similarity or Differentiation?

Purpose  

Comparative advertising is seen as an effective means of conveying the differentiating advantages of a brand. Nevertheless, several studies show that a primary effect of comparative advertising is to lead consumers to associate the advertised brand with the competitor brand identified within the ad: it seems that comparison generates perceived similarity among brands instead of differentiation, per se. In order to clarify the issue, the aim of the research is to investigate the relative effectiveness of comparative and non-comparative advertising in communicating the differentiating attributes of a brand.     

Processes underlying developmental reversals in false-memory formation: comment on Brainerd, Reyna, and Ceci (2008)

C. J. Brainerd, V. F. Reyna, and S. J. Ceci (2008) reviewed compelling evidence of developmental reversals in false-memory formation (i.e., younger children exhibit lower false-memory rates than do older children and adults) and proposed that this phenomenon depends on the development of gist processing (i.e., the ability to identify and process the semantic theme of word lists, events, etc.). A full understanding of development reversals, however, cannot be achieved without further characterizing the role played by complementary or opposing processes. Suggestions for future research are made from this perspective.