Copying strategies for patterns by children and adults

In the present study, eve movements during the copying of a pattern were analyzed to compare visual strategies of adults and children. Subjects had to build an accurate copy of spatial block patterns. Tested variables were the incidence and the duration of ocular dwelling in the pattern area (where the pattern to be copied was located), the work area (where the copy was made), and the source area (where the blocks were that could be used for creating the copy). Furthermore, to unravel employed strategies, sequences of dwelled areas were investigated. Previous studies reported that adults employ repetitive visual scanning strategies to accomplish the task instead of strategies depending upon an internal representation. The present results show that the II children, within the ages of 7 to 12 years, made more eye movements and fixations of longer duration during copy tasks than the 11 adults. The visual strategies of the children were highly comparable to those of adults. Memory was restricted to one block, while color and location seemed to be remembered together.     

Obscene telephone calls to children: a retrospective field study

Studied a sample of 24 Danish children selected from a larger group of 56 children who had received obscene telephone calls from a single adult offender to ascertain the psychological consequences of this form of sexual abuse. The sample is unusual in that the source of the abuse was the same for all of the children, and none of them had records of prior or concurrent abuse from other sources. Almost all children suffered significant psychological consequences from these calls, those who obeyed the caller's demands experiencing more serious consequences than those who did not. A comparison was made with the consequences suffered by an additional group of 7 children who had experienced direct physical sexual abuse by the same offender.     

Substance P is involved in terminating the hypothalamo- pituitary-adrenal axis response to acute stress through centrally located neurokinin-1 receptors

The neurokinin substance P (SP) has been previously shown to inhibit basal hypothalamo-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis activity. This study was designed to investigate the effects of central injection of the specific neurokinin-1 receptor antagonist RP67580 on the HPA axis response to acute restraint stress. In non-restrained rats injected with RP67580, plasma ACTH and corticosterone levels were elevated at 30 and 60 min compared to rats injected with vehicle, but there were no differences between vehicle and RP67580 groups at 4h. In restrained rats injected with vehicle, plasma ACTH and corticosterone levels were significantly elevated at 30 min and 60 min following initiation of the stress but had returned to basal levels at 4h. In restrained rats injected icv with RP67580, plasma corticosterone and ACTH levels were significantly elevated at 30 min and 60 min, with no significant differences compared to the restraint stressed vehicle-injected group. However, in the RP67580-injected group, corticosterone and ACTH levels remained significantly elevated at 4h following onset of restraint compared to those in the restraint stressed vehicle-injected group. Corticotrophin-releasing factor mRNA levels in the parvocellular subdivision of the paraventricular nucleus of the hypothalamus and POMC mRNA levels in the anterior pituitary were significantly increased in the stressed group 4h following injection with RP67580 compared to the stressed group injected with vehicle alone. These data show that endogenous SP does not inhibit the initial magnitude of the HPA axis response to restraint stress, but does act through neurokinin-1 receptors at a central level to reduce the duration of the response to stress. This suggests that SP may be an important central agent controlling the transition between acute and chronic stress.     

Susceptibility to Affect: A Comparison of Three Personality Taxonomies

This study had three major goals: to clarify the relationships between Eysenck's, Gray's, and Cloninger's personality taxonomies, to show that traits from these taxonomies predict differential sensitivities to emotional states, and to explore the relationship between sensitivity to an emotional state and how much that state is actually experienced. A factor analysis of traits from Eysenck's, Gray's, and Cloninger's personality taxonomies resulted in three factors that were named reward sensitivity, impulsivity-thrill seeking, and punishment sensitivity. These factors predicted a global measure of affect, emotional reactions to a laboratory mood induction, and self-reported affect in daily life. Generally, reward sensitivity predicted positive, but not negative emotions, whereas punishment sensitivity predicted negative, but not positive emotions. Impulsivity-thrill seeking predicted few emotions in either context. Coherence among the relationships found across methodological contexts suggests that the traits that predict emotion susceptibilities in the laboratory similarly predict emotional experience in ongoing daily life.     

Remembering experienced and reported events

Reported events are distinguished from personally experienced (autobiographical) events by being known from reports provided from some person or agency—for example, news reports. Memory for reported events has usually been ignored theoretically, or classified as ‘semantic’, though it is clearly concerned with specific, dated episodes. We discuss a number of differences between the information available to specify experienced and reported events, and the possible implications of such differences for remembering the events. A study of retrieval of the two types of events, prompted by cue words, showed that reported events take much longer time to retrieve but are dated as being equally old as experienced events. Effects of using emotion words as cues were similar for the two event types. These results suggest that reported events are forgotten (or become inaccessible) at the same rate as experienced events, but that memories are organized in such a way that reported events often have to be accessed indirectly through memories of associated autobiographical events.     

A learning theory account of depression

Learning theory provides a foundation for understanding and deriving treatment principles for impacting a spectrum of functional processes relevant to the construct of depression. While behavioral interventions have been commonplace in the cognitive behavioral tradition, most often conceptualized within a cognitive theoretical framework, recent years have seen renewed interest in more purely behavioral models. These modern learning theory accounts of depression focus on the interchange between behavior and the environment, mainly in terms of lack of reinforcement, extinction of instrumental behavior, and excesses of aversive control, and include a conceptualization of relevant cognitive and emotional variables. These positions, drawn from extensive basic and applied research, cohere with biological theories on reduced reward learning and reward responsiveness and views of depression as a heterogeneous, complex set of disorders. Treatment techniques based on learning theory, often labeled Behavioral Activation (BA) focus on activating the individual in directions that increase contact with potential reinforcers, as defined ideographically with the client. BA is considered an empirically well‐established treatment that generalizes well across diverse contexts and populations. The learning theory account is discussed in terms of being a parsimonious model and ground for treatments highly suitable for large scale dissemination.     

Aggression of police officers as a function of temperature: An experiment with the fire arms training system

The impact of temperature on police officers' tension, perception, and behaviour in police—offender interactions was investigated. It was hypothesized that increased temperature results in: (1) increased tension; (2) a negative impression of the offender; and (3) aggressive behaviour. The findings confirmed these hypotheses. Finally, some implications of the results are discussed.     

The effects of preschool on educationally advantaged children: First phases of a longitudinal study

This study is concerned with the preschool and kindergarten phases of a ten-year longitudinal research project designed to investigate the immediate and long-term effects of preschool on educationally advantaged children. Preschool data dealing with IQ, social competency, and school readiness, as well as physical abilities and self-concept were collected on two waves of subjects. Wave I(N = 129) consisted of 87 experimental and 42 control subjects, and in Wave II(N = 85) there were 54 experimental and 31 control subjects. Follow-up data on school readiness and social competency data were obtained from Wave I subjects in kindergarten. Analysis of data indicated that social competency, was enhanced through preschool participation and although there were no significant group differences in kindergarten test results, substantial social competency gains were observed for both groups. Findings will have greater meaning as the longitudinal study continues.