Longitudinal Study of Life Events,Well-Being,Emotional Regulation and Depressive Symptomatology

Etiological research regarding adolescent depression is relatively recent and longitudinal studies are needed to explicate the mechanisms by which risk and protective factors impact the development of depression. This investigation evaluated the effects of time 1 predictors (e.g., depressive symptoms, life events, subjective well-being, and emotion regulation strategies) on depressive symptoms assessed at time 2 (1 year later). The sample comprised 182 Portuguese adolescents, aged 12–16. Time 1 depressive symptoms and psychological well-being were significant predictors of time 2 depressive symptoms. Time 1 rumination predicted time 2 depressive symptoms, but time 2 brooding mediated this effect. Time 1 life events did not predict time 2 depressive symptomatology. This study identified several factors that seem to play an important role in the development of depressive symptomatology. Previous depressive symptomatology and well-being had a significant effect in this process and the relationship between rumination in time 1 and depressive symptoms at time 2 (1 year later) was fully mediated by brooding at time 2. Given these results, implications for prevention and treatment of depression include addressing risk factors like early depressive symptoms, rumination and brooding, and increasing the protective effect of psychological well-being.     

Personality Traits and Plagiarism: an Empirical Study with Portuguese Undergraduate Students

Academic dishonesty is a major problem and is thus a highly relevant area of inquiry. Considerable research has shown that key traits from the Big Five model of personality are associated with various forms of anti-social behaviour. To date, however, relatively little research interest has been devoted to study the relationship between personality traits and plagiarism. This study attempts to fill this gap by examining the relationship between the Big Five personality traits and the inclination to commit plagiarism by undergraduate students. The main conclusion is that the inclination to plagiarize is negatively associated with Conscientiousness and Agreeableness traits. Neuroticism was not found to be related to the inclination to plagiarize. Implications of the findings are discussed.     

Temporal generalization gradients following an interdimensional discrimination protocol

We investigated the effects of interdimensional discrimination training in the temporal generalization gradient. In a matching-to-sample task, pigeons learned to choose key S after a T–s houselight sample and key NS in the absence of the houselight sample. For one group of pigeons, T?=?20?s; for another, T?=?10?s. Subsequently, houselight duration was varied to obtain temporal generalization gradients. Results showed that (a) proportion S increased as houselight duration ranged from 0?s to T?s and then remained high for houselight durations longer than T; (b) the gradients were well described by negative-exponential functions; (c) these non-flat gradients were present from the beginning of testing, and; (d) the average gradients obtained with T?=?20?s and T?=?10?s overlapped when plotted in relative time. We conclude that temporal control does not require explicit discrimination training along the temporal dimension, and that temporal generalization gradients obtained with an interdimensional protocol show the scalar property of timing. We discuss how these findings challenge current models of timing.     

Looking for answers: eye movements in non-visual cognitive tasks

It is not known why people move their eyes when engaged in non-visual cognition. The current study tested the hypothesis that differences in saccadic eye movement rate (EMR) during non-visual cognitive tasks reflect different requirements for searching long-term memory. Participants performed non-visual tasks requiring relatively low or high long-term memory retrieval while eye movements were recorded. In three experiments, EMR was substantially lower for low-retrieval than for high-retrieval tasks, including in an eyes closed condition in Experiment 3. Neither visual imagery nor between-task difficulty was related to EMR, although there was some evidence for a minor effect of within-task difficulty. Comparison of task-related EMRs to EMR during a no-task waiting period suggests that eye movements may be suppressed or activated depending on task requirements. We discuss a number of possible interpretations of saccadic eye movements during non-visual cognition and propose an evolutionary model that links these eye movements to memory search through an elaboration of circuitry involved in visual perception.     

Are practitioners incorporating a strengths‐focused approach when working with multi‐problem poor families?

Multi‐problem poor families have been characterized as dysfunctional and chaotic, and problem‐centred interventions have been developed. However, the activation of families' strengths has shown itself to be an important tool for intervention, hence the relevance of promoting the incorporation of a strengths‐focused approach. So, it becomes important to determine to what extent practitioners are thinking of incorporating a strengths‐focused approach when working with these families. To achieve this goal, a semi‐structured interview was administered to 23 practitioners. The findings suggest that practitioners are able to identify strengths but do not think in a strengths‐focused way. The main obstacles are: ambiguity in the definition of strengths, a focus on problems, lack of confidence in the possibility of improvement in the lives of families. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Role of Co-Occurrence Statistics in Developing Semantic Knowledge

The organization of our knowledge about the world into an interconnected network of concepts linked by relations profoundly impacts many facets of cognition, including attention, memory retrieval, reasoning, and learning. It is therefore crucial to understand how organized semantic representations are acquired. The present experiment investigated the contributions of readily observable environmental statistical regularities to semantic organization in childhood. Specifically, we investigated whether co-occurrence regularities with which entities or their labels more reliably occur together than with others (a) contribute to relations between concepts independently and (b) contribute to relations between concepts belonging to the same taxonomic category. Using child-directed speech corpora to estimate reliable co-occurrences between labels for familiar items, we constructed triads consisting of a target, a related distractor, and an unrelated distractor in which targets and related distractors consistently co-occurred (e.g., sock-foot), belonged to the same taxonomic category (e.g., sock-coat), or both (e.g., sock-shoe). We used an implicit, eye-gaze measure of relations between concepts based on the degree to which children (N = 72, age 4–7 years) looked at related versus unrelated distractors when asked to look for a target. The results indicated that co-occurrence both independently contributes to relations between concepts and contributes to relations between concepts belonging to the same taxonomic category. These findings suggest that sensitivity to the regularity with which different entities co-occur in children's environments shapes the organization of semantic knowledge during development. Implications for theoretical accounts and empirical investigations of semantic organization are discussed.     

The mood effect in relation to impulsive online buying behavior

This article analyzes impulsive buying behavior in scenarios where the consumer's negative or positive mood, oriented by emotional situations, stimulates an uncontrolled instinct in relation to the purchase. Four experimental studies were carried out to evaluate the influence of the mood state on impulsivity in different scenarios of consumption: online versus face-to-face shopping (Study 1); product characteristics – hedonic versus utilitarian product types in online environments (Study 2); the individual characteristic of self-control in relation to the online purchase (Study 3a); and the individual characteristic of social value in relation to online consumption (Study 3b). The results demonstrate that consumers have greater impulsiveness within the online environment when they are in a positive mood, and that the positive mood maintains greater purchasing impulsiveness when the product is utilitarian, and when the consumer has low self-control and/or high social value individually.