Hypermnesia in older people and its relationship with successful ageing / La hipermnesia en personas mayores y su relación con el envejecimiento exitoso

Abstract

This study analyses the phenomenon of hypermnesia and its relationship with variables associated with successful ageing such as age, sex, cognitive status and cognitive plasticity in older people. The sample consists of 124 institutionalized and non-institutionalized participants, whose ages ranged from 65 to 91. A specific task was used to evaluate hypermnesia; a cognitive screening test and a verbal fluency test were used to assess cognitive status, and the AVLT-LP test was used to measure cognitive plasticity. The results show significant improvements between the hypermnesia recall tests for the total sample and for all the groups, according to the variables studied. Participants with successful ageing characterized by a younger age, a high level of cognitive functioning and a greater cognitive plasticity showed better results than the other participants in the hypermnesia task with the exception of sex, which did not present differences between groups. This study confirms that hypermnesia occurs more significantly in older people with successful ageing regardless of whether they are male or female.     

Do Friends’ Characteristics Moderate the Prospective Links between Peer Victimization and Reactive and Proactive Aggression?

This study examined (a) the predictive link between peer victimization and children’s reactive and proactive aggression, and (b) the potential moderating effect of reciprocal friends’ reactive and proactive aggression in this context. The study also examined whether these potential moderating effects of friends’ characteristics were stronger with respect to more recent friends compared to previous friends. Based on a convenience sample of 658 twin children (326 boys and 332 girls) assessed in kindergarten and first grade, the results showed that peer victimization uniquely predicted an increase in children’s teacher-rated reactive aggression, but not teacher-rated proactive aggression. The relation of peer victimization to increased reactive aggression was, however, moderated by recent ˉ not previous ˉ reciprocal friends’ similarly aggressive characteristics. These findings, however, tended to be mostly true for boys, but not for girls. The findings are discussed in terms of their theoretical and practical implications for victimized children’s risk of displaying reactive and proactive aggressive behaviors. This research was made possible by grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Fonds Concerté pour l’Aide à la Recherche, the Fonds Québécois de la Recherche sur la Société et la Culture, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, and the Fonds de Recherche en Santé du Québec.     

Conflicting social motives in negotiating groups

Negotiators' social motives (cooperative vs. individualistic) influence their strategic behaviors. In this study, the authors used multilevel modeling and analyses of strategy sequences to test hypotheses regarding how negotiators' social motives and the composition of the group influence group members' negotiation strategies. Four-person groups negotiating a 5-issue mixed-motive decision-making task were videotaped, and the tapes were transcribed and coded. Group composition included 2 homogeneous conditions (all cooperators and all individualists) and 3 heterogeneous conditions (3 cooperators and 1 individualist, 2 cooperators and 2 individualists, 1 cooperator and 3 individualists). Results showed that cooperative negotiators adjusted their use of integrative and distributive strategies in response to the social-motive composition of the group, but individualistic negotiators did not. Results from analyses of strategy sequences showed that cooperators responded more systematically to others' behaviors than did individualists. They also redirected the negotiation depending on group composition.     

Emotional Arousal and Memory Binding: An Object-Based Framework

ABSTRACT— Binding various features of an event together and maintaining these connections in memory is an essential component of episodic memories. Previous theories make contradictory predictions about the effects of emotional arousal on memory binding. In this article, I review evidence for both arousal-impaired and arousal-enhanced memory binding and explain these contradictory findings using an object-based framework. According to this framework, emotionally arousing objects attract attention that enhances binding of their constituent features. In contrast, the emotional arousal associated with one object either impairs or has no effect on the associations between that object and other distinct objects or background contextual information. After initial encoding, the attention-grabbing nature of emotionally arousing objects can lead to interference in working memory, making it more difficult to maintain other bound representations. These contrasting effects of arousal on memory binding should help predict which aspects of emotional memories are likely to be accurate and which aspects are likely to be misremembered.     

The tenacious nature of memory binding for arousing negative items

In two experiments, we investigated whether people are better or worse at updating memory for the location of emotional pictures than of neutral pictures. We measured participants’ memories for the locations of both arousing negative pictures and neutral pictures while manipulating practice (encountering the same event repeatedly) and interference (encountering the same picture in a different location). Memory for the context of emotional items was less likely to be corrected when erroneous and was less likely to be correctly updated when the context changed. These results suggest that initial item-context binding is more tenacious for emotional items than for neutral items, even when such binding is incorrect.     

Split-Brain: What We Know Now and Why This is Important for Understanding Consciousness

Neuropsychology Review - Recently, the discussion regarding the consequences of cutting the corpus callosum (“split-brain”) has regained momentum (Corballis, Corballis, Berlucchi,...     

Associations between young children's emotion attributions and prediction of outcome in differing social situations

Associations between young children's attributions of emotion at different points in a story, and with regard to their own prediction about the story's outcome, were investigated using two hypothetical scenarios of social and emotional challenge (social entry and negative event). First grade children (N=250) showed an understanding that emotions are tied to situational cues by varying the emotions they attributed both between and within scenarios. Furthermore, emotions attributed to the main protagonist at the beginning of the scenarios were differentially associated with children's prediction of a positive or negative outcome and with the valence of the emotion attributed at the end of the scenario. Gender differences in responses to some items were also found.     

Goals and values in school: a model developed for describing,evaluating and changing the social climate of learning environments

This paper defines a broad model of the psychosocial climate in educational settings. The model was developed from a general theory of learning environments, on a theory of human values and on empirical studies of children’s evaluations of their schools. The contents of the model are creativity, stimulation, achievement, self-efficacy, creativity, safety, control, helpfulness, participation, responsibility and influence; they are hypothesised to be structured in a circular model. The contents are defined and related to existing theories and research in education, special education, educational psychology and sociology, on the basis of reviews of literature. The model underlies the Goals, Attitudes and Values in School questionnaire, developed to assess the characteristics of educational settings. The model can be a practical tool in understanding and appreciating differences between learning environments in research and assessment and it could represent a guideline for interventions aimed to analyse and improve the social climate of learning environments.     

Competing for Happiness: Attitudes to Competition,Positional Concerns and Wellbeing

Competition is one of the driving forces of the market, but the actual effects that a competitive behavior can produce, especially on well-being, depend on how competition is perceived by economic agents. In this paper we empirically study the relationship among different attitudes to competition, positional concerns, and happiness. Using microdata from an ad-hoc survey administered to all first-year undergraduate students attending courses in economics and sociology at a medium-sized university in the North of Italy, we find a high degree of positionality for several items, especially income. Furthermore, the attitude to competition matters for both positionality and wellbeing: while a negative perception of competition increases the probability of being positional, a positive perception of competition increases life satisfaction. Results by gender highlight that a negative perception of competition is detrimental particularly for women. These results are robust to alternative definitions of the competition indicators and to alternative ways to control for potential endogeneity.